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Ved Mehta

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

Book 1 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
On its surface, Daddyji serves as a lucid biographical portrait of Amolak Ram Mehta, an esteemed Indian public servant, written by his son. But as Ved Mehta's story unwinds, it becomes apparent that something else is being recreated - the intricacies and intimacies of a lost world, of pre-Partition Lahore.

Daddyji

Continents of Exile: 1

Primo Levi

A chemist by training, Primo Levi became one of the supreme witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In these haunting reflections inspired by the elements of the periodic table, he ranges from young love to political savagery; from the inert gas argon - and 'inert' relatives like the uncle who stayed in bed for twenty-two years - to life-giving carbon. 'Iron' honours the mountain-climbing resistance hero who put iron in Levi's student soul, 'Cerium' recalls the improvised cigarette lighters which saved his life in Auschwitz, while 'Vanadium' describes an eerie post-war correspondence with the man who had been his 'boss' there. All are written with characteristically understated eloquence and shot through with deep humanity.

The Periodic Table

Evelyn Waugh

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were two of the twentieth century's most amusing and gifted writers, who matched wits and traded literary advice in more than five hundred letters over twenty-two years. Dissecting their friends, criticizing each other's books and concealing their true feelings beneath a barrage of hilarious and knowing repartee, they found it far easier to conduct a friendship on paper than in person. This correspondence provides a colourful glimpse into the literary and social circles of London and Paris, during the Second World War and for twenty years after.

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh

Italo Calvino

In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contracts, language and sensations associated with emptying the kitchen rubbish and the shape he would, if asked, consider the world. These reflections on the nature of memory itself are engaging, witty, and lit through with Calvino's alchemical brilliance.

The Road to San Giovanni

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Tristes Tropiques begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude Lévi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found 'human society reduced to its most basic expression'. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of 'primitive' man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty and a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly detailing personal and cultural loss, and brilliantly connecting disparate fields of thought. Few books have had as powerful and broad an impact.

Tristes Tropiques

Fly and the Fly Bottle is perhaps Ved Mehta's masterpiece: a collection of his brilliantly revealing conversations with some of the twentieth century's most important philosophers. Engaging with such heavyweights as Isaiah Berlin, Gilbert Ryle, and Elizabeth Anscombe, Mehta is not only able to shed light on the personalities involved in shaping modern philosophy, as well as on the particularities of that philosophic thought, but also to minutely examine the surrounding atmosphere of mid-century British life.

Fly and the Fly-Bottle

Gertrude Stein

For Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and &lsquo;it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning&rsquo;. Picasso was there with &lsquo;his high whinnying spanish giggle&rsquo;, as were Cezanne and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As Toklas put it &ndash; &lsquo;The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me&rsquo;. A light-hearted entertainment, this is in fact Gertrude Stein&rsquo;s own autobiography and a roll-call of all the extraordinary painters and writers she met between 1903 and 1932. Audacious, sardonic and characteristically self-confident, this is a definitive account by the American in Paris.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

John Steinbeck

Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travellers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad - now  Volgograd - but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. A RUSSIAN JOURNAL is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document.  Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II.  This is an intimate glimpse of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle

A Russian Journal

George Orwell

The Lion and the Unicorn was written in London during the worst period of the Blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his belief in socialism, patriotism and an English revolution. His fullest political statement, it has been described as 'one of the most moving and incisive portraits of the English character' and is as relevant now as it ever has been.

The Lion and the Unicorn

Socialism and the English Genius

Georges Simenon

'For personal reasons, or for reasons I don't know myself, I began feeling old, and I began keeping notebooks. I was nearing the age of sixty' 
 
Georges Simenon's autobiographical notebooks, in which he recorded his observations, experiences, anxieties and 'all the silly ideas that pass through my head', are one of the most candid self-portraits of a writer ever put to paper. Here, as the celebrated author ruthlessly examines his tortuous writing methods, his past, his fame, his intimate relationships and his fears of ageing, the result is an unsparing, often painfully revealing insight into a man trying both to find and to escape himself. 
 
'As revealed in these notebooks, Simenon's is a shrewd, lucid mind ... the balance tips toward the real, the immediate, the mysteries of human complexity above all ... Utterly unpretentious' The New York Times

When I Was Old

Gerald Brenan

Between 1920 and 1934, Gerald Brenan lived in the remote Spanish village of Yegen and South of Granada depicts his time there, vividly evoking the essence of his rural surroundings and the Spanish way of life before the Civil War. Here he portrays the landscapes, festivals and folk-lore of the Sierra Nevada, the rivalries, romances and courtship rituals, village customs, superstitions and characters. Fascinating details emerge, from cheap brothels to archaeological remains, along with visits from Brenan&rsquo;s friends from the Bloomsbury group &ndash; Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf among them. Knowledgeable, elegant and sympathetic, this is a rich account of Spain&rsquo;s vanished past.

South From Granada

Book 3 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Ved continues the story of Ved Mehta's two earlier memoirs, Daddyji, a biographical portrait of his father, and Mamaji, an exploration of his mother and her history. The focus here turns toward Mehta's childhood, his education in an Indian orphanage for the blind, and the general experience of blind people in India.

