Penguin is putting out snazzy, mesmerizing, jacket-less hardcover editions of a number of classics. These remind of the old books on my parents’ shelves. You won’t be able to get your hands on these for a few months though.
Hardcover Beauties
The Universal Author
In the sixties, when he was a student at Cambridge, Stephen Greenblatt came across a book of Persian art. The book inspired a lifelong interest in the region, which in part explains why, after the University of Tehran invited him to give the keynote address at the first annual Iranian Shakespeare Congress, he packed his bags and headed over to the Middle East. In The New York Review of Books, the Harvard professor and Swerve author writes about his experience.
●
●
Thomas Pynchon: The Comic Strip
Galley Cat highlights a 2003 comic strip, “Thomas Pynchon, Man of Mystery,” that is unfortunately yet to go into syndication.
●
●
Someone Should Try This on Jeopardy
No wonder trivia night at the local bar is such a hit. A new study finds that “drinkers got more test questions right and were quicker in delivering the right answers” after they’d had a few beforehand.
●
●
6 comments:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Sandman is Back
Neil Gaiman is famous for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the number one reason is Sandman, the graphic novel series that won the author nineteen Eisner and six Harvey awards. Now, twenty-five years after publishing the first issue, Gaiman has written a prequel, named Overture.
More Authorial Car Crashes
“Camus, Car Crashes, Cinema,” a weird sequel to Bill Morris’ two lists of writers who met death by motor vehicle.
Writing to Explain Yourself to Yourself
The Tide King author Jen Michalski shares a wonderfully honest account of how she managed to write her way out of the closet. “People, mostly nonwriters, are always surprised when I tell them I wrote so much growing up,” she says. “But those words, I want to tell them, weren’t written for anyone else – the audience who needed to see them and the audience for whom they were written was me.”
●
●
Up South
“Young black fiction writers in the U.S. often face a strange obstacle as they try to figure out who they are — it’s called American literature. A high number of pre-civil-rights-era novels by white American writers are likely to include tossed-off racial slurs and/or stock black characters, some of which make racially conscious readers want to hurl the book across the room, even if the wooly-headed pickaninnies are only peeking around a doorjamb on one page out of 400. There are exceptions, but shockingly few. You always have to brace yourself — always.” James Hannaham writes about growing up in Yonkers but finding himself in Southern literature.
Some of these have been out in Canada for a while. You can even get ’em for $15 CAN plus tax, which a decent price for nice covers.
These have been in bookstores since before Christmas. Or, at least, I saw a few in a Border’s in CT in December.
I’d be curious to know if any of these are abridged. That “Treasure Island” looks like a winner, but not if it’s an abridged version –
A number of these were published a while ago. You can see them at Anthropologie.
http://www.anthropologie.com/anthro/catalog/category.jsp?popId=HOME&navAction=middle&navCount=90&isSortBy=true&pushId=HOME-BOOKS&id=HOME-BOOKS-NOVELS
Yes, many of them have been available in the states since before Christmas; I got two as gifts. It looks like they are slowly adding to the collection, so some books have not yet been released.
Neither of the two that I have are abridged. In fact, for the two I have, the insides are basically all the nice features of a paperback Penguin Classic. (Intro, Text, Notes, Appendices if necessary.) Actually, it seems like these are all just the insides of a penguin classic with awesome awesome covers.
Knowing Penguin, these books are printed on flimsy newspaper paper that turns brown in 10 years (or 5). The “hardcover” boards will be flimsy. Don’t buy em to keep around.