The Best Books of 2024: Reprints
I’ve grown accustomed to kicking off these intergalactically famous Stevereads year-end lists with a few categories that can function as health gauges for the US publishing industry in general, categories that can show an exploratory, inquisitive reading environment. These categories give me hope as both a reviewer and a reader, even in a comparatively weak reading year such as 2024, which had fewer bright spots than any time in the last five or six years. Reprint culture is one such yardstick category, surely: a way for true believers in the book world to present old works in new forms, hoping to find new readers. This year saw quite a few such leaps of faith (or commerce). These were the best of them:
10: The Divine Comedy by Dante, translated by Charles Singleton (illustrated by Roberto Abbiati) (Princeton University Press) – This first entry is a perfect example of just such a leap of faith: somebody at Princeton UP maybe remembered Singleton's odd, steeply intelligent prose rendering of the Commedia (doubtless also remembering the great accompanying volumes of commentary that made this a six book set; Princeton apparently isn't reprinting the commentaries, so even dreams have limits), and lo, here it is, in a lovely new hardcover with appropriately stark, suggestive illustrations.
9: Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada (translated Michael Hoffmann) (Melville House) – This latest reprint of Fallada's masterpiece is the most attractive of them all, a fat, floppy paperback that includes end-matters documenting the pertinent bits of Nazi history that form the backdrop of Fallada's story of Berlin life under Nazi rule. Fallada wrote the book at a white heat, and it was every bit as powerful on this re-read as it was when I first encountered this book many years ago.
8: Citizen Poet: New and Selected Essays by Eavan Boland (WW Norton) – In this volume, editor Jody Allen Randolph collects some of the strongest nonfiction pieces from the great poet's earlier volumes of essays, plus other writings – including a memoir piece Boland was working on when she died. Reading these essays, watching how oddly and effectively they reflect and refract the preoccupations of Boland's poetry, is both thrilling and a bit sad – this collection is a gift to readers.
7. McNally Editions: Offices Politics by Wilfrid Sheed, Constant Reader by Dorothy Parker, et al – These McNally Edition reprints are tough, attractive things, and their range is instantly intriguing. The two most recent highlights are welcome returns to the in-print world: Wilfrid Sheed's smart, sad, funny, antic literary-workplace novel Offices Politics, and Constant Reader, a collection of the pieces Dorothy Parker wrote a century ago as the weekly reviewer for the New Yorker, pieces that are wonderfully mean and knowing and surprisingly readable even though most of their subject matters are long lost to memory.
6. The Shield of Achilles by WH Auden (Princeton University Press) – This slim, attractive hardcover reprint of Auden's National Book Award-winning landmark volume of poetry is edited by Alan Jacobs and feels remarkably fresh standing as a slim volume in its own right after decades of being folded into larger collections of the poet's work. The introduction and notes by Jacobs gives the work its context for the curious, but it's curiously wonderful to have the work itself standing clear of the Collected Works.
5. Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear (Soho Crime) – This hardcover “collector's edition” of the first installment of Winspear's beloved – and now concluded – series about the plucky and endlessly resourceful title character might not have much interest for actual book collectors, but it'll be priceless to Maisie fans who've read their original paperback to tatters.
4. The Origins of Marvel Comics by Stan Lee (Gallery 13) – As impossible as it will be for many old-time comics fans to believe, it's been 50 years since the first appearance of Stan Lee's Origins of Marvel Comics, a volume in which the impresario of the modern superhero comic told silly, bombastic, sometimes heartfelt behind-the-scenes stories about the creation of such seminal characters as Spider-Man and the Hulk. This new reprint opens with a scandal – as good an artist as Alex Ross is, it's sacrilege to substitute his homage cover for the gorgeous John Romita original – but then recaptures all the original magic again.
3. Norse Mythology: The Illustrated Edition by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Levi Pinfold (WW Norton) – Levi Pinfold's spectrally beautiful color illustrations are the perfect enhancement to Gaiman's energetic retellings of the great stories of Norse mythology. Those stories have been retold many times before, from Roger Lancelyn Green to Edith Hamilton and beyond, and the combination of Gaiman's storytelling and Pinfold’s artwork makes this big volume a worthy successor.
2. Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery, curated by Barbara Heller (Chronicle Books) – This reprint of Montgomery's beloved novel sets an almost impossibly high bar for the new presentation of classics: as with the earlier volumes in this series, this volume is filled with imaginative extras – letters, notes, little bits and pieces “created” by the book's characters. Readers still get the whole text of the book itself, but for those who already know it by heart, these extras will be an endless source of delight.
1. The Secret Garden: An Illustrated Edition by Frances Hodgson Burnett (Chronicle Books) – Artist Kate Lewis supplies the illustrations for this, the best reprint of 2024, a gorgeous edition of a classic that's had a good many enhanced editions over the century and more since it first appeared. The novel is of course still the main attraction here, but the profusion of illustrations in this edition make everything feel more vibrant.