Vedi

Continents of Exile: 3

In 1581 Edmund Campion, a Jesuit priest working underground in Protestant England, was found guilty of treason and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Years later he would be beatified. Evelyn Waugh's compelling and elegant narrative is a homage to the man he revered as a poet, scholar, hero and martyr. He tells Campion's story with a novelist's eye for detail, from his success as an Oxford scholar, through his travels around Europe, his doomed secret mission to England and on to his capture and dramatic trial. 
 
Vividly re-creating a time of persecution and surveillance, Waugh writes that 'the hunted, trapped murdered priest is our contemporary and Campion's voice sounds to us across the centuries'.

Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr

Anaïs Nin

The brilliant tale of Anais Nin's true love affair with Henry Miller, and her ambiguous, charged relationship with his wife, June. Drawn from the journals of a single momentous year in Paris, Henry and June provides a wildly lyrical account of a woman's sexual awakening and the disillusion of idealized marriage.

Henry and June

Jack Kerouac

Never before published in Kerouac's lifetime, Jack Kerouac's Wake Up is a clear and powerful study of the life and works of Siddartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, from the author of On the Road. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Robert Thurman. 
 
Wake Up recounts the story of Prince Siddhartha's royal upbringing and his father's wish to protect him from all human suffering, despite a prediction that he would become a great holy man in later life. Departing from his father's palace, Siddhartha adopts a homeless life, struggles with his meditations, and eventually finds Enlightenment. Written at the end of Kerouac's career, when he became increasingly interested in Buddhist teachings, and collected for the first time in one book, this fresh and accessible biography is both an important addition to Kerouac's work and a valuable introduction to the world of Buddhism itself. 
 
Jack Kerouac (1922-69) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. His first published novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957, that made Kerouac famous. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac died in Florida at the age of forty-seven. 
 
If you enjoyed Wake Up, you might like Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
'[Kerouac] defines the attitudes of an entire generation' 
Guardian

Wake Up

A Life of the Buddha

Wang Xiaobo

Wang Xiaobo made his name as a novelist but his essays, too, have become ongoing bestsellers in China since their publication in the 1990s. Bringing together his thoughts on reading and talking and silence in the Cultural Revolution, about the irrepressible spirit of one beloved pig he met while an 'educated youth', and about being operated on via a textbook, these essays give a rare glimpse into a world rarely seen and discussed with such honesty. 
 
Written with a light touch and with a wry sense of humour, these are also the essays of a great literary talent, grappling with sociology, sexuality and feminism, with the cultural clash of living in the USA, and with Chinese sci-fi, the internet, and beloved European writers like Bertrand Russell and Italo Calvino. Electrifying, containing a razor-sharp wit and intellect, this collection reveals the voice of a generation to English-speaking readers for the very first time.

Pleasure of Thinking

Ronald Blythe

This colourful, perceptive portrayal of English country life reverberates with the voices of the village inhabitants, from the reminiscences of survivors of the Great War evoking days gone by, to the concerns of a younger generation of farm-workers and the fascinating and personal recollections of, among others, the local schoolteacher, doctor, blacksmith, saddler, district nurse and magistrate. Providing insights into farming, education, welfare, class, religion and death, Akenfield forms a unique document of a way of life that has, in many ways, disappeared.

Akenfield

Azar Nafisi

Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, gradually they come to share their own stories, dreams and hopes with each other, and, for a few hours, taste freedom. Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir is a moving, passionate testament to the transformative power of books, the magic of words and the search for beauty in life's darkest moments.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Wallace Stegner

'Enchanting, heartrending and eminently enviable' Vladimir Nabokov 
 
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner's boyhood was spent on the beautiful and remote frontier of the Cypress Hills in southern Saskatchewan, where his family homesteaded fro 1914 to 1920. In a recollection of his years there, Stegner applies childhood remembrances and adult reflection to the history of the region to create this wise and enduring portrait of pioneer community existing in the verge of a modern world. 
 
'Stegner has summarized the frontier story and interpreted it as only one who was part of it could' The New York Times Book Review

Wolf Willow

'Shooting an Elephant' is Orwell's searing and painfully honest account of his experience as a police officer in imperial Burma; killing an escaped elephant in front of a crowd 'solely to avoid looking a fool'. The other masterly essays in this collection include classics such as 'My Country Right or Left', 'How the Poor Die' and 'Such, Such were the Joys', his memoir of the horrors of public school, as well as discussions of Shakespeare, sleeping rough, boys' weeklies and a spirited defence of English cooking. Opinionated, uncompromising, provocative and hugely entertaining, all show Orwell's unique ability to get to the heart of any subject.

Shooting an Elephant

Antoine Saint-Exupery

In 1926 de Saint-Exupéry began flying for the pioneering airline Latécoère - later known as Aéropostale - opening up the first mail routes across the Sahara and the Andes. WIND, SAND AND STARS is drawn from this experience. Interweaving encounters with nomadic Arabs and other adventures into a richly textured autobiographical narrative which includes the extraordinary story of his crash in the Libyan Desert in 1936, and his miraculous survival. 'Self-discovery comes when a man measures himself against an obstacle,' writes Saint-Exupéry.  This book he explores the transcendent perceptions that arise when life is tested to its limits. Both a gripping tale of adventure and a poetic meditation.

