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.
Before I worked at a bookstore, books were just things to be read. I never gave much thought to the big glossy volumes that occupy a lot of shelf space in many book stores. But the world of so-called “coffee table books” is surprisingly varied, going way beyond books of art or photographs of faraway places. With impressive production values – and hefty price tags – these books are closer to works of art than literature. I was reminded of this after an article London Review of Books pointed me to a book called Disruptive Pattern Material: An Encyclopaedia Of Camoflage: Nature, Military, Culture. The heft and glossiness of such a volume, despite – or perhaps because of – its esoteric focus, somehow make it inordinately desirable to me. Taschen, the eccentric European publishing house known for its expensive and eclectic selections, also occasionally puts out books that have this affect on me, like the Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. And I’m a sucker for atlases, the bigger and glossier and more stuffed with maps and diagrams and charts the better, like the National Geographic Atlas of the World. I am especially intrigued by atlases devoted to a narrow topic like the Atlas of Contemporary Architecture.