Kicking off “Books are Nice” Week at AustenBlog!
“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say any thing wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?”
Catherine is absolutely correct: books are very nice, indeed! (As is Henry Tilney!) With a veritable cornucopia of upcoming books for Janeites to enjoy, we have decided that tonight and for the next three nights, AustenBlog will have at least one post related to books by, about, or inspired by Jane Austen, culminating on Friday in a giveaway of a copy of The Jane Austen Handbook: A Sensible Yet Elegant Guide to Her World, personally inscribed to the recipient by the Authoress. (We also will have information about bookplates for the runners-up and other Handbook-related fun.) If any of our Gentle Readers would like to send in reviews of recent releases of Jane Austen-related books, we would love to publish them, so make haste!
Good news for Team Knightley: a paperback edition of Mr. Knightley’s Diary by Amanda Grange will be available in the U.S. in October from Berkley. (Click on the thumbnail to see a larger version of the gorgeous cover illustration.) Berkley also will be publishing Captain Wentworth’s Diary in paperback, though no date is available yet. However, for those who can’t wait, or are on the other side of the pond, Captain Wentworth’s Diary will be available in about a month; it is available for preorder in hardback from the publisher’s site at a very nice discount. We hear that the next book in the series will be Edmund Bertram’s Diary, which should be out sometime in 2008, and after that…rumors of a certain gentleman of the military sharing his secrets have reached our shell-pink ears. AMMMMM!
For any Gentle Readers heading to Book Expo America this week, there will be a panel on Jane Austen called “Confessions of Jane Austen Addicts: Author, publisher, and bookseller perspectives on Austen’s enduring popularity” (all the way at the bottom of the page). Panelists include Kathryn Court, president and publisher of Penguin Books; Patrice Hannon, author of 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Jane Austen: The Truth About the World’s Most Intriguing Romantic Literary Heroine and the upcoming Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine’s Guide to Life and Love; Laurie Viera Rigler, author of the upcoming Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict; and, though they are not listed on the site, we are told Emily Auerbach, author of Searching for Jane Austen; Emma Campbell Webster, author of the upcoming Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure; and Antonia Squire, children’s book buyer at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, California. Also contrary to the site, we are told the panel begins at 4 p.m., not 4:30!
Attention Team Tilney (and Team Valancourt, we guess): Graphics Classics’ Gothic Classics Volume 14, featuring graphic-novel treatments of Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho, is available for purchase. If you want to receive the novel right away, order direct from the publisher; they tell us it should be available on Amazon in about two weeks.
Alert Janeite Julie P. told us about A Match Made on Madison by Dee Davis, which the cover blurb claims is an homage to Emma; since it’s about high-society matchmakers, the comparison is perhaps inevitable!
Alert Janeites Joan Ellen (a sequel author herself) and Kim sent us a deal from Publisher’s Lunch Weekly that might be of interest to Team Darcy.
UK bestselling author Alexandra Potter’s ME AND MR. DARCY, a contemporary novel about life, love and dating literature’s most eligible bachelor, to Signe Pike at Ballantine, for publication as a trade paperback original, by Stephanie Cabot at The Gernert Company.
Look for it sometime next year, we would say.
Speaking of Team Darcy, Diana Birchall’s novel Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma, previously available only through online outlets, will be republished next year by Sourcebooks, publisher of Linda Berdoll’s books, Mr. Darcy’s Diary by Amanda Grange (clearly Team Darcy has a strong foothold there), and The Jane Austen Miscellany, which means that anyone who has had trouble tracking down the book will be able to purchase it in almost any bookstore. Indeed, the bookstores will be full to bursting with Jane books in the upcoming months!
(We will update the blogroll this week, we promise most faithfully!)
May 30th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Awww! What a lovely new cover of ‘Mr. Knightley’s Diary’. If I had know this one was coming out I would have waited for it. And as a paperback it can not be that expensive even if one has to pay taxes to ship it over the pond.
And Yay! for the ‘Gothic Classics Vol. 14′ coming out! I have mine on preorder ever since I read here about it for the first time.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:55 am
That is me above!
May 30th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Has anybody noted the most wonderful book from Austen’s time?
Its titled “A Picture History of Mr. and Mrs. Grenville of Rosedale House: An Album by Mary Yelloly, Nine Years Old”
It is hard to describe, so this is how Amazon put it:
In this exquisite gift book, Mary Yelloly’s watercolors depict life in the English countryside, where the imaginary Grenville family, invented by Mary, spends its days playing games, taking walks, and enjoying carriage rides. Assisted by her “Nanna” and her sisters, Mary painted the elegant and fashionable Rosedale House, Gloucestershire, surrounded by parkland. The story is told through the child’s eyes both in a series of interiors-drawing rooms, libraries, and opulent bedrooms-and a sequence of beautiful landscapes. The book offers a delightfully innocent view of life in 19th-century England, but it also tells the intriguing tale of school-age Mary Yelloly, whose brief life appears to have been as charmingly domestic as those she depicts on the pages. Gatefolds, marbleized paper, and beautifully reproduced illustrations make this book an irresistible gift and the exceptionally accomplished watercolors will be of special interest to art lovers.
About the Author
Mary Yelloly was born in 1816 and died tragically at the age of 21. Lindsay Stainton was a curator at the British Museum for many years and is the author of many authoritative publications on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British artists.
This is probably the most remarkable visual commentary available.
felix
May 30th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
And, speaking of “nice books,” my copies of “the big 6″ arrived today. It took a while (long story) but they’re home, safe and sound.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:29 am
That is a very nice cover of “Mr. Knightley’s Diary.” But I am very very very excited about the news of “Edmund Bertram’s Diary”!!!!