Indie lit magazines: from Virginia Woolf to McSweeney’s

The Independent’s article on the new breed of literary magazines has got us excited about journal writing, both new and old. With the exception of a few notables, such as McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and Granta, literary magazines have a long tradition of publishing only the published, having sparse design and ultimately, carrying an aura of pretension. Thankfully, times have changed.

The past few years have seen an onslaught of new literary magazines that are anything but pretentious: Litro (whose editor Sophie Lewis translated Hesperus’ own On Love by Stendhal), PenPusher, Popshop and Stingray, to name but a few. These are magazines  that recognize that the words “literary” and “fun” actually mingle quite nicely and that there are a lot of innovative new writers out there.

If we go back in literary magazine history, back before the birth of the Paris Review and The New Yorker, we find that ten-year old Virgina Woolf shared this same sentiment. From 1891-2 and part of 1895 Woolf (then Stephen) contributed to Hyde Park Gate News: The Stephen Family Newspaper, a collaborative effort between Woolf, her sister Vanessa and her brother Thoby. Hermione Lee writes in her foreword to Hyde Park Gate News:

Originality is not the point: the mixture of letters, stories, advice columns, answers to questions, and reports on family events, is parodic and satirical… Hyde Park Gate News is the production of highly literate upper-middle-class English children, very much of its time and genre. It is an in-house publication meant to amuse and impress a mother and father with very high standards.

Unbeknownst to young Virginia,  her in-house publication is amusing and impressing a twenty-first century audience with high standards of their own.

Do check out the excellent work being offered by the new wave of literary magazines and while you’re at it order  a copy of Hyde Park Gate News, the original no-budget journal that launched the writing career of one of the most important voices of the twentieth century.

–HMJ (Hesperus’s self-proclaimed “Social-Media” intern. Get ready for the plug: Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook, please and thank you.)

Another century of Brief Lives

More than three hundred years after the death of John Aubrey, author of Brief Lives, or, Lives of Eminent Men, Paul Johnson has resurrected the concept with his own Brief Lives; detaling his interactions with the likes of Pablo Picasson, Princess Diana and Lindon B. Johnson. His observations are humerous and shocking, to say the least (he says Picasso is “probably the most evil man I ever actually came across” and Pinochet is “the most misjudged figure of the 20th century”). Read his soundbites on other public figures at The London Review of Books.

Here at Hesperus, we are big fans – indeed publishers – of John Aubrey’s own soundbites on notable figures such as William Shakespere:

‘Mr William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon in the country of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade, but when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech.’

Aubrey spent his life collecting anecdotes, gossip and biographical details about his contemporaries. His colourful evocation of poets and philosophers includes: Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare. An unorthodox approach to the art of biography, full of lively and witty detail, they are a singular portrait of a tumultuous age. Of course, it is published by your very own Hesperus Press and available for purchase here. Before becoming aquainted with today’s most eminent figures, get to know the men (and women!) who trod before them. Buy it now at the Book Depository.

An excellent video by the NZ Book Council that book lovers everywhere will appreciate

TheNZBookCouncil — November 18, 2009 — Film for NZ Book Council Produced by Colenso BBDO Animated by Andersen M Studio

And the winner is…

Alas, Howard Curtis’ brilliantly pitched translation of Flaubert’s classic Three Tales did not win last night’s Oxford-Weidenfeld prize, with Jamie McKendrick’s English of The Embrace by Valerio Magrelli taking first place. The chair of the judges, Bernard O’Donoghue, praised all entrants, and Howard’s skilled rendering of the ‘difficult simplicity’ of Flaubert’s work was found particularly praiseworthy. Many congratulations to Howard, and of course Jamie and all the other nominees, and thanks to the judges and all those at St Anne’s College, New College, The Queen’s College, and to Lord Weidenfeld, for a spectacular event.

