If you’re a bookseller, you know that terrible book covers are a part of your everyday life. Which is why, when the folks at McNally Jackson saw the cover of Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, they conspired and took a stand.
Melville House: Books are Weapons
Formed by an executive order of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935, theWorks Progress Administration was a signature initiative of the New Dealand the most ambitious employment project in American history. The WPA hired millions of unskilled workers to build and repair infrastructure,…
“Before he was Harry Houdini he was Erik Weisz, born in Budapest in 1874, son of a rabbi.”
- A Younger, Stranger America: On Harry Houdini’s The Right Way to Do Wrong by Emily St. John Mandel
This is what gets lost in the hand-wringing over the mergers and rumors-of-mergers between America’s Big Six (or Big Five?) publishing houses: there are more than six publishers in this country. There are countless presses that continue, every year, to publish great work. They range from the large and very well-established — W.W. Norton and Grove/Atlantic — all the way down to the micro-presses.
Somewhere inbetween is Melville House, which for these past few years has been producing, alongside new offerings, a delightful line called The Neversink Library.
A Younger, Stranger America: On Harry Houdini’s The Right Way to Do Wrong by Emily St. John Mandel
“Imagine if Bertie Wooster’s considerably more intelligent but equally fussy older brother had wandered by accident into a John LeCarre novel. The result might look something like Maurice DeKobra’s exquisite The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars”
- Back in the USSR by Emily St. John Mandel
This comes out soon, and if you aren’t excited, you’re not paying attention.
Leigh Stein’s forthcoming poetry collection now has a spiffy description to match its spiffy cover.
Source: mhpbooks.com
