The Best Books of 2020: Reprints!
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There’s an oddly ancillary feel to embarking on the hallowed Stevereads Year-End list in 2020, since this list unspools in the shadow of a once-in-a-century pandemic that had the bad-movie irony of simultaneously trapping people in their homes and sapping their desire to read. The endless profusion of the publishing world stuttered and stumbled in the early Spring and then worked its way forward by finding new channels, new paradigms, and new expectations (including teaching the oldest of old dogs - book reviewers - some new tricks). Bookstores closed in part or in whole, book on-sale dates started changing willy-nilly, and in the midst of all that, the whole endeavor of the book-chat world also felt discouragingly pointless in the face of capsized economies and soaring mortality numbers. But books have continued, and so has my reading - and my reading lists, of course!
Best Books of 2020: Reprints
We’ll start off our run-down of the new with a run-down of the old: the year’s spectrum of reprints. In any given publishing year, the strength of reprints is one good indication of the strength of the year itself, because as often as they reflect somebody in Marketing squinting beadily at some micro-trend in the news, they just as often reflect somebody’s passion project, some long-held dream of bringing a treasured book back into public view. 2020 was a good solid year for reprints, and these were the best of them:
10 The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick (Verso)
Verso brought back this 1977 classic of boots-on-the-ground urban reporting and profiling by the legendary Vivian Gornick in a handy new volume, reminding readers - across any conceivable political spectrum - of Gornick’s virtues as an author: her incisive prose and her willingness to follow a thought wherever it leads.
9 The Recognitions by William Gaddis (NYRB Classics)
That animating ethos of reprinting - putting older books in front of new readers - is surely never stronger than when some publishing outfit decides to reprint an actual classic, and even more so when it’s a notoriously difficult classic. So the good folks at New York Review of Books are to be commended for this stylishly minimalistic new cinder-block paperback of one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
8 The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford (Tor Essentials)
SFF publisher Tor puts the “essential” in its “Tor Essentials” line by reprinting this amazing, challenging World Fantasy Award-winning historical fantasy novel by Ford, rescuing it from yet another year of its fans passing around battered old out-of-print paperbacks.
7 E. E. Cummings: Selected Works (Norton Critical Editions)
Norton Critical Editions are staples of the classroom, since they so effectively combine the works and a selection of the critical reactions to those works. But even in that realm, there are standout volumes, and this one, edited and annotated by Milton Cohen, is a superb example, an edition of Cummings for everybody to treasure.
6 Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings, edited by David Womersley (Oxford University Press)
There’ve been many “selected writings”-style volumes of Johnson’s work, and 2020 saw one of the best of them, assembled and presented by the same Oxford professor who gave readers, among other things, the definitive edition of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This big, generous edition of Johnson shows him in all his mind-boggling variety and voice.
5 Collected Stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson (Library of America)
Sometimes, in its mission to shelve a uniform literary canon for the United States, the Library of America brings back into the spotlight a figure who’s been long forgotten, and Constance Fenimore Woolson certainly qualifies. Once a popular and respected short story writer, Woolson here is re-introduced to readers in a comprehensive volume edited by Anne Boyd Rioux, whose Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy made this list back in 2018.
4 Spinoza’s Ethics translated by George Eliot (Princeton University Press)
Princeton University Press and editor Clare Carlisle here present to readers a stylishly-designed reminder that there’s even more to George Eliot than being one of the greatest novelists of all time - she was also a clever and argumentative translator, as this wonderful edition of her translation of Spinoza at his most thought-provoking amply demonstrates.
3 The Western: Four Classic Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America)
Library of America anthology volumes are always cause for readerly celebration, even when (especially when) I end up disagreeing with the selections, and in this latest great anthology, a collection of classic Western novels, there’s precious little to disagree with: included are The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Shane by Jack Schaefer, The Searchers by Alan le May, and Warlock by Oakley Hall - all terrifically invigorating to read again in 2020.
2 Unfinished Tales, Illustrated Edition by JRR Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin)
For the 40th anniversary of this weirdly lopsided collection of Middle Earth odds and ends - sketches, fragments, whole stories in various degrees of polish - Houghton Mifflin has pulled out all the stops, enlisting artists Alan Lee, John Howe, and Ted Nasmith to illustrate the dramatic high points of this lovely new hardcover of treasured Tolkieniana.
1 Collected Stories by Shirley Hazzard (FSG)
Edited by Brigitta Olubas, this, the best reprint volume of 2020, brings together the two volumes of Hazzard’s whip-smart short stories, some previously uncollected stories, and a couple that have never appeared in print before. It’s the most generous assemblage ever made of Hazzard’s work in all its inimitable array of voices and registers, perfect for keeping this author alive for new readers to discover - the essence of good reprint culture.