ER

Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize 2010

We’re very excited at Hesperus HQ to be preparing for this evening’s Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize at St Anne’s College, Oxford – a prize for which Howard Curtis’ brilliant translation of Flaubert’s Three Tales, published by Hesperus in 2009 with a foreword by Margaret Drabble, has been nominated. The full list of nominees is:

Susan Wicks for Valérie Rouzeau’s Cold Spring in Winter (Arc Publications)

Larisa Gureyeva & George Hyde for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Pro Eto – That’s What (Arc Publications)

Jamie Mckendrick for Valerio Magrelli’s The Embrace (Faber and Faber)

Howard Curtis for Gustave Flaubert’s Three Tales (Hesperus Press)

Lazer Lederhendler for Nicolas Dickner’s Nikolski (Portobello Books)

Sam Garrett for Tommy Wieringa’s Joe Speedboat (Portobello Books)

Fingers crossed for Howard! We’ll let you know the result in the morning.

ER

Introductions

Hello all, from the newest addition to the Hesperus team! I have been interning at your favourite publishing house for the past few months and I’m really delighted to have been welcomed as an honorary Hesperette. My time here has been somewhat of a learning curve but I feel as if I’ve really gotten to grips with the goings-around the office. It is a pleasure to be able to contribute even just a little to publishing the interesting and exciting titles Hesperus is renowned for. I was particularly excited to be offered a pass to the London Book Fair and was looking forward to being initiated into this most important of publishing events. But with the news that Iceland’s oh-so-temperamental (and unpronounceable to those without a good grasp of the Icelandic language) volcano would be throwing tonnes of ash into the world’s flight-paths for some time, the book fair seemed to be doomed. Publishers around the world were at the mercy of Eyjafjallajokull, with hundreds of aeroplanes grounded and flights cancelled. With representatives from international publishing houses both large and small unable to travel to London, Earls Court felt a little like a literary ghost-town.

Lack-lustre the book fair may have been, but that certainly is not how I would characterise my time at Hesperus.

More from me soon (hopefully!), AC.

Would Virginia Woolf have blogged?

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, claimed at the beginning of this year that people are no longer concerned about privacy, many of us choosing to publicise our every movement on one or more of the many social networking and online publicity tools at our disposal. Zuckerberg’s vested interest aside, there’s something in the idea that attitudes to what might be considered private information have changed. Is the blogosphere an arena of exhibitionists (she asked her WordPress screen)? Would famous diarists of bygone times have been avid Tweeters? In writing a diary, is there always an element of performance – even if performer and audience are one and the same?

A Brief History of Diaries: From Pepys to Blogs, by award-winning diaries expert Alexandra Johnson, will consider the permutations of the form, why we write for ourselves and why we might make writing about ourselves more public, taking in (in no particular order) Thoreau, Pepys, Boswell, Woolf, Darwin, Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath and many more, and finishing right here in the blogosphere.

A Brief History of Diaries will be published in September of this year.

ER

Slight Return

Oh dear – another opening apology from me, I’m afraid, for many months of silence. While not blogging, here at Hesperus HQ we’ve been beavering away putting together a new series, a new website (imminent!), and a fab selection of new translations,  resurrected  classics, anthologies and literary biographies; and of course, most recently, we attended the somewhat eerie London Book Fair 2010.

First things first: in September we’ll be launching our new series, Brief Histories. An exciting new departure, this: each volume will consider the long and rich history of the forms and media that surround us every day. The inaugural titles will be:

A Brief History of Biographies: From Plutarch to Celebs (Andrew Brown)

A Brief History of Encyclopedias: From Pliny to Wikipedia (Andrew Brown)

A Brief History of Diaries: From Pepys to Blogs (Alexandra Johnson)

A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction (Lee Rourke)

More on the contents next week, but for this Friday afternoon I’ll leave you to enjoy the rather glorious covers.

