Brief encounter.

My now chronic bête noire with book covers means that other than stare daily at my copy of Seven Hundred Penguins or flick through Joe Kral's Flickr collection I have to either hunt down a used edition for every single copy of whatever it is I want to read or forever enter the bookshop with trepidation.

The more than tolerable alternative to the very pleasing growing shift towards Penguin reissuing titles that evoke the old Penguins of the mid 20th Century though has done quite a lot to allay my fear of being forced to read a book with a cover I simply detest. Enter Mini Modern Classics – brief bites of storytelling ranging from Beckett to Camus, Kafka to Saki to Woolf in bold, stark, silver modern livery.

This set of fifty titles also work well if you’re trying to wean yourself back onto narratives of 140 characters+ from a life of ceaseless microblogging, Ulysses now more than ever strikes you as too daunting and you find flash fiction more of a, er, flash in the pan.

And what's more, it's not just the design or brevity that's appealing. The tiny form of these Mini Modern Classics is clearly here no small factor: they are easy to pick up and slip into your back pocket and out again – that is if you don't get to finish the tale (sometimes only a few pages long) in a single leg of your daily commute.

The right tone dialed.

Rather than the usual publicity tour or even the more progressive book trailer, to launch her new collection poet Heather Christle, at set times every day throughout the first half of July, will read a poem to anyone who calls her.

Turning her back on online verse via digital social media platforms for a communication channel far more personal, Christle has decided to opt for what she herself describes as the "...intimate distance a telephone creates." How fitting.