Several landmark projects come to fruition this fall, as Library of America continues to expand and enrich our celebration of America’s best and most significant writing. A major new anthology of African American poetry, the biggest and most representative ever published, will anchor a nationwide programming initiative involving public events in all fifty states. Another anthology will commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing in all its cross-cultural complexity. Ernest Hemingway makes his long-awaited series debut, while we delve further into the groundbreaking work of Shirley Jackson and Ursula K. Le Guin. A new collection returns Breece D’J Pancake, a tragically short-lived master of the short story, to the public eye. And, just in time for the 2020 presidential election, journalist and bestselling author Nicholas Lehmann checks in with a handy gathering of key historical texts that illuminate the most urgent questions confronting our democracy today.
Refer to the list below for details about contents and publication dates for these and other titles; scroll further down the page for a fuller description of each new book.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA SERIES
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song
Kevin Young, editor
Library of America #333 / ISBN 978-159853-666-9
September 2020
Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918–1926
Robert W. Trogdon, editor
Library of America #334 / ISBN 978-159853-667-6
September 2020
Ursula K. Le Guin
Annals of the Western Shore
Gifts • Voices • Powers
Brian Attebery, editor
Library of America #335 / ISBN 978-159853-668-3
October 2020
Shirley Jackson
Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s
The Road Through the Wall • Hangsaman • The Bird’s Nest • The Sundial
Ruth Franklin, editor
Library of America #336 / ISBN 978-159853-670-6
October 2020
Plymouth Colony: Narratives of English-Indian Encounter from the Mayflower to King Philip’s War
Lisa Brooks and Kelly Wisecup, editors
Library of America #337 / ISBN 978-159853-673-7
November 2020
SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS
The Collected Breece D’J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters
Edited and introduced by Jayne Anne Phillips
ISBN 978-159853-672-0
October 2020
American Democracy: 21 Historic Answers to 5 Urgent Questions
Nicholas Lemann, editor
ISBN 978-159853-662-1
December 2020
BOXED SET
The Shirley Jackson Collection [2-vol boxed set]
ISBN 978-159853-671-3
October 2020
Expertly selected by poet and scholar Kevin Young, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song reveals a glorious living tradition through a chorus of many brilliant voices, some familiar, others recently rescued from neglect. In its pages, an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronts her legal status in verse and antebellum activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voices her passionate resistance to slavery. Nuanced, provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretch from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond, while the works of figures such as Langston Hughes, Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer transform poetic modernism. Movements such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, Black Arts, Cave Canem, Dark Noise Collective are all given their due, as are the complex bonds of solidarity and dialogue among poets across time and place, including communities in the African Diaspora. The anthology’s concluding sections demonstrate why African American poetry, amply recognized in recent National Book Awards and Poet Laureates, is flourishing as never before. Taking the measure of the tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of African American genius.
For years, one of the most frequently asked questions by Library of America readers has been “Where’s Hemingway?” So it’s with special pleasure that we announce Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918–1926, the inaugural volume in our long-anticipated multivolume Hemingway edition. Edited by Hemingway scholar Robert W. Trogdon, the book brings together work from the period when Hemingway set about creating one of the most influential prose styles of the twentieth century. It includes the indelible stories that comprise In Our Time (1925), the novella The Torrents of Spring (1925), and his first great novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). This volume also gathers rare journalism from Hemingway’s stint as a reporter for The Toronto Star and Hearst International News Service (some of which hasn’t been seen in almost a century), the 1924 letterpress edition of the modernist classic in our time issued by Three Mountains Press, the unusual parody “A Divine Gesture” (never before collected in a book), and other works—all presented in authoritative, newly edited texts that correct errors and restore Hemingway’s original punctuation. Taken together, the writings in this volume offer an unparalleled look at Hemingway’s breakthrough years and an internationalist modernist moment that placed him at the center of an extraordinary group of expatriate writers and artists in Paris.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Annals of the Western Shore, the fifth volume in the Library of America’s definitive edition of Le Guin’s work, presents a trilogy of coming-of-age stories set in the Western Shore, a world where young people find themselves struggling not just against racism, prejudice, and slavery, but with mysterious and magical gifts. Collected here for the first time, these three novels—Gifts (2004), Voices (2006), and Powers (2007)—feature the generous voice and human concerns that mark all of Le Guin’s work, and together they form an elegant anthem to the revolutionary and transformative power of words and storytelling. The volume also includes Le Guin’s hard-to-find essays on the books as well as her hitherto-unseen hand-drawn maps of this vivid fictional world.
Ten years ago, Library of America’s Click here for a preview of its contents.
