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

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

London seems positively echoey these days: those that haven’t been struck down by the dreaded swine flu are off getting impressive stamps in their passports and tropical diseases to match. Unfortunately, I suspect that I won’t now be leaving the M25 zone for some time, as when I haven’t got my Hesperette hat on I am hard at work on a degree. Ah, harmless drudgery.

Allow me to live vicariously: what has been your holiday reading this year? Somewhere, far off at the end of a tunnel, I see a light. When I do eventually find myself 15,000 words lighter, I’d like to be able to indulge my new-found liberty to read wisely, and I can’t think of any wiser forum to ask…

ER

PS. Thank you for the many catalogue requests that have come in; they’re all being processed as we speak, so if you haven’t received yours yet, don’t fret. There are only so many envelopes a Hesperette can stuff in a day.

Hello all,

Salutations after a shamefully long silence. We’ve weathered the heatwave here at Hesperus HQ and have been beavering away on our latest catalogue, boxes of which lay enticingly, and perhaps slightly hazardously, strewn around the office. If you’re keen to see how we plan to satisfy our – and, with a bit of luck, your – bibliophilia, please send a mailing address to enquiries [@] hesperuspress [.] com (only, err, without the extraneous punctuation, which I’m assured will keep similarly extraneous spam from our inboxes. We shall see…)

Thank you for all your enquiries about the website, which is currently being steered to completion. We’ve a few competitions up our sleeves to celebrate its launch, so watch this space…

Anyway, enough about us. How have you been?

ER

Hello, I am writing to you in post London Book Fair euphoria, a state of relief brought on by being allowed to leave the confines of Earl’s Court One and Two.

It was my first Book Fair and I found that I split my time evenly between fending off passers-by trying to interest me in Hesperus-irrelevant business ventures and getting hopelessly lost on the way back from the bathroom: I found the three days to be quite eventful, but am definitely relieved to be back in the fresh air.

The main topic of debate that I heard rearing its head (that’s a hell of a mixed metaphor, but I’m too to think this through) the most often was the question of the relevance of Book Fairs in modern society. According to some, trade Book Fairs are dead and internet advances have superseded any need to meet face-to-face. I suppose this is a compelling idea when the logistics of such enormous fair are considered. However, I was struck by the interest that all publishers seem to evince with regard to their neighbouring companies. Part of this is probably monitoring rival companies but I was still surprised by how passionate and genuinely interested publishers still are about books. Getting them all together in one room seems to me still to be at the very least a culturally interesting and enlightening pastime. Tangentially, may I say how much I enjoyed and learned from the British Council lectures about Indian literature. I found the authors to be so fascinating and diverse in their achievements and political views. On Monday, I found myself quite unexpectedly listening to sung renditions of ghazals, a surreal (for Earl’s Court) but fabulous experience.

Right, must sign off, the post-book-fair pub party last night turned out to be a slightly messy one for me and I am slightly feeling the effects… More soon, Martha

Among the various interminable games and lists circulating on Facebook, one in particular has caught my eye this week. The BBC at some stage apparently issued a list of one hundred books that they believe to be of some – unquantified and unspecified – merit. (N.B. several variations on this list have been winging their way through cyberspace, I’m not entirely sure as to the authenticity of the one which reached me; I have been unable to track down a version on the BBC website.) Anyway, the BBC apparently predicted that the majority of people will not have read more than six of them. I thought that Facebook yielded surprisingly diverse types of response.

 Some people seem to be playing a fierce game of one-upmanship. Many claim to have read more than ninety percent of the titles. (For the few who claim to have digested the whole gamut, I feel a certain incredulity: purely because this would involve reading the whole of the Bible.)

There is room for horror as to the number of books that the average person has achieved, and a lot of scathing commentary about falling standards of education.

Another popular response seems to be to bemoan the quality of the books on offer and perhaps comment on the strange juxtaposition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the entire works Shakespeare.

I feel that perhaps the most interesting factor up for discussion should not be what constitutes ‘literature’, but simply how interesting it is that such diverse books appear on the same list. I think it serves to illustrate very neatly that personal choice should be the only regulatory criteria of any list of literary merit, and indeed this one was compiled as a result of a reader poll to determine Britain’s greatest book. (The only flaw in this plan is the fact that the BBC, by issuing such lists, does seem to encourage a rather proscriptive approach to reading as people strive to read the books other people perceive as ‘valuable’.)

