Hawthorne Books and Literary Arts, a tiny publishing company with a growing reputation for publishing emerging authors, is branching out with a new program to bring back award-winning books that have fallen out of print and pair them with introductions by writers including A.M. Holmes, Robert Coover and Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka.
The company's founders, Rhonda Hughes and Kate Sage, met several years ago in a medieval lit class at Portland State University, where they were both studying for their M.A.'s in English. They started the press and named it for their Portland, Ore., neighborhood. This month, with about a dozen books in print and a distribution deal with Publishers Group West, Hughes and Sage are publishing the first titles in their Rediscovery series.
The idea for the reissues came two years ago, when Hughes and Sage decided to make a play for literary connections. They wrote a $5,000 check to have dinner with novelist Russell Banks at a fund-raiser at Portland's annual book festival. It proved providential. "Kate and I both put in $2,500 of our own money," said Hughes. "We didn't really have it, but I thought something was going to come of it."
Banks introduced Sage and Hughes to fellow novelist Richard Wiley, and during a phone conversation those three hatched the idea for rediscovering works by living writers. Wiley thought perhaps his friends Toby Olson and Lynne Sharon Schwartz might be interested.
The result: the first two Hawthorne Rediscovery titles, published this month, are Wiley's 1987 PEN/ Faulkner—winning Soldiers in Hiding, with an introduction by Soyinka, and Olson's 1983 PEN/Faulkner—winning Seaview, with an introduction by Coover. Schwartz's Leaving Brooklyn, a 1990 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is slated for fall '07. At press time, Hawthorne was still in the process of securing an intro for Leaving Brooklyn, but Holmes signed on for the introduction to the other fall '07 Rediscovery title, Tom Spanbauer's Faraway Places. Spanbauer, who lives in Portland, won a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association award for The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon in 1992.
"We're going after award winners and finalists because that seems to give the series some literary merit," said Hughes.
While she could not provide sales figures, Sara Rosenberg at Publishers Group West, which started distributing Hawthorne last season, said accounts have responded favorably to Hawthorne's pairing of authors in its Rediscovery series. "They are a great little press doing the kinds of things we can really get behind," said Rosenberg.
Hawthorne is now looking to couple its debut writers with introductions by well-known writers. Chuck Palahniuk not only provided an introduction to the forthcoming Clown Girl by Monica Drake, but offered to make appearances with her when the book is published in March. Palahniuk and Drake met at a writing workshop in 1991 in Spanbauer's kitchen. He told PW he loved the book and was even pricing rubber chickens to give away at readings. (The cover has a rubber chicken on it.)
"Anybody who has Palahniuk is going to sell," said Paul Ingram at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa. He said he had a mixed reaction to the pairings for the Rediscovery books. "I'm rah, rah about what they're into doing."
Ingram thinks the design and production quality of Hawthorne's paperback books makes customers pick them up. Prairie Lights sold 20 copies of Poe Ballantine's essay collection, Things I Like About America, at an author event last spring. "That's great for someone no one's ever heard of," Ingram said. "People picked it up because of the way it looked. And he's funny."
Katherine Broadway, a manager at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., described herself as a Hawthorne fan. "They are just very distinctive books—beautiful as objects and very original in subject matter," she said. She met Hughes and Sage at BookExpo in May and was impressed by them. "They're two women and independent publishers, and that's a brave and wonderful thing to do in this day and age," she told PW.
The seed money for Hawthorne came from Sage's small savings (she was a literary agent in New York before moving to Portland) and Hughes's print brokering company, Print Vision, which she founded in 1992 and remains the "literary arts" part of Hawthorne. The press published its first book, September 11: West Coast Writers Approach Ground Zero, in time for the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks. The New York Times included the anthology, which contained essays by Alice Walker, T.C. Boyle, Ken Kesey and Maxine Hong Kingston, in a roundup of 9/11 books.
"We thought, wow, this is easy," said Hughes. "We know better now."