The Inside Random House series has released another video. This one gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the publisher’s offices as book designers explain their creative processes and the experience of creating covers for some of the world’s best-known authors. What’s great about this video is that we get to see some of the best book cover designers in the business, people like Chip Kidd and Peter Mendelsund of Knopf, Robbin Schiff of Random House, and Marysarah Quinn and Christopher Brand of Crown. Chip Kidd at one point picks up a manuscript and stresses the importance of a close reading of the text in order to understand how to approach its design. Aspiring designers can learn a lesson from the cover outtakes featured in the video, such as the multiple attempts required for The Dinner by Herman Koch; All That Is by James Salter; Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss; and Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff. The video is not only insightful but entertaining too.
Category Archives: Books
GERTRUDE publishes as part of Hermann Hesse Project
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Coyote Canyon Press just published the first of two novels by Hermann Hesse, an endeavor we’re calling our Hermann Hesse Project. Just published is Gertrude. The text for this edition is taken from Adele Lewisohn’s translation of 1915, Gertrude and I, published in New York by The International Monthly.
Gertrude was the first novel by Hermann Hesse published in English and not part of an anthology. The novel deals with the destructive nature of love, its central theme the narrator’s enduring and hopeless passion for Gertrude, whom he meets through their mutual love of music. “Music was important to Hesse,” says Thomas Fasano, who wrote the Introduction to the book. “As a child he loved to listen to the church organ, learned to play the violin, and developed a passion for Chopin. His interest in music and painting and his lifelong association with musicians and painters greatly informed his writing.”
Fasano writes in the Introduction:
Hesse’s pre-World-War-I heroes are esthetes who live only in their own world of dreams, who shrink before bold action. Temperamental artists, they are paralyzed by their chronic indecision and consumed by loneliness—timid souls to whom the art of life and the art of love are forever unobtainable. They ask little of life and expect much. Such is the nature of the child of nature, Peter Camenzind, and the timorous composer, Kuhn. Such too was Hermann Hesse.
The second book in the Hermann Hesse Project will be a rediscovery of sorts: In The Old Sun, a novel published in English over one hundred years ago and essentially lost since then — until now. We’re planning a beautiful edition of the novel both in hardback and Kindle. In The Old Sun was actually Hesse’s first book published in English in the United States. It was part of an anthology called German Classics and has never been published as an individual book until now.
H. L. Mencken – The American Language
H. L. Mencken with a Remington understrike typewriter
H.L. Mencken as a uniquely American voice was The American Language, a book he believed would be “my swan song.” Through the humid months of 1918, a shirtless Mencken could often be found on the sleeping porch of his home in Baltimore amongst piles of reference works and dictionaries. He sweated through each tome, taking notes and dog-earing pages. He also dug out articles he’d previously published in the Evening Sun, the Smart Set, and the New York Evening Mail. From this chaos of material came a certain order.
In 1918 linguistics was hardly recognized as a science. One of the aims of education was to preserve the sanctity of the King’s English, a pedagogical aim based on the notion that American English was inferior to that spoken in England. Mencken could find but a few scant articles on American pronunciation and even less on grammar. He found this surprising since the difference between the American and English languages was a subject that had preoccupied America since the colonial days. In 1789, in a letter to Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster foresaw that this new country, with its relations with Indian tribes, would forge a new vocabulary. But not just in words alone did the two languages differ — something remarked upon by Mark Twain in 1882 when he wrote that in England his American tongue was unintelligible to most Englishmen. Yet the bulk of the material Mencken uncovered, as he writes in the Preface to the First Edition, was dedicated “to absurd efforts to prove that no such thing as an American variety of English existed — that the differences I constantly encountered in English and that my English friends encountered in American were chiefly imaginary.”
In “Mencken Revisited,” the noted linguist Raven McDavid Jr. wrote: “No professional scholar of the time would have dreamed of presenting a discussion of the totality of American English.” This was a role for which Mencken was well cast. As an experienced journalist, a social historian, and a critic of modern culture (the booboisie), Mencken was skilled at summarizing information in a clear style. The writing of linguists was dull in comparison.
Even for a writer of Mencken’s talent, however, the book wasn’t easy to write. “This tome is infinitely laborious and vexatious — a matter of writing and rewriting,” Mencken told his future biographer, Ernest Boyd. Yet by the end of six months, Mencken had typed the last sentence of The American Language. He wrote in the Preface: “It is anything but an exhaustive treatise upon the subject . . . . All it pretends to do is to articulate some of those materials — to get some approach to order and coherence into them, and so pave the way for a better work by some more competent man. That work calls for the equipment of a first-rate philologist, which I am surely not.” He described “that damned American language book” to friends as “a heavy, indigestible piece of cottage cheese.” As for continuing with the subject, he wrote to Ernest Boy, “Never again! Such professorial jobs are not for me.”
The indexes remained, and throughout the autumn of 1918 Mencken struggled to complete them while an outbreak of influenza struck the nation. As many as 1,500 obituaries filled newspaper columns each week. More civilians were dying at home from influenza than troops abroad. In August Mencken wrote, “All that could be seen from our house were funerals.”
Alfred A. Knopf published The American Language in 1919, and the first edition was a runaway success. With one powerful stroke Mencken had severed the umbilical cord which linguistically bound America to England. In addition it was clear that the center of American cultural gravity had shifted and had swung toward Mencken though not all were pleased about this. As his most virulent critic, Stuart Sherman, put it in his book Americans, Mencken had leapt into the center stage off American culture “at a hard gallop, spattered with mud . . . high in oath.”
In 1920 when Knopf published Mencken’s Prejudices: Second Series, they wanted a revision of The American Language. The orders were rolling in and the royalties on the small first edition were more than on any of his previous books, leading Mencken to joke, “the moral is plain: fraud pays.” Despite his sarcasm, Mencken would see that his was the first work of its kind to transcend traditional barriers between scholarly and popular books. What at first had been drudgery now enthralled him as he saw how each new edition recaptivated an old audience and captured a new one.
But revising the manuscript filled him with dread. He wrote in “Preface to the Revised Edition” that the corrections and suggestions from the first edition that needed to be incorporated into the second “were of such bulk that they almost alarmed me into abandoning the work altogether.” Mencken’s revision, which included the addition of four new chapters, an appendix, and an extended bibliography, was demanding physically and mentally. Three new sections dealt with American slang. The first, “Specimens of the American Vulgate,” included a facetious translation of “The Declaration of Independence” into common speech. Two pieces by Ring Lardner that showcased the common argot of professional baseball players were also included. A second addition, “Non-English Dialects in America,” acknowledged the influence of Yiddish and Spanish on the American language. The third addition included a section entitled “Proverb and Platitude,” in which Mencken included examples of “the national talent for extravagant and pungent humor.”
The American Language was nothing less than a declaration of linguistic independence. No more would America suffer the oppression of literary colonialism. A new day had dawned on American literature. “American writers were finally able to take flight from the old tree and to trust for the first time their own dialect,” Edmund Wilson observed. “Mencken showed the positive value of our own vulgate heritage.”
Despite his belief that the book was filled with errors, he was able to explain to linguist Raven McDavid that he had achieved his “central objective” of “convincing[ing] 100% of Americans that language is really interesting, and not only interesting but important.”
Five Great Dialogues of Plato
At the time of his trial and execution in 399 BC, Socrates had reached the age of seventy. He had lived through the Periclean Age when Athens was at the pinnacle of Imperial power, then through twenty-five years of war with Sparta and Athens’ defeat in 404. He did, however, live to see the restoration of democracy. For most of that time he was a well-known character in the streets of Athens, speaking to anyone who’d listen to his philosophy of life. His mission, which he explains in the Apology, was to expound the idea that man was responsible for his own moral attitudes.
To satisfy the need for education in the 5th century BC, there arose numbers of traveling teachers known as the Sophists. They taught rhetoric, a powerful weapon, since all the important decisions were made by the assemblies of adult male citizens. Socrates was often confused with the Sophists, but their differences are vital: the Sophists professed to teach their students how to be successful, whereas, Sophocles claimed nothing of the sort; his dialogues aimed at discovering the truth, the understanding of life and its values that he believed were the basis of philosophy: that is, philosophy as a moral as well as intellectual pursuit. Thus his celebrated paradox: when men do wrong it is because they don’t know any better. This is not to say that Socrates ignored the will. He believed that educated man would choose the right because they cannot choose the wrong.Benjamin Jowett’s translations in this volume give Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial and death. Euthyphro is a kind of introduction to Plato’s account of Socrates’ speech to the jury in his own defense. Crito gives the account of how Socrates could have escaped into exile but refused. Meno shows Socrates debating Meno on the nature of human virtue and questioning Meno’s slave boy on a question of geometry in order to prove the preexistence of the soul. Phaedo gives the account of Socrates’ last discussions with his friends on the immortality of the soul.
Ambrose Bierce: “Chickamauga”
“Realism” is an element of some of Abrose Bierce’s short stories (particularly those concerning the Civil War), but the term is of little value when discussing his often fantastical imagination. In his essay “The Short Story” he writes: ‘Probability? Nothing so improbable as what is true. It is the unexpected that occurs . . . Everything being so unearthly improbable, I wonder that novelists of the Howells school have the audacity to relate anything all.’ ”
Bierce’s stories can be roughly divided into three categories: those about the Civil War, horror and the supernatural, and comic or “tall” tales. Though his plots are mostly contrived, he writes with great economy and vividness, and his stories often have a caustic, almost misanthropic edge to them. The shot story was clearly an ideal medium for him.
His contrivances of plot include reordering of the time scheme such as analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward), exploration of dreams and the surreal, and a preoccupation with the vagaries of perception. Through these techniques, he demonstrates an uncanny ability to record how humans record experience before organizing it conceptually.
In his most horrifying war story, “Chickamauga,” a deaf-mute child witnesses the retreat of the Confederate soldiers after the eponymous battle and wanders out toward the battlefield and encounters men crawling away from battle. The child thinks they are playing a game and tries to ride on the back of one of them, but the soldier flings him to the ground and then
turned upon him a face that lacked a lower jaw — from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry.
The child retreats and then drawn by a great fire, leads the men as if into battle with his toy sword. Soon he recognizes the burning building as his own home, his mother lying dead before him, and he utters “a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries — something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey — a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil.”
The reversal of physical orientation is complete and serves as an emblem of the reversal of the story: war as a matter of youthful enthusiasm and heroism revealed as bloody horror.
Peter Rugg, or the Missing Man
From among his few short stories, William Austin’s fame rests primarily with one, “Peter Rugg, or the Missing Man,” which became immensely popular and a favorite of Hawthorne and Longfellow. Austin incorporates legends of the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman into a New England setting, much as [[Washington Irving]] had done with Knickerbocker materials in “Rip Van Winkle.”
The storytelling method is sophisticated in that Austin recounts Rugg’s situation by means of one narrative nested within another. The frame storyteller is Jonathan Dunwell, who presents events that transpire chiefly during 1820, although there is a distortion of time that heightens the sense of the supernatural.
After spending a stormy night with friends in Concord, Rugg and his young daughter, Jenny, fail to reach Boston and are cursed thereafter to travel continuously in an antiquated carriage (even by 1820 standards) and become precursors of storms (like the older Flying Dutchman).
Originally published on September 10, 1824, in the New England Galaxy in the form of a letter to the editor but carrying the title “Some Account of Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, Late of Boston, New England, in a Letter to Mr. Herman Krauff,” it was signed “Jonathan Dunwell,” about whom nothing was known. For the next seventeen years, the true author, a local attorney named William Austin, concealed his identity.
This collection of great American short stories contains over thirty of the finest ever penned by American writers from Washington Irving to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self-Reliance and Other Essays
Three of the essays in this collection (“History,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-soul”) sprang from the 1836 lectures on the philosophy of history Emerson delivered at the Boston Masonic Temple.
“History” really isn’t about history but how to convert the burden of the past into a survival kit for the future. “The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible.” Emerson believed that history could not be ignored, but for it to have currency we must imagine ourselves in it. “We . . . must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten images to some reality in our experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.”
Emerson’s essay on the unalienated human being, “Self-Reliance,” the essay for which he is most remembered, is a synthesis of the self-rule of classical stoicism, the bildung of Goethe, the ideas of Schleiermacher, the knotty musings of Kant — translated into a coherent, accessible English. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” But it is not a mandate for selfishness. It recommends self-reliance as a starting point — not as a goal. A better society will come about only as an association of fulfilled individuals. Whereas “Self-Reliance” emphasizes the individual, “The Over-soul” focuses on the common mind. “Self-Reliance affirms individualism; “The Over-soul affirms “that great nature in which we rest,” a nature variously described as “a common nature,” “the great heart of nature,” “the common heart,” and “the great, universal mind.” The link between these two essays is Emerson’s idea that the power of the individual is the power of our common nature.Also in this collection is “The Poet,” the finest piece ever penned about literature as a process, a form of expression as fundamental as any basic drive — like sex — but also one of the main purposes of human life. Poetry is not a skill or a trade, but a reflection of the human spirit, the inner fire: “For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch bearers, but children of the fire, made of it.”
