For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Namwali Serpell (introducer) has won the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Caine Prize for African Writing, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. The author of the novel The Old Drift, she was born in Zambia and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a professor of English at Harvard.
Reading, editing, writing, photography, friends. Philly-born, NJ-raised, UK-naturalised, Swiss-resident. Hi!
‘Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work was banned by Kenya’s government and he was detained without trial for a year in a maximum-security prison, where he wrote the first modern Gikuyu novel, Devil on the Cross, on toilet paper.’ (‘old’ article)🌟! https://t.co/DDD9jgAQdp
Writer • Traduttore e traditore • Editor at the @mcachicago • My first language is Non-English • Chileno & now Chicagüense • Fulbrighter • All views son mías 🫠
"During his year in a maximum security prison in the Kenya of the 1970s, he decided to stop writing his novels in English and wrote his fifth novel, Devil on the Cross, on squares of toilet paper in Gikuyu, his mother tongue." https://t.co/vfPdP94JI7
"His novels . . . have been deservedly canonized by the iconic [Penguin Classics] series." --The Wall Street Journal
"One of our century's great novels." --Tribune (UK)
"Ngugi is the most celebrated of African novelists. What he offers is nothing less than a new direction for African writing." --British Book News
"Striking." --The Guardian
"Bold and disquieting and, like most great novels, wonderfully immersive. So immersive, in fact, that I dreamed about it. Devil on the Cross argues quite convincingly--so convincingly that, for a moment, I became a character in the novel, or perhaps Ngugi became the author of my life--that all of us are living within a dream. . . . This is not a well-behaved novel, the kind you might read with your book club while discussing character motivation over tea and biscuits. This is a novel that wants you to act. . . . It's the perennial question: What is the point of literature? . . . I can't say that Ngugi's intention was to mount a defense of literature when he wrote this, but I can tell you what this novel did to me. He taught me that it's time for us to build new dreams." --Tolpe Folarin, Los Angeles Review of Books