| A reminder that this great deal is ending soon: Subscribe to The Washington Post for just $0.99 every four weeks.  Top: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Scribner; Harper; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Harper. Bottom: Grove Press; Catapult; Penguin Press; Tordotcom; G.P. Putnam's Sons | I'm officially on vacation, so this must be a relatively brief newsletter. (Dawn thinks I'm in the basement changing the furnace filter.) Before we say goodbye to 2021, I want to recommend my 10 favorite novels of the year – though it kills me to leave off so many others I enjoyed: - "Black Buck," by Mateo Askaripour, is an irresistible comic novel about the tenacity of racism in corporate America (review).
- "Damnation Spring," by Ash Davidson, considers the competing interests of environmentalists, loggers and their families living in old growth forests (review).
- "The Sentence," by Louise Erdrich, is about an ex-con who works in a Minneapolis bookstore that's haunted by the ghost of an irritating customer during a year of covid and BLM protests (review).
- "Crossroads," by Jonathan Franzen, examines with extraordinary wit and insight the moral crises experienced by a minister and his family (review).
- "The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois," by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, is an epic story about the development of the United States and one African American family (review).
- "Small Things Like These," by Claire Keegan, scrapes away decades of Christmas frosting to create a tough, anti-sentimental holiday classic (review).
- "Fake Accounts," by Lauren Oyler, hilariously skewers the deceptive posing, the withering irony and the infinitely cloned political outrage of our social media age (review).
- "Gold Diggers," by Sanjena Sathian, adds a touch of alchemy to the struggles of young Indian Americans trying to satisfy the demands of two cultures (review).
- "The Chosen and the Beautiful," by Nghi Vo, unleashes witches and vampires to produce a queer revision of "The Great Gatsby" that's enchanting (review).
- "Still Life," by Sarah Winman, celebrates with exquisite charm the enduring friendships among a group of Londoners who move to Florence after World War II (review).
 Little, Brown; Penguin Classics; SeaWolf Press; Knopf | Question: Who isn't happy to greet 2022?
Answer: The owners of expiring copyrights on classic books. When the ball drops in Times Square tonight, Agatha Christie's mystery "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"; William Faulkner's first novel, "Soldiers' Pay"; Ernest Hemingway's finest novel, "The Sun Also Rises" and many other books will finally fall into the public domain. Anyone will be free to publish their own editions or adapt the stories however they'd like. This bounty of unloosed books is the product of America's copyright law. Works published from 1923 to 1977 are protected for 95 years, which means 2022 is Liberation Day for books that appeared in 1926. That includes Dorothy Parker's "Enough Rope," Langston Hughes's "The Weary Blues" and Willa Cather's "My Mortal Enemy." I appreciate the way copyright supports our creative economy, but it's curious to see how losing that protection can also spur creativity. "The Great Gatsby" is a case in point, old sport. Last year, just months before Fitzgerald's classic fell into the public domain, Scribner released a strikingly redesigned collector's edition. This year, we got inventive reimaginings of Nick's life by Nghi Vo and Michael Farris Smith. Earlier this month, Penguin Vitae threw its hat in the ring with an edition of "Gatsby" that includes an introduction by Min Jin Lee. And on Feb. 1, Jillian Cantor will release "Beautiful Little Fools," which retells Fitzgerald's story from the point of view of several female characters. Stripped of their legacy protection, old books suddenly have to compete on physical design, editorial quality and critical commentary. Next week, for instance, "Winnie-the-Pooh" drops into the public domain." Oh, bother! On Jan. 11, Knopf will release a new hardcover edition of A.A. Milne's classic with the original black-and-white illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard painted in color. (I've seen a PDF of the upcoming version, and I would trade my last pot of honey for a hardcopy.) Popular books in the public domain offer indie publishers a unique opportunity to compete with the Big Five and their massive backlists. Among the reputable companies offering public domain books is a relatively new one called SeaWolf Press in Orinda, Calif. Using Amazon's print-on-demand service, SeaWolf specializes in selling high-quality reproductions of about 350 older classics at surprisingly low prices – many less than $10. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Working largely by himself, publisher Robert Etheredge includes the original cover images and interior illustrations. What's more, he resets the text in an antique font so that the books look old but are easy to read. You may have seen SeaWolf editions at the Jack London, Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain museums. Caveat emptor: Online, alongside editions from publishers like SeaWolf, you'll also find schlocky editions that are nothing more than printed PDFs downloaded from Project Gutenberg. So we beat on.