In his essay-review in this issue (pp. 35-38), before zeroing in on the centenary edition of Robert Hayden’s Collected Poems, Brett Foster celebrates reprints, reissues, new editions keyed to some notable anniversary, and all manner of bookish repackaging. “I often find,” he writes, “that an old book comes into fresh focus when its publisher rolls out the promotional red carpet. I admit to being too easily hooked, like a little boy with a bauble, by a redesign of a book with which I am long familiar, and likely even have in my possession already. Visuals aside, I am also a fan of that slightest of subgenres, the literary introduction, and so am glad to find some novelist briefly introducing a venerable or modern classic, or a reflective author presenting a new preface for a second edition.”
I know exactly what Brett means (that’s one reason he and I have so often gone book-hunting together), and I can’t resist adding to his generous list of examples. Have you seen any of the titles published by Pushkin Press, based in London? The books are beautifully made, and the Pushkin list is deliciously distinctive. Recently I read The Hunting Gun, a novella by Yasushi Inoue (1907-1991), first published in Japan in 1949 and now translated into English by Michael Emmerich. Inoue, who had worked as an editor and journalist, started late with fiction but went on to become a prolific and highly regarded writer of novels and stories. Though I’ve read a lot of Japanese lit in translation, this was my first encounter with him. I’m looking forward to reading Bullfight, first published around the time of The Hunting Gun, and Life of a Counterfeiter (already available in the UK and coming in the U.S. next year), also from Pushkin Press.
Brett mentions the appeal of familiar books that appear with a new design. My favorite current example is the redesign of the Calvino list at Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, undertaken by Peter Mendelsund and Oliver Munday. I’ve never cared for the design of earlier iterations of the Calvino backlist, but the Mendelsund/Munday look is delightful. In addition to reprints, the line includes some new material—Into the War, for instance, a collection of three early stories first published in English translation in the UK in 2011 and in the U.S. in September of this year. If you are a Calvino fan, keep an eye out for your favorite titles as the freshly designed list unrolls.
As Brett observes, every year has its harvest of literary centenaries, duly observed by editors, publishers, and denizens of Twitter. This year, City Lights published Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition, edited by Seth Harlow, with an afterword by the poet Juliana Spahr. The publisher describes this as “the first and only version to incorporate Stein’s own handwritten corrections.” Along the way, City Lights also issued a 50th-anniversary edition of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. This edition includes a preface by John Ashbery, an editor’s note by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and other new material.
I read a lot of crime fiction, a lot of spy fiction, and the like. (Also a lot of nonfiction about espionage, much of which turns out to be fiction of another, less interesting variety, often of the self-serving kind.) In the latter category, one of my all-time favorites is The Great Impersonation, by E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946), first published in 1920. I read this novel—spellbound—for the first time when I was about 12 years old and have returned to it several times over the years. It has been reissued this year (marking the centenary of the outbreak of “the Great War”) by the British Library, distributed in the U.S. by the University of Chicago Press, along with another Oppenheim title, The Spy Paramount. (The University of Chicago Press, by the way, has a superb record of publishing tasty reprints, ranging from the fiction of Anthony Powell to the novels written by Donald Westlake under the name “Richard Stark” and featuring the cold-blooded professional criminal Parker.)
Some reissues, as Brett notes, draw the reader’s eye with new introductions and such. Yale University Press has just published the fourth edition of Rhyme’s Reason, by John Hollander, who was one of Brett’s mentors in graduate school at Yale (I gave a copy of an earlier edition to our daughter Anna many years ago). This edition comes with a new introduction by J. D. McClatchy and a new afterword by Richard Wilbur. This afterword, though quite brief (only a page and a half), is a Wilburian delight.
A kissing cousin of the reissue is the new translation. Two of the best sci-fi writers in the Soviet Union were brothers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. They wrote a lot, but most readers, if asked to pick the Strugatskys’ best book, would name Roadside Picnic, the inspiration for Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. First published in Russia in 1972, the novel appeared in English translation in 1977. Two years ago, Chicago Review Press published a new translation by a professor of mathematics, Olena Bormashenko, that read much better than the earlier version. I posted an interview with Bormashenko on the Books & Culture website. I also wrote about the book for CT. (“Many novels involving contact with aliens have what might be called a theological dimension, and that’s certainly true of Roadside Picnic, in which the Strugatskys took some familiar conventions of the genre and applied a lot of torque.”) Now Chicago Review has published Bormashenko’s rendering of another novel by the Strugatskys (also previously translated), Hard to Be a God.
Mention of new translations brings me to Penguin’s splendid project to bring out the entire run of Georges Simenon’s Maigret series—75 novels in all—newly translated. As first announced, the plan was to publish a new volume each month. In the UK, where the books began to appear last fall—starting with the first Maigret, Pietr the Latvian—that schedule has been followed so far. In the U.S., where the books began to appear early this year, the schedule has been less dependable. Some of the translations that have appeared to date are indeed brand-new; others are relatively new, having been commissioned for a much smaller selection of Maigrets that Penguin published a little over ten years ago. The latter have now been “slightly” (presumably very lightly) revised. In any case, this project is a great boon for readers, May Penguin carry it through.
Have you heard that we have launched a biweekly digital edition of B&C that you can read on your tablet? Our art director, Jennifer McGuire, has created a very handsome and user-friendly design, as I think you’ll agree. The digital biweekly will also feature some extras. If you subscribe to our free weekly e-newsletter, you already know that we regularly publish web exclusives, pieces that appear only on the B&C website, not in print. In July, for example, we posted Wesley Hill’s tribute to his friend Chris Mitchell, whose sudden death left many of us feeling bereft.
But over the years I’ve discovered that many faithful readers of the magazine are not aware of these web exclusives. To introduce such readers (you, for instance?) to what they’re missing, one installment of the digital biweekly gathers five web exclusives posted on the B&C website between June and December of last year. I hope you’ll enjoy them—and that you will be looking for such pieces routinely and sharing them with other readers.
Since the start of the year, we have been receiving donations fulfilling pledges made last fall to support B&C in 2014. Thanks to all of you who have already done so. If you have not yet made the donation that you pledged a year ago, please do so as soon as possible. We continue working toward our goal of securing funding for 2015-18. When I look at the contents of the November/December issue—encompassing Philip Jenkins on the early Arab conquests and the rise of Islam, Russell Howell on inerrancy, Andrea Palpant Dilley on “Juicers, Cheaters, and Men Who Hate Hillary,” Robert Bishop and Robert O’Connor on Stephen Meyer’s case for intelligent design; Lisa Cockrel on “Faith and Writing in Norway,” Michael Robbins on the poetry of Aaron Belz, and Jane Zwart on David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks—I’m thankful all over again for your support.
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