Penguins on Parade: The Collected Stories of Nabokov

Revisiting short works in a whopping big hardcover

Some Penguin Classics just don’t, just can’t, just won’t ever actually feel like classics and yet have been inducted into the lineup just the same. The entire reading world encountered this phenomenon with Morrissey’s Autobiography, of course, a desperate marking sham from which the entire Penguin Classics brand will never fully recover. But I’ve encountered it many times before that incident and after, and doubtless I’ll keep encountering it as more and more and more books come into the public domain and as Penguin increasingly slates its publishing roster toward a program of identity politics and diversity box-checking. A dozen or more of the most recent Penguin Classics choices have prompted me to start thinking of the publisher as simply “Penguin,” mentally eliding the whole notion of “Classics” even as the Penguin editorial team stretches the term out of all meaning.