©  Well-behaved books seldom make history. (Dutton; One World; Random House; Vintage; Harry N. Abrams) | Power politics and accurate history have never played well together, but 2021 has been a particularly rough year. If the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault moves any slower, Donald Trump's congressional toadies may succeed in erasing the attack — or at least recasting it, as Rep. Andrew Clyde did, as "a normal tourist visit" (yep). Fortunately, we have books like Jonathan Karl's "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show," which "sheds new light on how the man who lost the presidency nearly succeeded in overthrowing the 2020 election" (review). But assaults on democracy — and truth — will surely keep coming. (Lessons from a year covering conspiracy theories.) Governors in several states have signed laws to muzzle teachers in English, social studies and history classes. (A White teacher taught White students about White privilege. It cost him his job.) Raging away about "pornography" and "critical race theory," conservatives are pawing through public and school libraries to find books that don't affirm their notion of what a family, a country and our past should look like. With Orwellian irony, these repressive actions are being pursued by the same group that's nattering on about the evils of cancel culture. Sadly, this moral and intellectual rot at home gives the United States little authority to object to even more aggressive repression taking place around the world. In Hungary, a new law is punishing libraries and bookstores for offering LGBTQ+ books. Beijing keeps tightening its control of publishing and bookselling in Hong Kong, extending the government's fantastical revisionism to the once relatively free city. And in Russia, Putin's minions recently shut down Memorial International, which maintains a vast archive of Soviet abuses. (Putin can't erase the past.) Whenever freedom of expression is under attack — which, as history shows, is always — good works of fiction and nonfiction can help mount a substantial defense, but that defense depends upon intelligent readers. State-sponsored intimidation of writers, publishers and booksellers is sure to remain the most pressing concern for serious book lovers in 2022. Vive les livres!  Top: Graywolf; Tin House; New Directions; Norton; Penguin; Norton. Bottom: Graywolf; One Signal/Atria; Graywolf; Copper Canyon; University of Georgia Press; Knopf. | In 2018, I began including a poem near the end of each newsletter. What started as a lark quickly became one of my favorite elements of this project. Usually, the poems are drawn from new collections; sometimes they're from books that have won prizes during that week. Since they're all poems that I was excited to share with you, it's tough to pick favorites at the end of the year, but here are a dozen collections that I particularly loved: - "Pilgrim Bell," by Kaveh Akbar (Graywolf)
- "The Perseverance," by Raymond Antrobus (Tin House)
- "A Treatise on Stars," by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (New Directions)
- "The Historians," by Eavan Boland (Norton)
- "The Life," by Carrie Fountain (Penguin)
- "The Curious Thing," by Sandra Lim (Norton)
- "frank," by Diane Seuss (Graywolf).
- "Goldenrod," by Maggie Smith (One Signal/Atria)
- "Such Color," by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf)
- "Waterbaby," by Nikki Wallschlaeger (Copper Canyon)
- "Divine Fire," by David Woo (University of Georgia Press)
- "Stones," by Kevin Young (Knopf)
Many thanks to these publishers and others who have graciously allowed me to reprint poems throughout the year.  Dawn and Ron Charles on their wedding anniversary at Great Falls in the C & O Canal National Historic Park in Potomac, Md. (Photo by Madeline Charles) | This week, Dawn and I celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary, which means our marriage is in its prime. (Yes, math puns are the secret to a long relationship.) Years ago, we grew tired of exchanging gifts, but somehow Dawn has never grown tired of me. As the 19th-century theologian Mary Baker Eddy once wrote, "There are no greater miracles known to earth than perfection and an unbroken friendship." I'm lucky to have found both in Dawn. As old teetotalers, we'll welcome in the new year as we usually do: at home with some good ice cream enjoyed by the fireplace. Those of you carousing tonight, please try to keep the noise down; we'll be asleep long before midnight. (Where New Year's Eve celebrations are happening — and how to join in.) Thanks for sharing 2021 with me. Best wishes for 2022. Meanwhile, send any questions or comments about our book coverage to ron.charles@washpost.com. And if you know friends who might enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to them and remind them it's free all year long! To subscribe, click here.
Interested in advertising in our bookish newsletter? Contact Michael King at michael.king@washpost.com. |
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