We were saddened this week, as was everyone in publishing, to hear that Maurice Sendak—the author of countless delightfully macabre, unforgettable books—had passed away at the age of 83. The University of Virginia Press is proud to have published two of Sendak’s books, both out of print now and prized by collectors—Ten Little Rabbits (1970) and Fantasy Sketches (1981).
In the summer of 2004, a collector in Roanoke, Virginia, purchased a box stuffed full of an odd collection of documents. The container held ticket stubs, a college transcript, hand-drawn maps, newspaper clippings, and both typewritten and handwritten letters and stories. Examined closely, the materials revealed themselves to be the papers of George S. Bernard, Petersburg lawyer and member of the 12th Virginia infantry regiment during the Civil War.
Beginning in late 1966, John Steinbeck, roughly the age of the century, spent several months in Southeast Asia, covering the war in Vietnam for Newsday. His reports back home, published now in Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War, constitute the Nobel laureate’s final published work. Steinbeck’s reports took the form of letters to Alicia—a tribute to Alicia Guggenheim, the late publisher and editor of Newsday. In them, he applied his naturally superb eye to a scene that eluded comprehension, “a war not like any we have been involved in.” The Huffington Post has posted a typically eloquent, searching letter here. Positive reviews are in from Shelf Awareness, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus.
Steinbeck is most associated with Depression-era works such as The Grapes of Wrath. But, says Steinbeck in Vietnam editor Thomas Barden, “Steinbeck always wanted to be where the action was.” His reports were complicated by the fact that, despite his rather left-leaning past, Steinbeck was no dove. While not as important as Steinbeck’s novels, Barden feels these dispatches “have the spell-casting power of Steinbeck’s great works of fiction. They have his trademark immediacy and passion.”
Saving Monticello author Marc Leepson continues to keep a busy schedule. We have the dates for all of his upcoming talks and book signings.
Congratulations are in order for several contributors to our Best New Poets series. Scott Abels’ first full-length collection of poems, Rambo Goes to Idaho, was recently published by BlazeVOX. Scott’s poem “As Rambo Lay Dying” was published in Best New Poets 2011.
The Supreme Court’s hearing on the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law has attracted a nearly unprecedented amount of interest, not only from individuals demonstrating on the court’s steps—or waiting in line literally for days for a seat inside—but from organizations either supporting or opposing the law. Apparently a record number of briefs have been filed—so-called amicus curiae, in which organizations provide historical and legal data to influence the process. As these briefs are processed by the court’s law clerks, we thought we would go to Todd C. Peppers and Artemus Ward, editors of In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices, with some of our questions about the preparation for this historic ruling.