Aug. 11 [1858]. The great bullfrogs, of various colors from dark brown to greenish yellow, lie out on the surface of these slimy pools or in the shallow water by the shore, motionless and philosophic. Toss a chip to one, and he will instantly leap and seize and drop it as quick. Motionless and indifferent as they appear, they are ready to leap upon their prey at any instant.
We've been sitting on this preview of Alistair Reid and Ben Shan's Ounce Dice Trice for a while now. And even though the book isn't on sale yet—we've only just received a few advance copies this week—we couldn't resist sharing some choice pages. The only problem was, figuring which pages to choose, since almost every one contains something delightful. Alastair Reid, who for many years worked at the New Yorker, drew on "odd notebooks" for wonderful, private, obscure, mouth-bending words. He addressed his young readers in a very short introduction to the book:
"And if you grow to love words for their own sake, you will begin to collect words yourself, and you will be grateful, as I am, to all the people who collect odd words and edit odd dictionaries, out of sheer astonishment and affection."
An aside: A few months ago, Vicky Raab just happened to run into Mr. Reid on the subway, and she wrote about the chance encounter at the New Yorker's Book Bench blog.
Bakri, who previously had been laughing without saying anything, said, "Tell us, Bint Majzoub, which of your husbands was the best?"
"Wad Basheer,” said Bint Majzoub promptly.
“Wad Basheer the dozy dope," said Bakri. "He was so slow a goat could make off with his supper."
—from Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
with an introduction by Laila Lalami
forthcoming April 2009
top: front cover featuring Pinocchio by Tim Rollins and K.O.S.; back cover
middle: title page (and facing) with two illustrations by Attilio Mussino (1911)
bottom: final pages showing another Mussino illustration (spoiler: Pinocchio becomes a "proper little boy")
from: The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, newly translated by Geoffrey Brock, introduction by Umberto Eco, afterword by Rebecca West, available November 2008
Yes, it's July and miserably humid in Manhattan, but we were greeted this morning by a bracing sight: just-printed copies of our Christmas offering, Rock Crystal (Bergkristall).The book will go on sale in time for the holidays, but it might have been more useful as an August release. After all, snow (and the blizzard-transformed alpine landscape) is as much a character in this novella as are its ostensible protagonists, a brother and sister who lose their way in a Christmas-eve storm.
The photo above does not do the volume justice, but it should give some idea of the beauty of the finished book, which is due in large part to its cover art. Kenneth G. Libbrecht, chairman of the physics department at Caltech, and taker of the cover photo, has turned his scientific research into a natural wonderland. Check out Snowlfakes.com to see his many beautiful photographs of snow crystals, taken with a special photomicroscope.
Luckily, the novella is as beautiful inside as it is out. The story transcends its Christian particulars to embrace the entirety of the natural world—which is not to say that it abandons its underpinnings in Stifter's Catholic faith. In an unpublished review (collected in Reflections on Culture and Literature), Hannah Arendt writes of Stifter's
"overwhelming, neverending gratitude for everything that is. Out of this grateful devotion, Stifter became the greatest landscape-painter in literature...: someone who possesses the magic wand to transform all visible things into words and all visible movements—the movement of the horse as well as that of the river or of the road—into sentences.... For Stifter, reality actually means nature and, for him, man is but one of its most perfect products. Again and again, he describes the slow, steady, and blessed process of the growth of a human being as it lives and blossoms and dies together with the trees and flowers of which it takes care during its lifetime."
Along these lines, John (aka Johannes) Urzidil, in a 1948 review of Stifter's Abdias that appeared in The Menorah Journal, writes about Stifter's universalism:
"Born into the simple popular Catholicism of his Bohemian backwoods, Stifter occasionally describes how he adhered to it with pious devotion during his childhood. Later on he filled in this Catholic outline with the purified values of Humanität and of Catholic Christianity. It was Goethean Humanität that transformed the dictum “Anima naturaliter Christiana” into “Anima naturaliter humana.” At least, he bestowed upon his Christianity such a world-wide sympathy that it led to an understanding of all forms and fates and destinies."
Which is all a fancy way of saying that, even if you're the Grinchiest of Grinches, you should still give this book a try. But don't take our word for it, read what what Stewart, Mark, and Terry had to say about it.
"Mailer's book holds up better than most political journalism written last week, let alone four decades ago. Indeed it survives better than it has any right to—as history, as literature, and as a portrait of America both then and now."—Frank Rich
Our new edition of Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago doesn't go on sale until July, but if you're interested in reading what Frank Rich has to say about it, you can get a sneak peek of the introduction as it was published in The New York Review of Books here.
The Midnight Folk, the companion book to John Masefield's Box of Delights, isn't coming out till next September, but—the necessities of publishing being what they are—we already have the cover in house.
Nikki McClure, whose paper-cut illustrations are all done by hand, and who illustrated the cover of the earlier Masefield book (and kept us in line, reminding us that wolves weren't really evil—no red eyes!—and that metallic inks are environmentally unfriendly) has outdone herself here with a suspenseful image of Kay Harker and his rat pal shrinking in a basement corner while the witchy Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and her coven march down the steps.
We've been fans of Nikki's ever since noticing her work (including her yearly calendar, which has a cult following & which has been spotted around town at several of our favorite shops) at Buy Olympia.
Last year Abrams brought out a book collecting the works in all of the previous years' calendars.
Some of us in the office, though, have been aware of Nikki's work since prep-school days, and one of us is even the proud owner of an early rare work, Sent Out On The Tracks They Built: Sinophobia in Olympia, 1886, which she collaborated on with Sarah Dougher in a more rocking incarnation.
Read and interview with Nikki McClure here.
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