Jeremy Treglown

The masters in miniature

Jeremy Treglown finds something for everyone in Penguin’s new Mini Modern series

issue 26 March 2011

Jeremy Treglown finds something for everyone in Penguin’s new Mini Modern series

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.

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