Penguin Central European Classics

Simon Winder, the editor responsible for the Great Ideas series, launched Central European Classics:
This series originates in a visit I made to Krakow last summer where I was talking to a Polish publisher who had known Czesław Miłosz and who berated me for the useless way in which Miłosz 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'.