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Where to start reading the Penguin Little Black Classics

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The best books to hunker down with this autumn

Three Japanese Short Stories

'Oh the cruelty of time, that destroys all things!' 
 
Beguiling, strange and hair-raising tales from early 20th century Japan: Nagai's Behind the Prison, Uno's Closet LLB and Akutagawa's deeply macabre General Kim. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The Life of a Stupid Man

'What is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.' 
 
Autobiographical stories from one of Japan's masters of modernist story-telling. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927). Akutagawa's Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories is also available in Penguin Classics.

Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

Akutagawa Ryunosuke, short-story writer, poet, and essayist, one of the first Japanese modernists translated into English. He was born in Tokyo in 1892, and began writing for student publications at the age of ten. He graduated from Tokyo University in 1916 with an English Literature degree and worked as a teacher before becoming a full time writer in 1919. His mother had gone mad suddenly just months after his birth and he was plagued by fear of inherited insanity all his life. He killed himself in 1927. 
 
 
Haruki Murakami (Introducer) has written eleven novels, eight volumes of short stories and numerous works of non-fiction, as well as translating much American literature into Japanese. His most famous novels are Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore. Jay Rubin (Translator) has translated several of Murakami's works into English and is also the author of Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. He has been professor of Japanese Literature at the Universities of Washington and Harvard.

Ry&uuml;nosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan&rsquo;s foremost stylists - a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. &lsquo;Rash&ouml;mon&rsquo; and &lsquo;In a Bamboo Grove&rsquo; inspired Kurosawa&rsquo;s magnificent film and depict a past in which morality is turned upside down, while tales such as &lsquo;The Nose&rsquo;, &lsquo;O-Gin&rsquo; and &lsquo;Loyalty&rsquo; paint a rich and imaginative picture of a medieval Japan peopled by Shoguns and priests, vagrants and peasants. And in later works such as &lsquo;Death Register&rsquo;, &lsquo;The Life of a Stupid Man&rsquo; and &lsquo;Spinning Gears&rsquo;, Akutagawa drew from his own life to devastating effect, revealing his intense melancholy and terror of madness in exquisitely moving impressionistic stories.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Jay Rubin

One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works. The elegantly spare style has a truly spine-tingling brilliance

Extravagance and horror are in his work, but never in the style, which is always crystal-clear

Akutagawa was one of the towering figures of modern Japanese literature, and is considered the father of the Japanese short story. This paradigmatic selection, which includes the stories that inspired Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, showcases the terrible beauty, cynicism, sublime pain and absurd humour of his writing.

Hell Screen

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Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Praise for Hell Screen

One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works. The elegantly spare style has a truly spine-tingling brilliance

Extravagance and horror are in his work, but never in the style, which is always crystal-clear

Books by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Articles featuring Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Where to start reading the Penguin Little Black Classics

The best books to hunker down with this autumn

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