Product Description
The Penguin Classics Book
Author: Henry Eliot
Format: Hardback
**Shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year**
The Penguin Classics Book is a reader's companion to the largest library of classic literature in the world.
Spanning 4,000 years from the legends of Ancient Mesopotamia to the poetry of the First World War, with Greek tragedies, Icelandic sagas, Japanese epics and much more in between, it encompasses 500 authors and 1,200 books, bringing these to life with lively descriptions, literary connections and beautiful cover designs.
About the Author
Henry Eliot is the author of The Penguin Classics Book, The Penguin Modern Classics Book, Follow This Thread and Curiocity: An Alternative A-Z of London. An inveterate bookworm, Henry has tackled a number of bookish adventures, such as recreating Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, leading pilgrims from Southwark to Canterbury and retelling the tales along the way; mounting a quest for the Holy Grail based on Malory's Morte d'Arthur; swimming across the Hellespont from Europe to Asia on the bicentenary of Lord Byron's crossing (the subject of Byron's 1810 poem, 'Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos'); and reading Ulysses in real-time on Bloomsday, 16 June, starting at 8am with grilled kidneys and finishing in the early hours of the following morning. He produced an interactive edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest in collaboration with Sir Ian McKellen and Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, which Apple named one of the '10 best apps of 2016', and for five years he was an editor of the Penguin Classics series in London. Today he is one of the QI research elves and hosts the podcast On the Road with Penguin Classics, in which he travels to discuss books with guests including Frank Cottrell Boyce, Louis de Bernières, Rachel Joyce, Patience Agbabi, Andrew Motion and Will Self.
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