Tuesday, November 9, 2010

It's all about the work

It's always a highlight of my week when yet another courier parcel arrives with copies of the latest Janet Frame edition.

Kind of makes everything worth it.

Today the shiny new volume - ah that lovely smell of a new book - is the US paperback edition of Counterpoint Press's Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame.

The hardback first edition of this selection of the best of Janet Frame's published stories was released last December 2009.

This paperback is very comfortable to hold and read. It has an attractive large font. I particularly appreciate a large well-spaced font because I don't have the best eyesight.

The hardback edition has been well received and reviewed and it's good to see it being followed up by a paperback which will allow these wonderful stories to reach a wider audience.

Here are some of the reviewer responses to Prizes:

"Frame is mythic, slyly funny, and psychologically dead-on. And just as wryly critical of herself as of others, most astringently in "Prizes", a tale about the intrusiveness of success. Laced with startling observations and leaps of the imagination, Frame's gracefully excoriating stories are iridescently alive."

~ Donna Seaman, Book List

"Frame's stories, in her new collection Prizes, are deceptive treasures, unadorned but absorbing in their depth and lucidity of observation. Her understated descriptions of the color, texture and shape of the physical world - the clothes, cups, plants and animals that comprise it - grant her work sharp insight into the distinctly human dramas of identity, loneliness, and loss."

~ Ruth Curry, Literary Review.

"Frame's stories remain entirely applicable to contemporary issues. They are a kinder, gentler 1984, pointing to the danger of 'well-meaning' coercion and compulsory psychological conformity."

~ Savannah Schroll Guz, Gently Read Literature

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