ABPress

From suburbia and skyscraper scrawl to the open prairies and 'local color', slum life to rural idyll: reprinting American and British literary classics.

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