Wishing you all a lovely weekend,

ER

August Bank Holiday/New Releases

I don’t know about you, but here at Hesperus HQ we are counting down the hours until the beginning of the August bank holiday weekend. We are excitedly keeping our fingers and toes crossed that we will be blessed with one last blast of sunshine before autumn begins to set in. It seems to be approaching all too quickly this year though – I woke up in a panic at 6AM this morning, completely horrified to find myself in darkness!

Anyway, I would now like to bring your attention to the latest Hesperus Press new releases – We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Brief Lives: Alexander Pushkin. I apologise in advance for the lengthy spiel, but I am posting the blurbs below to give you a flavour of these great books. So have a read, and make sure that your bank holiday plans now include purchasing copies from your local bookshop!

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (translated by Hugh Aplin, and with a foreword by Alan Sillitoe). 

Inside its glass dome, the One State is a place of mathematical precision, a community where everything is everyone’s and integrity, clarity and unerring loyalty reign over all. Δ-503, Constructor of the Integral, is an honest number, ashamed of the hairy hands that link him to a barbaric ancestry. It is this forbidden legacy that torments him by making him lust, that allows him to imagine, that has given him a soul. Consumed by his sickness and obsessed with the seductive and mysterious I-330, Δ-503 is led by his new lover outside the Wall, where he colludes in a plot to overthrow the Benefactor. As the Benefactor retaliates by ordering a state-administered Operation to return order to the perfect world, Δ-503 finds himself fighting for the primitive and natural state of chaos – and rebelling against all that he once held true.

A key work in the history of dystopian literature, Zamyatin’s We was hugely influential, shaping the writing of many other authors including Orwell and Huxley. Written in the1920s, and banned in the Soviet Union for over sixty years, We is still topical today, a portent of future totalitarian regimes, and an admonition that the battle for freedom is never over.

Brief Lives: Alexander Pushkin by Robert Chandler 

Alexander Pushkin is Russia’s greatest poet. In addition to his prodigious work in verse, he experimented with a variety of genres ranging from Shakespearean tragedy and dramatic miniatures to the short story and the historical novel. He was often responsible for completing the first work of each type in the Russian language. Dostoevsky claimed that Pushkin embodied the Russian soul, and artists including Tchaikovsky, Mikhail Bulgakov and Nikolai Gogol have been inspired by his life and work. He was witness to important events in the turbulent political history of early nineteenth-century Russia.

This exquisite biography by an award-winning translator examines Pushkin as writer, lover and public figure; it acts as a succinct and sympathetic guide for anybody trying to understand Russia’s most celebrated poet – and, indeed, Russia itself.

All for now, LB

Publish and be damned…?

I’m slightly slow off the mark in responding to this, but a certain Guardian books blog post – my favourite of recent months – has been pinging around my mind for a few weeks now. Tackling the tricky question of how best to approach the cultural hangover from once-accepted imperial and racist attitudes, Kavitha Rao concludes that shifting values are best spoken of frankly, interrogated, and, thus, stripped of their venom. Encouraged from an early age to approach texts critically, her daughter will, I have absolutely no doubt, grow into a phenomenally sensitive and sophisticated reader.

Though not a parent myself (offspring of Hesperette: Hesperette-ette?), I do, for obvious reasons, have something of  a special interest in the contemporary reception of classics, and it seems to me that there is a question here for publishers as well as parents. A parent’s choice to introduce a book into their child’s ever-expanding horizon is a private one, and one, moreover, whose ramifications can be monitored and, where necessary, guided. I’m not for a moment suggesting that a publisher ‘educates’ its readers in the same way a parent educates their child, or that it would be either possible or desirable for publishers to steer criticism of their titles, yet in publishing a book one assumes a certain responsibility – to one’s own press, if nothing more. In the present climate, to publish a book containing outmoded or offensive views – though they may be couched in exquisite prose – is a bold move indeed, and there is a danger that many books of worth will be left to rot unresurrected as a result of their violation of contemporary propriety. I’m interested to know: what, in your view, is the publisher’s duty in this instance? Certainly not to censor – but where does the decision to select or reject a book based on its politics become censorship?

ER