American Retro

C format paperbacks, gatefold
colour & design coordinated
£6 each

America witnessed great social transition between the end of its Civil War and the beginning of the First World War. Depictions of rural idyll and its regional traditions of ‘local color’ writing were carried forward, but a metropolitan mode of unforeseen scale was introduced to its literature, with descriptions of urbanity and culture, but also of a suburban, skyscraper scrawl. Social distress and a new politics came also with this vast lifestyle.

The following titles are to be published in March 2020:-

AR01	Sarah Orne Jewett	The Country of the Pointed Firs
AR02	Alice Dunbar-Nelson	The Goodness of St. Rocque
AR03	Mary Roberts Rinehart	The Circular Staircase
AR04	O. Henry	The Four Million
AR05	Jack London	The Game & Other Writing on Boxing
AR06	Edna Ferber	Buttered Side Down
AR07	Ring Lardner	You Know Me Al
AR08	Sherwood Anderson	The Triumph of the Egg
AR09	Edith Wharton	Summer
AR10	Willa Cather	A Lost Lady

The short story was in the ascendant, a viable commercial form to meet the demands of the popular literary magazines of the time. At the same time, differing veins of novel structure were being developed. The aim of this series of short stories, novellas, and novels is to reflect this kaleidoscopic American literary landscape. It includes not just writers who are assuredly part of the literary canon, but also writers who are of interest because of their observational vantage point, who they were, or their subject matter.

The Short Story in America
– an article from The London Daily News, Oct 14, 1893