Penguin Island

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'Believe me, the best proof is to have none at all. That is the only evidence one cannot debate.'Anatole France's 1908 novel Penguin Island offers a thinly veiled lampoon of French history and of human civilization. When a wayward Christian missionary monk lands on an island off the northern coast of Europe, he perceives the island's seabirds, a colony of upright, unafraid auks, as a sort of pre-Christian society of noble pagans and baptizes them. This causes a problem for God, who normally only allows humans to be baptized. He resolves the dilemma by converting the baptized birds to humans and giving them each a soul. The ensuing history of Penguinia presents a comic send-up of the foibles and frailty of humanity.The novel's centerpiece is an immensely skillful and scathing parody of the Dreyfus Affair, which stands alongside Émile Zola's 'J'accuse' for its humanity and intellectual bravery. This new translation, more than a century after the first and only English version, offers a full introduction to the novel, setting it in its historical and literary context, including France's life and rich literary legacy.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Jordan Finkin is a scholar-librarian with a distinguished career at the intersection of Jewish studies, literary scholarship, and academic librarianship. He has held teaching and research appointments at institutions including Oxford and Harvard Universities, and currently serves as Deputy Director of Libraries and Rare Book and Manuscript Librarian at Hebrew Union College. His academic work focuses on Yiddish and Hebrew literature, modernist poetics, and translation, and his publications include translations of Mikhoel Burshtin's By the Rivers of Mazovia (2023), Siegfried Kapper's Tales from the Prague Ghetto (2021), and From the Jewish Provinces: Stories by Fradl Shtok (with Allison Schachter, 2021), which won the Modern Language Association's Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies.