Harvill, Hyman, Hénaff & MacLehose

At the end of the last century there was a wonderful series of books being published by what was then the Harvill imprint, under the editorship of Christopher MacLehose. In the end there were at least 230 in this series, most of them translations, all recognisable by the stripe-and-lion on the left-hand-side of the cover.

I bought as many as I could at the time, and have been collecting them ever since when I come across them second-hand. Here are the piles of those I've not yet read...

Sadly, Harvill was swallowed up by Random House, and most of the list left to slide out of print. Fortunately, however, Christopher MacLehose later set up a new imprint, MacLehose Press, much of which is dedicated to fiction in translation. I bought one of their books recently--Sophie Hénaff's Parisian crime novel The Awkward Squad, and found that it was labelled as the third 'Maclehose Edition'.

Investigating further, I discovered these MacLehose Editions seem to be the beginning of  new list of translated books which I hope will come to rival the original Harvill series. Some of the other titles, published and forthcoming, are these:



Back to the Hénaff: it has a lovely and distinctive cover drawn by one Miles Hyman, who has also provided covers for other MacLehose books...




..as well as for other publishers, both English and French. I knew Hyman's work from his excellent graphic-novel adaption/expansion of his grandmother's famous short story of group madness and cruelty: Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'.

Here are some of the book's pages (click to enlarge):



So, in short: old Harvills, MacLehose books, Miles Hyman's work--explore them all.

Small Publisher Specials #2: New Vessel Press

New Vessel Press is a small publisher that started up just three years ago, devoted entirely to literature in translation into English. How they make it work financially I have no idea, but it doesn't hurt that they seem to publish uniformly excellent books (I've read around half of their output so far, and there hasn't been a dud amongst them). A particular highlight has been their republication of two wonderfully grim (but funny) novels by Marek Hlasko, a Polish-born, sometimes-Israeli-settled writer who died at the age of 35 from living the sort of life he wrote about so well.

All of New Vessel's covers so far are the work of talented designer and comics creator Liana Finck, They almost all use very limited colour palettes to great effect, and not one of them has any type that isn't hand-drawn anywhere on them.

I just got and started reading this yesterday: fascinating so far--a weird mix of sun-bleached nostalgia, family politics, sexual frustration and depravity

Finck's own experiences in the comics world can probably be summarised by this cartoon she created (click to make legible)...

..since, far from superheroes, her biggest comics work to date is A Bintel Brief, an anthology of true stories adapted from the 100+-year-old advice columns of New York's old Yiddish-language The Forward newspaper. You can read several extracts from the book at her site, here.

Cooke vs Parker

(Note: I know it's boring that every (rare) post here begins with an excuse for the long time between posts--my excuse is that once my daughter began walking and getting into everything, it became extremely difficult to find time to fart around on the internet, especially when someone three feet tall is comes along and hammers at the keyboard every time you try!)

Six years ago I admired the first in David Drummond's series covers for the Richard Stark (pseudonym for Donald E Westlake) Parker novels--perhaps the best crime books ever written. Published by University of Chicago Press, they have been responsible for a well-deserved revival in the late Westlake's fortunes.

One of the first outgrowths of this revival were the graphic novel adaptations of some of the Parker books by Darwyn Cooke, whose bold, dynamic retro-inspired illustrations are a perfect fit for the works. Here are the covers of the first four books...

..a collected 'Martini Edition' of the first two...

..and some of the two-colour interior art ...

Cooke has also produced a limited-edition portfolio of art from the series.

All of this meant that when comics publisher IDW bought the rights to reprint the original Parker series in hardcover, Cooke was the natural choice to turn to to produce illustrations to accompany the text. Turning away from the two-colour style of the comics adaptions, Cooke has produced paintings that could easily be the covers to great 1950s/60s pulp novels. Here are four from the just-released first book from the series, The Hunter. (Very much click for much bigger versions.)

It's a shame Cooke isn't illustrating the covers for the books, which, while striking, are text-only and a little bland..

..though, comics publishers being what they are, there is an expensive deluxe edition which is much more attractive...

All of which brings us to an exciting and actually new book: Donald Westlake's The Getaway Car, a collection of his non-fiction writings edited by Levi Stahl, proprietor of the excellent I've Been Reading Lately, to be published in September by the same University of Cicago Press who kicked this whole thing off. The lovely cover is, naturally enough, the work of one Darwyn Cooke. Again, click for bigger...