Wind, Sand and Stars

Ryszard Kapuscinski

When the great Ryszard Kapuscinski was a young journalist in the early 1960s, he was sent to the farthest reaches of his native Poland between foreign assignments. The resulting pieces brought together in this new collection, nearly all of which are translated into English for the first time, reveal a place just as strange as the distant lands he went on to visit. 
 
From forgotten villages to collective farms, Kapuscinski explores a Poland that is post-Stalinist but still Communist; a country on the edge of modernity. He encounters those for whom the promises of rising living standards never worked out as planned, those who would have been misfits under any political system, those tied to the land and those dreaming of escape.

Nobody Leaves

Impressions of Poland

Göran Rosenberg

Close, close beneath the land I had once rooted myself in and loved, lay a land filled with violence, injustice and hatred 
 
On 22 April 1962 what remains of Göran Rosenberg’s family embark from his native Sweden to make Israel their new home. Transplanted into a nation born only a few months before him, he is first enchanted by its vitality, imprinted by its ideals. It marks the beginning of a lifetime’s journey across the promised land and into its past, a reckoning with the utopian visions and desperate fears that went into Zionism as well as the violence and dispossession of its realization. This landmark book tells the story of that journey – through buried stories and erased villages, dreams and disillusionments, and the histories still unfurling today.

Israel

A Personal History

Allen Ginsberg

William S. Burroughs

William Burroughs closed his classic debut novel, Junky, by saying he had determined to search out a drug he called 'Yage' which he believed transmitted telepathic powers, a drug that could be 'the final fix'. In The Yage Letters - a mix of travel writing, satire, psychedelia and epistolary novel - he journeys through South America, writing to his friend Allen Ginsberg about his experiments with the strange drug, using it to travel through time and space, to derange his senses - the perfect drug for the author of the wild decentred books that followed. Years later, Ginsberg writes back as he follows in Burroughs' footsteps, and the drug worse and more profound than he had imagined.

The Yage Letters

Redux

Lytton Strachey

Eminent Victorians marked an epoch in the art of biography; it also helped to crack the old myths of high Victorianism and to usher in a new spirit by which chauvinism, hypocrisy and the stiff upper lip were debunked. In it Strachey cleverly exposes the self-seeking ambitions of Cardinal Manning and the manipulative, neurotic Florence Nightingale; and in his essays on Dr Arnold and General Gordon his quarries are not only his subjects but also the public-school system and the whole structure of nineteenth-century liberal values.

Eminent Victorians

Jan Karski

'Insistently asks the question: What would you do? Would you fight, or acquiesce, or collaborate? ... Karski was deeply patriotic and ludicrously brave ... an astonishing testament of survival' Ben Macintyre, author of Operation Mincemeat 
 
It is 1939. Jan Karski, a brilliant young Polish student, enjoys a life of parties and pleasure. Then war breaks out and his familiar world is destroyed. Now he must live under a new identity, in the resistance. And, in a secret mission that could change the course of the war, he must risk his own life to try and save those of millions.

Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World

Marshall McLuhan

Well known for coining the term 'Global Village', Marshall McLuhan's thinking was, and still is, revolutionary. His theories, many of which are illustrated in this astonishing 'inventory of effects', force us to question how modes of communication have shaped society. This is an astonishing work by a truly astonishing man. 
 
The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. This is one of four books in that series.

The Medium is the Massage

An Inventory of Effects

Tove Ditlevsen

Growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, Tove feels that her childhood is made for a completely different girl. As 'long, mysterious words begin to crawl across my soul', she comes to understand that she has a vocation that will define her life. Her path seems assured, but she has no idea of the struggles ahead - love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms.

Childhood, Youth, Dependency

The Copenhagen Trilogy

John Mortimer

Clinging to the Wreckage is the first part of John Mortimer's acclaimed autobiography. Here he recounts his solitary childhood in the English countryside, with affectionate portraits of his remote parents - an increasingly unconventional barrister father, whose blindness must never be mentioned, battling earwigs in the mutinous garden, and a vague and endlessly patient mother. As a boy dreaming of a tap-dancing career on the stage and forming a one-boy communist cell at boarding school, his father pushes him to pursue the law, where Mortimer embarks on the career that was to inspire his hilarious and immortal literary creations. 
 
Told with great humour and touching honesty, this is a magnificent achievement by one of Britain's best-loved writers.

CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

Book 9 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
In Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, Ved Mehta provides an unparalleled glimpse into the inner workings of the one of world's most famous magazines. He portrays in detail the strange, nurturing atmosphere at the New Yorker, and he recounts the earthquakes that shook the magazine as it moved into the hands of more commercial ownership. At once a tribute to William Shawn - one of the longest serving editors in the New Yorker's history - Mehta's memoir is also a joyful tribute to the intricately linked arts of editing, writing, and reading.

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