For me, as a Hesperette, the most striking feature of the list that I read was the number of titles on the list that were not originally written in English. Here is the list of translated works that appeared: War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, One Hundred Years of Solitude, A Suitable Boy, The Shadow of the Wind, Love in The Time of Cholera, Lolita, Count of Monte Cristo, Germinal, Madame Bovary, The Little Prince, The Three Musketeers, Les Misérables.

I take fourteen percent foreign literature on a reader poll to be a pretty good score. It should also be noted that with a couple of exceptions these books are all pretty hefty works of literature. It would seem that, not only have people persevered with reading these books (Germinal, really?), they also rank them among their favourites. I found this, in general, to be an encouraging situation. (We must, of course, ignore the fact that most people were probably only showing off and that only three languages are represented in translation.)

Anyway enough random musings for one day,

Back soon,

Martha

Although I think I might be ready to scream if someone mentions the dreaded words ‘credit crunch’ again, there is definitely something lacking in the Christmas spirit this year. I woke up in a blind panic when I realise that yesterday’s date signified that only one month was left before Christmas.

As yet more headlines emerge about drops in spending, I have begun to wonder whether newspapers will soon suggest that Christmas be cancelled altogether due to recession. Certainly, Christmas shopping doesn’t seem to be high on my agenda at the minute, although I blame that entirely on the terrible weather this summer which has convinced my brain that it should still be August. So yes, back to Christmas presents… Ok, so I’m biased, but books do seem like a pretty much failsafe option. Although, according to yet more headlines, apparently not immune to recessions, books still seem to provide a good value for money option, and are so versatile as well. For those who face being unceremoniously turfed out of their previous job, one could either present them with books about the best way to succeed at job interviews or they could focus instead on the fact that, once unemployed, they would probably appreciate a good page-turner of a novel. 

I have, however, decided to fully embrace the Christmas spirit, even artificially generating it if necessary! Books are not only good as presents but are also mood-enhancing. For my part, in order to create my Christmas, I shall be ordering in extra copies of our Dickens ‘Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire’, building said fire and settling in for the long evenings with one of Jerry Thomas’ amazing concoctions. See, who said books couldn’t solve the credit crisis; it’s all about Christmas-ing yourself out of it!

Back at Hesperus headquarters, however, we are busy finalising the list for next year, and I must say it’s all looking very exciting! Amongst other titles will be our newly launched ’Poetic Lives’ series, these short biographies of renowned poets will build on our successful ‘Brief Lives’ series. So, I think I will look forward to Christmas as a vital step towards embarking on the next year, which will be filled with even more beautiful books for us to publish.

More soon,

Martha

Today has been a super ratty one for me, unfortunately, but one which would have passed fairly uneventfully if I’d not (four weeks too late, damn and curse it!) come across this inane excuse for an opinion piece… I’m not going to go into all that I object to in Mr Caines’s argument, but I think it utterly ridiculous to pick us out – for all that other publishers are mentioned, it does appear to be a rather unecessarily pointed attack – for lack of creativity, and LAZINESS?! And this in a world riddled with Gaudi/Duma/Da Vinci Keys…

The accusation that we are somehow ‘cashing in’ on Big Name Classics would be a fair point if it weren’t for the fact that the majority of our titles are not public domain texts, readily available for anyone to plunder: our Dickenses and Austens, which are all hugely successful (enough justification in itself for their publication I’m sure anyone in Sales and Marketing will avow) allow us to publish translated works - by authors as well known and readily available as Sciascia, Odoevsky, Fenoglio, Alarcon, Petofi and Kuzmin, all of whom the article’s author has no doubt read; he’s right: it really is about the names… – which are classics in other cultures but unknown and potentially alienating to the English-reading book-buying public, and to bring into the English literary consciousness contemporary European literature, which is certainly not the complacent and lazy way out! I am totally ignoring the preposterous comparison with Jonathan Swift, but feel obliged to ask: how far can anyone claim Yasmine Ghata rivals TOM CLANCY?