The last essay in this collection is “The Divinity School Address,” given July 15, 1838, to the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School. Emerson had not been invited by the officers of the school, but by the senior class. What he delivered that evening was so objectionable to the clergy that nearly thirty years passed before he was invited to speak again at Harvard. Emerson’s address was both an attack on formal historical Christianity and a proposition of a personal religious consciousness, a sort of declaration of the divinity of the human. Emerson ended his talk with advice that asked a lot of the young graduates: “Let me admonish you to go alone; to refuse the good models . . . and to love God without mediator or veil.” The address would be Emerson’s last face-off with organized religion, though he would remain a deeply religious and spiritual man throughout his life.
John Dos Passos — Three Soldiers
The defining moment in the life of John Dos Passos came between August 16 and 20, 1917, when he experienced combat firsthand as an ambulance driver in France at the Battle of Verdun. Three days later he wrote to his friend Rumsey Marvin:
The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don’t do the fighting.
Of all the things in this world a government is the thing least worth fighting for.
None of the poor devils whose mangled dirty bodies I take to the hospital in my ambulance really give a damn about any of the aims of this ridiculous affair.
Before his wartime experiences, Dos Passos had only intellectualized his feelings of rebellion nurtured at Harvard, and later embellished during his bohemian days in Greenwich Village with its political radicals such as John Reed. These were heady days for someone who wanted to work in the arts. Dos Passos saw the Armory Show, which introduced Americans to the work of Picasso and Matisse; he attended performances of the Ballets Russes; and he was deeply affected by the literary radicalism of the poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
He had become a pacifistic, but knew that for a young man hoping to be a writer, he must experience the war firsthand. He volunteered for an ambulance unit and shipped to France on June 20, 1917. Near the end of July he joined a section of drivers headed toward the front. What he saw there was, he wrote in one of his journal entries, “horror . . . so piled up on horror that there can be no more. How damned ridiculous it all is! . . . All the cant and hypocrisy . . . all the vestiges of the old truth now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas — the ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men — the heroics about war — my country right or wrong — Oh infinities of them!”
Mountain Interval by Robert Frost (1916)
The first edition of Robert Frost’s third collection of poems, Mountain Interval, was published in 1916 by Henry Holt and Company and was dedicated “To you who least need reminding that before this interval of the South Branch under black mountains, there was another interval, the Upper at Plymouth, where we walked in spring beyond the covered bridge; but that the first interval of all was the old farm, our brook interval, so called by the man we had it from in sale.” The “you” Frost refers to is his wife, Elinore, to whom he dedicated most of his books. The “South Branch” is the Frosts’ farm in Franconia, New Hampshire. The “Upper at Plymouth” is a reference to their time spent together in Plymouth, New Hampshire. “The first interval” is another reference to time spent together, this time in Derry, New Hampshire. And the brook is Hyla Brook, by Frost’s farm in Derry, which provided the title of one of the poems in this volume. According to Jay Parini in his biography of Robert Frost, Robert Frost: A Life (1999), an interval is a “New England dialect term for land in a valley.” Therefore “mountain interval” provides a double meaning, suggesting a “pause in a journey as well as a dip in the landscape” (278). “The Road Not Taken” opens the volume and perhaps makes reference to this “mountain interval.”
Initially the collection did not sell as many copies as Frost’s previous collection, North of Boston, probably because his publisher rushed the book into print. Nevertheless, it contains some of Frost’s best-known and most celebrated poems, such as “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches,” and “Out, Out—.” Frost wrote the majority of the poems during his stay in England; whereas he wrote a few before leaving for Europe and reworked them for book publication, such as “Birches” and “Putting in the Seed.”
Naturally, Frost was disappointed by the book’s lack of sales, but it was to be expected of a third volume following so quickly on the heels of two previous collections, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. Despite the book’s abysmal sales figures, most scholars agree that it was a seminal book in the history of modern poetry, virtually on the basis of “The Road Not Taken” and “Birches.”