New Series of Mitteleuropa Classics From Penguin

Over at Three Percent, Chad Post spreads the news that Penguin is launching a new translation series. Here's the info from the man behind it, Simon Winder:

This series originates in a visit I made to Krakow last summer where I was talking to a Polish publisher who had known Czes?aw Mi?osz and who berated me for the useless way in which Mi?osz was published in English – it was his essays which were so valued and admired in Poland and yet these were virtually unknown in Britain. Suitably shamed I read lots of the essays and, indeed, they were amazing. So then the challenge became, how could a suitable frame be created for republishing them? I have always been obsessed with Central Europe so it didn't take a huge leap of imagination to see that it might be possible to create a series which would allow readers to come to a range of great writers – the series could tell a story (from before the First World War to the last years of the Cold War), it could usefully highlight the switch from Soviet ‘Eastern Europe' to modern ‘Central Europe', and it could be made out of all kinds of writing – essays, novels, memoirs, philosophy, short stories.

We decided to use very bright colours for the jackets as it had become a Cold War tradition to design jackets for so much writing from this zone of Europe in greys and blacks. Many of these books had been deeply tangled in arguments about the nature of the Iron Curtain and had fallen out of circulation when the USSR finally collapsed. By reimagining the books' appearance the hope is that people will look at them with fresh eyes and see them not as ideological documents, but as great and enduring works of art - sometimes grim, but often extremely funny and constantly surprising.