JUDY STOFFMAN ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER
Some books disappear from bookstores after a season, while others live forever, or deserve to. What is an immortal work of literature is a matter that can be debated till Doomsday.
In fact, such discussions have divided academics for the past two decades, since it was noticed that nearly all the "classic" books were by men, with works authored by women and minorities conspicuously absent.
But none of that matters, because the decision does not rest with academics or the common reader � it's publishers who decide what is a classic by keeping it in print.
At Penguin Books Canada, the question of what makes a classic is answered simply: It is at least 20 years old by a noted writer that Penguin holds the rights to.
At a party at the AGO last night, Penguin's Canadian president Ed Carson and publisher David Davidar announced that nine Canadian books by Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley and Robertson Davies will join Penguin Modern Classics, a uniform international series that includes books by Evelyn Waugh, D.H. Lawrence, Ana�s Nin, Saul Bellow, Paul Bowles, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck, among others.
The nine will be issued on July 1, Canada Day.
Alice Munro
Dance Of The Happy Shades
Lives Of Girls And Women
Timothy Findley
Famous Last Words
The Wars
Mordecai Richler
Solomon Gursky Was Here
The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz
Robertson Davies
Fifth Business
The Manticore
World Of Wonders
All had been paperbacks published locally by Penguin when Cynthia Good was publisher, but it took the international vision of Davidar, the company's new Indian-born publisher, to fit the titles into a wider context.
Davidar consulted Adam Freudenheim, the Modern Classics' general editor in London, to determine which authors have international cachet.
Allen Lane, who invented the quality paperback and founded Penguin Press in 1935, started the Penguin Classics, distinguished by their uniformly black spines in 1946. This is why the company calls the series Black Classics.
A few years after Lane's death in 1970, all the 20th century authors were separated into the Modern Classics line, handsomely designed with silver spines. The classics series has 1,000 titles, of which 175 are moderns. George Orwell's Animal Farm is the line's biggest seller.
No Canadian writer has appeared in the series, which has the power to shape school reading lists around the world.
Carson calls the nine titles "just the beginning. These books are going to be around a long time."
Each of the books will come with introductions by noted authors: Annie Proulx, Jane Smiley, David Bezmozgis, Alberto Manguel, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Ann-Marie MacDonald and M.G. Vassanji.