Our May titles are in!

There is excitement here at Hesperus HQ about our May titles. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore’s  birth, we are publishing not just one, but two, of his books. Boyhood Days is an account of the Nobel laureate’s childhood in India and is published with a foreword by Amartya Sen, another Nobel prize-winner.  Farewell Song is one of Tagore’s few comic works, and the Hesperus edition is the only one available in English.

“The atmosphere, the stories, the fears and the excitements, and Tagore’s early reflections and analyses have come through vividly and powerfully in this English version. There is much to enjoy and learn from in this little book.” – Amartya Sen on Boyhood Days

Some unknown divinity, lacking patience, had brought the two of them face to face on a solitary mountain road, and fused their hearts together. The lightning-flash of this sudden revelation would haunt them often at night, etching itself against the darkness. – from Farewell Song

Continuing our ‘Brief Lives’ series of informative and readable biographies of writers, we have Brief Lives: Sigmund Freud. It sheds light on the life and times of the man behind some of the twentieth century’s most controversial theories. An ideal companion to this account of Freud’s life is On Cocaine - a selection of Freud’s letters, papers and dream analysis about the drug he saw as a miracle cure for depression and addiction.

“My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement.” – Sigmund Freud

Info on our June titles will be available soon – watch this space……

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.