This won't be about the slow resurgence of theatre and live music, but rather about listing some interesting books and DVDs that have been announced. Maybe I shouldn't be, but it is fairly impressive that both Criterion and NYRB have such solid backing in terms of customers who buy practically everything they put out that they can plan out release schedules more than a year in advance! I'm sure they have even more they are working on in the pipeline, but these are the releases they actually feel comfortable in announcing.
I'll actually take a bit of a detour though and mention that Cormac McCarthy has two linked novels coming out in late fall. The Passenger hits in late Oct. and Stella Maris, which is actually a prequel, arrives in Nov. Based on what has been released so far, I think I would be more interested in Stella Maris, so maybe I will wait and read that first and then decide if I will tackle The Passenger. I actually have read very little McCarthy, aside from The Road, and I don't think I've seen any of the films based on his movies. But it's still nice when announcements like this are still buzz-worthy.
Staying with books for the moment, I do try to check in at the NYRB Forthcoming page every so often. E. E. Cumming's The Enormous Room isn't that hard to get ahold of, so that isn't nearly as exciting as several of the others. I guess that goes double for Turgenev's Fathers and Children. It's a masterpiece, but there is no indication of why this presumably new translation is so essential. In contrast, they claim that this translation of Cela's The Hive is the first fully uncensored version. I was actually slowly coming up to The Hive in my reading list (in fact it would be a 2nd reading), but now I'm going to wait until December when this translation comes out. (The wait is a long one, but I have plenty else to read in the meantime!)
Here are others that have caught my attention, most of which are new to an English reading audience:
The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick -- May 2022
Italo Svevo A Very Old Man (Stories) -- August 2022
Victor Serge Last Times -- August 2022
Vladimir Sorokin Telluria -- August 2022
Amit Chaudhuri Sojourn -- September 2022
Maxim Osipov Kilometer 101 -- October 2022
Eileen Chang Time Tunnel (Stories and Essays) -- May 2023
I've not been a huge fan of Eileen Chang's work, but this one grabs me a bit more, so I guess I'll see in mid 2023!
Criterion may just have more releases per month, but at any rate, they only list things coming out between now and late June, so the wait isn't quite as excruciating. I must say I always get a bit of a thrill when a somewhat obscure movie that I know about gets a Criterion release, as that means its profile has just increased substantially.
I just happened to be thinking about After Life the other day and saw that it had a Criterion release back in August 2021, which I had completely missed. Still Walking, a later film by Hirokazu Kore-eda, had been out on Criterion since 2011, but After Life never really had such a high profile. Anyway, this release will likely change that. I decided to spring for the Blu-Ray, after DVD Beaver pointed out how badly butchered the original film was on DVD, so I guess this will almost like be seeing the film anew.
I don't think the upgrade is quite as remarkable for Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies (and this was hardly a little known film), but I'm still glad it got the Criterion treatment a short while back.
Love Jones is a cute romance set in Chicago in the 1990s. I'm not as happy that it only appears to be coming out on Blu-Ray, as I think that means the library won't carry it, though I don't think it is that hard to find on DVD. I'm even more worried about Mr. Klein by Joseph Losey, as I am not at all familiar with this film, so I really hope that the library will pick it up.
Other things that caught my eye are Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) by the Esiri brothers and Juzo Itami's The Funeral, which has been out on DVD previously, but this looks like a substantial upgrade. I might even go for the Blu-Ray version which has some additional bonus material.
So certainly a lot to be looking forward to...
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