Holy Schmole!
Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2005 8:04 pm
Here's what a newsletter from Library of America announced:
Man, makes me regret tearing my copy free from it's plastic wrappings and reading it. Mid-april will be second printing already. Outrageous!BACK IN BLACK: H. P. LOVECRAFT CONTINUES TO SCARE UP NEW READERS
Although there are still scattered copies available in bookstores and through online sellers, the first printing of H. P. LOVECRAFT: TALES has sold out--only a month after its publication. (The reprint is due to arrive in mid-April.)
Edited by best-selling author Peter Straub, the collection of 22 stories and novellas--including "The Dunwich Horror" and "At the Mountains of Madness"--has been an extraordinary hit with critics and readers. "It looks like [Lovecraft is] finally winning some long-overdue respect and recognition," said a reviewer in The Nation. A starred review in Publishers Weekly hailed Lovecraft as "the most important U.S. horror writer since Edgar Allan Poe and a big influence on nearly every major figure in the genre after his day." The Weekly Standard agreed, calling Lovecraft "the most important American writer of weird fiction in the twentieth century -and one of the century's most influential writers of any kind of fiction." And Kirkus Reviews exclaimed, "A landmark that lifts Lovecraft from pulp to Poe as a master of macabre fantasy and horror. . . . Black-robed by The Library of America, the real King rises from darkness in his homeland. His reputation glows abroad."
Reviewers also universally agree that the new edition is the best available. The Kansas City Star praises the Library of America edition as "the best single-volume overview of what Lovecraft was all about-strangeness, fear, wonder." USA Today advises, "To readers interested in delving into fright for the first time, there is no better starting point." And the volume is getting noticed even across the Atlantic: TLS declares, "Thanks to the Library of America, we can place H. P. Lovecraft on the shelf next to the uniform edition of Henry James as well as of Edgar Allan Poe."
For more information about this volume, go to:
http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=223