Fyodor Dostoevsky

LONDON: Penguin are pleased to announce the launch of imprint Penguin Now!, a ground-breaking new series re-packaging classic novels for a new generation.

For the first time, iconic books such as Albert Camus's The Stranger, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment will remove all the instances of full stops in the original text, and replace them with exclamation marks.

The great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami once translated The Great Gatsby for Japanese readers. In Columbia University Press’ In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means anthology, you can read an essay he wrote about translating the book:

"When someone asks, “Which three books have meant the most to you?” I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye."

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post for this blog headlined “When Dickens Met Dostoevsky (Maybe).” The headline was a bit cute, perhaps; as I noted in the post, the supposed meeting was highly disputed—though not, at that point, definitively refuted—by scholars, and the essay which prompted the blog post, Christopher Hitchens’ last for Vanity Fair, was itself skeptical of the encounter. Still, it was a terrific story, one that had been recounted in two recent Dickens biographies as well as multiple essays and reviews.