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
Tuesday New Release Day: Tuil; Curtright; Young; Hall; Bukowski
New this week: The Age of Reinvention by Karine Tuil; The Burned Bridges of Ward, Nebraska by Eileen Curtright; Shock by Shock by Dean Young; The Selected Poems of Donald Hall; and On Cats by Charles Bukowski. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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Stir Gently
Cookbooks, in general, are resistant to close reading, if only because their authors are barely present in the text, if at all. Yet sometimes we can discern a personality through the measurements and shopping lists. At Page-Turner, Kathleen Alcott reads the cookbooks of Nigel Slater. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen on reading cookbooks as literature.
The Business of Books
“Publishing is a word that, like the book, is almost but not quite a proxy for the ‘business of literature.’ Current accounts of publishing have the industry about as imperiled as the book, and the presumption is that if we lose publishing, we lose good books. Yet what we have right now is a system that produces great literature in spite of itself.” Twenty-first century publishing works in mysterious ways.
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Egan On E-Readers
Jonathan Franzen isn’t the only writer opposing technology and digitization. Jennifer Egan, in a panel discussion last week, compared Facebook to a “huge Soviet apartment block.”
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Philip Roth to Appear on Colbert
What do you do after you’ve retired but before you’ve won a Nobel Prize? You get interviewed by Stephen Colbert, apparently. (Bonus: How have other authors retired in the past? Let us count the ways.)
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“The only option is to participate.”
The Missouri Review interview with Jessa Crispin, founder of Bookslut. If you’ve yet to stumble upon the decade old literary blog, you might want to start with this recent post from Kevin Frazier on Edith Wharton and Julian Barnes. Or this treat from the archives about Monica McFawn Robinson trying to construct an undergraduate course syllabus on love.
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The Story Writer and His Writer Friend
Beautiful Ruins author (and Year in Reading favorite) Jess Walter describes “the genesis of a story.”
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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.