90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

‘As for me I have one ambition only: to invent stories, very beautiful stories’

Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen’s short stories offer incisive psychological portraits and imaginative visions of war, longing and tender love. Here, an orphan boy creates an elaborate fantasy of a life of grandeur, a feudal lord sets a peasant woman a deadly task, and a young woman resists against her captors, in the midst of conflict.

Karen Blixen (17th April 1885 - 7th September 1962) was a Danish author who wrote in Danish, English and French, also known by the pen name Isak Dinesen. Blixen married her cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in 1914 and moved with him to Kenya where they set up a coffee plantation. They divorced in 1921 and Blixen remained in Kenya for another ten years recording her experiences in her best-known work, Out of Africa. In 1931 Blixen returned to Denmark where she would live until her death in 1962.