Dear Friends:
Another BookExpo has come and gone, and the days of summer hours and beach reads have arrived! It was wonderful to see so many of our bookish friends in New York, but if you didn't have the opportunity to stop by and see us at the Javits Center, we'll bring you up to speed on all of our adventures, and even offer you the chance to score some of our BEA swag.
June will see the publication of John Milliken Thompson's The Reservoir, a literary murder mystery set in Reconstruction-era Richmond. Holly Le Craw says of the book: "Gorgeously suffused with the feel of 1880s Virginia, The Reservoir is not a whodunit but, even better, a did-he-do-it... Thompson's debut is an all-too-human and unforgettable puzzle, rendered in haunting shades of gray." In this issue, John writes about the actual court case that inspired the novel.
Also this month, we're incredibly proud to reissue Irmgard Keun's rediscovered classic, The Artificial Silk Girl. In 1933, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun's work and destroyed all existing copies, but this novel survived. The Los Angeles Times wrote: "Damned by the Nazis, hailed by the feminists....a truly charming window into a young woman's life in the early 1930s." Marie Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, wrote the introduction to our edition, and below she discusses the novel as a document not only of its time, but of ours.
For more suggestions for great summer reads, check out the titles in the sidebar. And as always, a selection of our summer and fall books are available for request via Netgalley.
Very best,
Terrie Akers Paul Kozlowski
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The True Story Behind
The Reservoir
The Reservoir is based on an actual court case, T.J. Cluverius v. the Commonwealth. A paragraph in a book on Richmond history got me digging deeper. I found copious newsprint dedicated to what became a sensational trial; it was wonderfully detailed, but it gave no clear idea of who the participants were, where they had come from, and why they ended up doing what they did.
I continued to dig up as much as I could about the case, while doing general research on the period. Though most of Richmond's early buildings have fallen to the wrecking ball, a good sample from various periods remains. Finding Lillian's grave early on--which took more effort than I'd thought it would--gave me a tangible link to the story and made me feel committed to telling it with as much passion and honesty as I could.
 I soon realized that I was going to have to imagine most of the story. By this point I felt so connected to these long-dead people that I thought I owed it to them to get it right, which in fictional terms meant that the story would have to rise up out of the facts like a holographic image from a flat screen.
But the question remained: what was the story?
Damned by the Nazis,
Hailed by the Feminists
by Marie Tatar
Marie Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology, where she teaches courses in German Studies, Folklore, and Children's Literature, and she authored the introduction to the Other Press edition of The Artificial Silk Girl.
 Doris, the artificial silk girl in the title of Irmgard Keun's acclaimed novel, is a collector of images: "I walk around the streets and the restaurants and among people and lanterns. And then I try to remember what I've seen." If the narrator of Christopher Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin" achieved acclaim by declaring, "I am a camera," Doris, too, insists that she works in a visual rather than verbal medium. She may "write everything down," but she feels nothing but contempt for diarists, who traffic in mere words. "I want to write like a movie," she declares, offering continuous reels rather than mere snapshots of the world she inhabits. If Doris is unable to script her life in exactly the way she desires, she nonetheless succeeds in producing powerful images that enlarge our understanding of the culture of everyday life in an era that came to be known as the "golden twenties."
Keun's compelling rendering of Berlin in the 1920s was inspired in part by Alfred Doeblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), a work that had created a literary sensation by turning the spotlight on convicts, prostitutes, and criminal lowlifes. Doeblin met Keun at a reading in Cologne and encouraged her to write, emphasizing that her sharp powers of observation and narrative skills could lead to real literary prominence. Following Doeblin's example, along with that of Brecht, who had portrayed armies of beggars, prostitutes, and gangsters in his popular Threepenny Opera (1928), Keun turned her attention to giving a voice to those who had never had any real literary representation. While male authors had sought to ventriloquize female characters--Arthur Schnitzler's Fraulein Else is perhaps the most notorious example--few women had engaged their literary skills to solving the problem of female representation in contemporary literature. Inspired by the example of Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), Keun set out to write the German answer to the bestselling novel from the United States.
BookExpo 2011
Click any image to view slideshow.
by Paul Kozlowski
How many times during BEA did an acquaintance come up to me and ask, "So how's your show going?" It's a BEA ritual--taking the show's temperature to determine whether it's still alive. As an industry veteran, I may be an endangered species these days, but my answer to the question was the same as I've been giving for many years. "The show is great because I get to talk to people I like--mostly about books--and reaffirm the bonds that tie us together. It is not so much about doing business as it is about sustaining a culture." I really believe that.
We decided to ask our authors who attended the show this year what they thought. Their replies are a lovely reminder that the show means a great deal, especially to first-timers who see it with fresh eyes.
If you missed us at BEA, you can still get in on our featured giveaways! The first five readers to send an e-mail to terrie@otherpress.com with the subject line "Newsletter BEA giveaway" will win a prize pack of our featured BEA titles, including The Reservoir by John Milliken Thompson, Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam (ARC), Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away by Christie Watson (PLUS a limited edition totebag), and Calling Mr. King by Ronald De Feo (ARC). Please include your name and mailing address.
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Great Summer Reads from Other Press
Available on NetGalley
Rights Guide
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