January 8, 2005
Hesperus Press at Strand
London-based Hesperus Press has received a lot of favorable coverage on literary weblogs and major media outlets (including, among others, a recent brief mention at Bookslut, this mention on MaudNewton, this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and this article in the Seattle Times), so I was happy to discover that a few titles have hit the shelves at Strand Books here in Manhattan. I picked up Marcel Proust's Pleasures and Days and immediately saw what all the fuss was about: The book is a little-known gem by a major author; it is inexpensive and attractively designed; and it features a forward by literary heavyweight A.N. Wilson and a fresh translation by Andrew Brown, who taught at Cambridge and has translated over two dozen books for the publisher to date. Any publisher who cares enough about authors to bring their "minor" works back in to print in such a loving manner deserves attention and applause. Now I'm off to bed with Proust's portraits of fin-de-siècle Parisian society.