In every case, English language originals included, – Jenny Wren, Aphra Behn, Mary Borden, Bulwer-Lytton, David Garnett, Edgar Lee Masters, to name but six – the books we publish have been researched at great length; we read hundreds of books which we discount (as dross, unreadable, for being too readily available, but never too obscure…) before picking the titles which end up on our list; in short: we work bloody hard to find the titles we then publish. For someone to denigrate all our hard work as being cynical and lazy, someone who according to his ‘biog’ hasn’t yet managed to finish writing anything himself, is far too much for me to take without clearing my throat. Wiesengrund puts it perfectly.

Oh, and the reason Robert Bage is not widely in print I’d guess, is that nothing that he wrote was very good. In the immortal words of Thumper…

KA, Blame It on the Hormones.

In these modern times of apocalyptic headlines forecasting the end of financial security, I find myself increasingly drawn to activities which remove me from reality. It is true that financial crises remain slightly irrelevant to me, along with, in all probability, all other erstwhile students,  as my bank balance slips every day further into the red (I can’t even remember what black looks like any more). I have, however, taken upon myself the duty of upholding the economy through shopping and frequenting pubs, yet with winter approaching my mind dwells persistently on pre-recession cheap flights; these days I must rely instead on flights of fancy (in my mind I have already been to Morocco, Egypt and New Zealand this month.) I think I may soon be utterly absorbed in imaginary travel to sunny places, preferably those without a financial market.

In the midst of such dark thoughts, I have found myself reading articles about Paddington Bear’s anniversary. Thus I remind myself that escapism seems to have always been at the heart both of reading and being British. How much further could one retreat from reality than an orphan bear with a penchant for marmalade. So, henceforth, expect Hesperus to publish only books of sunny disposition, depicting only fabulously wealthy heroines – then you’ll know who’s in charge of commissioning new works.

I was desperately searching for a link to make this blog relevant to any topic other than my own spleen, and fell to considering various Hesperus titles for their feel-good factors. I got no further than the covers of our recently published Housman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’ and Vita Sackville-West’s ‘The Heir’ both of which immediately caused me to drift off to a sunny field filled, perhaps, with peacocks, depending on my desire. Regardless of the contents, covers alone seems to suffice as a meditative tool to transport me to other non-recessional worlds. In fact so good are my daydreams that I fail to see any reason to strive to make this blog relevant to anything in particular except them…

Martha

Having recently moved to London, I am very rapidly becoming acquainted with the mixture of horrors and joys which daily commutes contain. There is the urgent need to lunge for a seat, elbowing everyone out of my way in the process, or if standing, to avoid the armpits of sweaty men. For me the stress of such activities is only relieved by my habit of vicariously reading over my fellow passengers’ shoulders. Whatever my companions may be reading, be it War and Peace, a trashy novel or even the Metro, it always looks infinitely more interesting in their hands. Am I alone in the world in this obsession? (I call it obsession because the urge to turn over their page for them is sometimes almost overwhelming.)

So, certain in the knowledge that I will soon be arrested for stalking someone fresh off a train in order to read the last line of a particularly interesting thriller, I thought I would come clean about my parasitic reading habits. But these musings have got me thinking that trains and undergrounds should be equipped with recordings of short stories, or perhaps weekly instalments taken from a thick Russian classic. It could resemble an interactive ‘Poems on the Underground’ or a diurnal version of the ‘Book at Bedtime.’ It didn’t take me very long to figure out some pretty serious flaws in my amazing plan, not least the fact that such a system would no doubt cause countless people to stay on beyond their customary stop in order to discover how a particular story would culminate.

Nonetheless, undeterred, I researched my fabulous idea on the internet, assuming that in Japan there must be an ultra-modern entertainment system for public transport, even if it doesn’t include literary classics or promising new fiction. However my search turned up nothing, so from now on I shall be mentally constructing a list of Hesperus books suitable for soothing and entertaining the masses on their way into work. I think we could lead the way with some beautiful La Fontaine fables perhaps? Or perhaps a quick piece of Jack London dystopic writing first thing in the morning, based on which one could envisage the world emptied of the hordes that are currently cluttering up one’s personal space in a railway carriage. So many options… Well enough of my strange musings, the real world calls, in which one has to read one’s own books, without companionship and turning one’s own pages.

More from me soon,

Martha