What happens when you ask 30 of the most creative people you know to each write a short story based on one of the 200 fortune cookie fortunes you've collected over the past decade? I had to find out. The result is FORTUNE'S FOOLS: A collection of short stories.

A man desperate to marry for money finds a love worth more than gold when he loses his heart to a penniless young woman. Original.

Australia's prosperity relies on the continent's extraordinary natural -- primarily mineral -- riches and good fortune. But economic, financial, environmental, geopolitical and societal pressures now threaten the nation's high living standards. The COVID-19 pandemic is the first of many trials to come. Lacklustre reform proposals are mired in ideological necrophilia: ideas which have been tried and failed. Politics is trading insults and slogans. Institutions lack the quality, skills, organisational memory and courage to deliver the required solutions. A disengaged citizenry are focused on preserving their entitled way of life, refusing to accept that the well of plenty is approaching exhaustion. Critics are derided as permanent professional pessimists, the doubting Irishman Hanrahan in John O'Brien's poem warning of 'roon'. Cognitive dissonance is a national religion. Written in accessible, acerbic prose, Fortune's Fool cuts through these issues to expose Australia's current dilemmas and choices. It dissects the pandemic, global trends, Australia's narrow 'house and holes' economy and its dependency on China, spotlighting a political paralysis that must be overcome and the changes that are urgently needed. For Australians remotely concerned about their own future and their children's, as well as the country's, Fortune's Fool is essential reading.

Penguin Classics is proud to welcome William Trevor—"Ireland’s answer to Chekhov" (The Boston Globe) and "one of the best writers of our era" (The Washington Post)—to our distinguished list of literary masters. In this award-winning novel, an informer’s body is found on the estate of a wealthy Irish family shortly after the First World War, and an appalling cycle of revenge is set in motion. Led by a zealous sergeant, the Black and Tans set fire to the family home, and only young Willie and his mother escape alive. Fatherless, Willie grows into manhood while his alcoholic mother’s bitter resentment festers. And though he finds love, Willie is unable to leave the terrible injuries of the past behind. First time in Penguin Classics Winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award

In 1999, when Napster made music available free online, the music industry found itself in a fight for its life. A decade later, the most important and misunderstood story—and the one with the greatest implications for both music lovers and media companies—is how the music industry has failed to remake itself. In Fortune’s Fool, Fred Goodman, the author of The Mansion on the Hill, shows how this happened by presenting the singular history of Edgar M. Bronfman Jr., the controversial heir to Seagram’s, who, after dismantling his family’s empire and fortune, made a high-stakes gamble to remake both the music industry and his own reputation. Napster had successfully blown the industry off its commercial foundations because all that the old school label heads knew how to do was record and market hits. So when Bronfman took over the Warner Music Group in 2004, his challenge was to create a new kind of record executive. Goodman finds the source of the crisis in the dissolution of the old Warner Music Group, the brilliant conglomerate of Atlantic, Elektra, and Warner Bros. Records. He shows how Doug Morris, the head of Atlantic Records, rose through the ranks and rode the CD bonanza of the 1990s to enormous corporate and personal profit before becoming embroiled in an ego-driven corporate turf war, and how all of Warner’s record executives were blindsided when AOL/Time-Warner announced in 2003 that it wanted nothing more to do with the record industry. When the music group was finally sold to Bronfman, it was a ghost of itself. Bronfman built an aggressive, streamlined team headed by Lyor Cohen, whose relentless ambition and discipline had helped build Def Jam Records. They instituted a series of daring initiatives intended to give customers legitimate online music choices and took market share from Warner’s competitors. But despite these efforts, illegal downloads still outnumber legitimate ones 19–1. Most of the talk of a new world of music and media has proven empty; despite the success of iTunes, even wildly popular sites like YouTube and MySpace have not found a way to make money with music. Instead, Warner and the other labels are diversifying and forcing young artists to give them a cut of their income from touring, publishing, and merchandising. Meanwhile, the average downloader isn’t even meeting forward-thinking musicians halfway. Each time a young band finds a following through music websites, it’s a unique story; no formula has emerged. If one does, Warner is probably in a better position than anyone to exploit it. But at the end of the day, If is the one-word verdict on Bronfman’s big bet.