News
Thursday 10 May 2012
Use amazon’s advanced search
to find forthcoming releases from your favorite publisher
(Since I’m giving a tip here, I thought I’d write the header for it à la lifehacker)
I’m guessing that most people think of books in terms of their favorite authors or titles, but if you’re a book nerd like me, you may follow certain publishers you particularly like (some of our favorites include Alma Classics, Angel Classics, Dedalus Books, NYRB, Pushkin Press, Red Dust Books, to name only a small few), and are always eager to run out and buy all of their new releases.
Now, far be it for Your Humble Editor to complain of websites that aren’t updated enough (ahem), but if there hasn’t been a new posting in a while to your favorite publisher’s page and you’re wondering what they’ve been up to, you can navigate to amazon.com’s advanced book search page where you might have a bit more luck. Type the name of the publisher in the publisher field, leave all the other fields blank, select “publication date” from the “sort results by” pulldown menu, hit search, and voilà! Then you can add any as yet unpublished books of interest to your wishlist and begin the long painful wait counting the days and marking the sad, empty hours until it becomes available.
NP doesn’t yet have a firm schedule for its upcoming releases, so this particular tip won’t work with us just yet, but we do try to update the main page with our newest titles as soon as they’re ready.
YHE
Monday 26 March 2012
Correspondance, Balzac’s Paris, & More Coffee
Graham Robb, the author of an indispensable biography of Balzac, as well as many other fine works, recently wrote a review of a new volume of Balzac’s correspondence in the TLS, which Your Humble Editor thought might be of interest to his fellow Balzacians:
Also of interest is a very nice page from the University of California, Riverside that gives a guided tour of the Paris of Balzac’s day which, shortly after the author’s death, would soon become a very different city at the hands of Baron Haussmann:
And, not to completely run this into the ground, but since I’m doing Balzac links, here’s one more—and it makes me wish I lived in Ontario.
Share and Enjoy.
YHE
April 2011
A back-dated excuse and/or apology
Noumena Press has moved from Baltimore to lovely Hatfield in Western Massachusetts! And, despite how happy this may make us, our relocation and various other delays (unpacking, sick cats, a car that won’t start, and the like) will unfortunately mean that 2011 will be the first (and hopefully last) year where we do not release a new book. Because of the high amount of annotations and translation work required, The Human Comedy, Vol. 3: A Start in Life and Other Works will not be ready until 2012. It would be easy for us to rush out an incomplete and unsatisfactory edition, but since that goes against our credo, we felt that it would be better to spend more time and produce a better book. We think the end result will justify the extra time it has taken, and we greatly appreciate the continued patience of our readers. Full disclosure: when Your Humble Editor writes “we,” he is in fact referring to only himself and the lovely and talented (but alas part-time) art & layout designer Rachel Thern—so, having only a 1.5 person operation often makes for slow going. The cats (better now, thank you) have been somewhat reluctant to apply their considerable linguistic and editorial skills towards our ongoing publishing project, but we have our hopes that in the coming months they may be bribed into helping out if they are given their very own copies of Natsume Sōseki‘s I Am a Cat and a steady ration of tasty yum-yums.
For the purposes of pacification, here are two leavings related to Obermann that we’ve been meaning to post but have neglected to do so for one reason or another:
The first is a photograph from Michaut’s Senancour, ses amis et ses ennemis that we did not end up using:
There was, additionally, a portrait of Senancour’s daughter, but it was so utterly unflattering that not only did we decide not to post it here, we hope that all traces of it are lost forever! (Yes, it was really that bad).
Your Humble Editor also neglected to include a mention in the endnotes of Franz Liszt’s piano suite La Valée d’Obermann which forms part of his Années de pèlerinage, 1st Year, a series of compositions that were inspired by his travels to Switzerland, and, of course, Senancour’s book. The following is a link to a page on Naxos Records, where a portion of Liszt’s composition may be previewed (track 6, login required).
LISZT: Annees de Pelerinage, Vol. 1
Thanks again for your continued patience!
Your Humble Editor
Monday 17 May 2010
Time at last for “coming soon” to come down, and some actual news to be posted.
We are at present putting the finishing touches on Senancour‘s Obermann which we hope to have ready by the end of May.
We’ve had a great response to our first two volumes of Balzac‘s Human Comedy, and we’ve had a number of inquiries as to when the other books in the series will appear.
Originally, we had planned to alternately release a volume of the Human Comedy with the work of another writer in the interest of providing some variety for our readers (and also to keep Your Humble Editor from going off his rocker—Balzac is one of literature’s great name-droppers, and many of the names, places, events, etc. that he makes reference to are not very well known in the English speaking world and therefore require a fairly significant amount of annotation), but because of the demand for further volumes of Balzac’s masterpiece, we will most likely release a Vol. 4 after Vol. 3 rather than focusing on another author.
We appreciate everyone’s patience, and to tide over all you Balzacians (actually a word!) would like to share with you the following link about Balzac’s coffee addiction:
“The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee”
Above is an image of the plate that will probably be used as the basis for the cover of Volume 3: A Start in Life and Other Works.
Thank you and happy reading,
Your Humble Editor