It’s a cool silver-grey in colour, weighs two and a half ounces and fits flexibly into your pocket. It opens easily to reveal words imaginatively chosen and arranged in sequences so absorbing and surprising that they can make you miss your bus stop. It costs £3.
Penguin’s Mini Moderns — there are 50 of them, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Penguin Modern Classics — include a story in which a boy uses something very like Skype to call his mother and tell her he would like her to come and see him. She protests: ‘But I can see you!’ But it’s not the same through ‘the Machine’, he complains. ‘I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come.’
The satire might seem a little laboured, except that it was written more than a century ago. ‘The Machine Stops’ is by E. M. Forster and is one of many finds offered by this imaginative series, which — like its predecessor Penguin Pocket Classics — is partly a programme of trailers for good international 20th-century writing (not to speak of books published by Penguin) but also much more. Each Mini Modern is complete in itself — entire stories and novellas, no extracts — and, taken together, they give a refreshing new account of fictional modernity.
Most of the big names are here, of course: Kafka with his hideous 1914 fantasy of mechanised torture and execution, ‘In the Penal Colony’; Conrad, Kipling, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Borges. But among texts by these familiar 19th-century-born stylistic adventurers are some which are little known and which Penguin has only recently acquired. Robert Musil is represented by nine astonishing short pieces first published in translation by a provincial American small press in the 1980s; Stefan Zweig by a gripping Nazi-era novella about two chess players, one of whom has learned the game as a way of dealing with being interrogated.
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