Statistics and Commissions

I get a fair amount of catalogs from publishers these days, and since they’re always chock full of new and interesting books that I’m guessing people will want to know about, I’m thinking about instituting a semi-regular feature called Covering the Catalogs wherein I pick out a handful of items that I deem interesting from the most recent catalog to cross my desk. And since I received the newest Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly Press/Black Cat/Canongate catalog yesterday, this one’ll be the first.Recently, Maud was expressing her discomfort with the impending media coverage of the upcoming Samuel Beckett centenary: “I await commemorative events like this centenary with excitement that tends to mutate, as the press coverage appears, into dread, then lamentation, and finally, resigned disgust.” The “news” that arises from the anniversary of the birth of a dead writer isn’t always scintillating, but, on the upside, such occasions give publishers – wanting to cash in on said press coverage – an opportunity to reissue and repackage the work of the great writer. As such, Grove is putting out two different items to mark Beckett’s centenary. The first is a bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot. The play was originally written in French by Beckett, and he translated it into English himself. This edition provides both texts, side-by-side. Grove is also putting out a four volume set of Beckett’s collected works with introductions by well-known writers. The first volume of novels is introduced by Colm Toibin and the second volume of novels is introduced by Salman Rushdie. The volume of collected dramatic works is introduced by Edward Albee, and the volume of collected poems, short fiction and criticism is introduced by J.M. Coetzee.Coming in April from the author of Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden is Guests of the Ayatollah. Bowden is well-known for his immersive coverage of armed conflict, and in this book he is setting out to provide an account of, as the book’s subtitle calls it, “the first battle in America’s war with militant Islam,” the Iran hostage crisis.Coming in July from Atlantic Monthly Press is Tom Drury’s first new novel in six years, The Driftless Area. Drury was among the “Best of Young American Novelists” named by Granta, and his stories regularly appear in the New Yorker, including “Path Lights” from last fall in which a bottle falls from the sky.I plan on continuing to cherry pick items that interest me from other catalogs as I receive them, so stay tuned. If you are a publisher and would like to send me your catalog, please email me.