The Short Canon
Discover essential short reads in The Short Canon—a curated book list featuring Isaac Babel’s Collected Stories, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Explore powerful fiction and poetry perfect for a concise literary journey.
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Metamorphoses
by Ovid
Mary Innes's classic prose translation of one of the supreme masterpieces of Latin literature "The most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare's)." -Ezra Pound Ovid drew on Greek mythology, Latin folklore and legend from ever further afield to create a series of narrative poems, ingeniously linked by the common theme of transformation. Here a chaotic universe is subdued into harmonious order: animals turn to stone; men and women become trees and stars. Ovid himself transformed the art of storytelling, infusing these stories with new life through his subtley, humour and understanding of human nature, and elegantly tailoring tone and pace to fit a variety of subjects. The result is a lasting treasure-house of myth and legend. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
by Isaac Babel
To read Babel is to experience the wild and often terrifying swings of Russian history."--BOOK JACKET.
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Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
The account of a young writer and his friends in free-wheeling Paris.
