Godine in Publishers Weekly

Godine is delighted to be featured in a new Publishers Weekly article entitled “New England Indie Publishers Stuck with Their Niches in 2020.” The piece begins:

New England’s independent publishers are known for carving out strong niches and holding steadfast to them, come what may. The extraordinary forces of the last year—pandemic, protests, and climate change—put that model to the test, and for five publishers it appears that strategy paid off…

Read MoreNew England Indie Publishers Stuck with Their Niches in 2020

Beneficence selected by Maine Public’s All Books Considered Book Club!

 

New York Times bestselling memoirist Meredith Hall’s debut novel Beneficence (Godine, 2020) has been named the inaugural selection of Maine Public’s All Books Considered Book Club for December/January.

The All Books Considered Book Club will meet via ZOOM on Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 7:00 p.m. and be joined by a very special guest: Meredith Hall.

For more details and to sign up for the club, click HERE. 

Beneficence raves in WSJ and WaPo

 

While Meredith Hall’s hometown newspaper, the Maine Sunday Telegram, recently called her novel Beneficence “a glorious book,” both the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post are also gushing. Here’s what the critics are saying:

“As organically as it traveled to heartbreak, Beneficence progresses to the place of wisdom that lies beyond it, where we learn that a home is part of the ‘vast world of innocence and harm,’ not an island beyond it.”
Wall Street Journal

“These voices from the past speak so clearly to our time, at a moment when many of us wonder whether we’ll lose the things that we consider blessings….Beneficence is a quiet but steady book, one that echoes ancient and important rhythms.”
Washington Post

Beneficence is a glorious book, its joy as quietly beautiful as the tragedy at its center echoes loudly through the lives of its characters. Hall acknowledges that each life is very small, on its own, but that the love we each bear for one another is immense, our capacity for it endless.”
Maine Sunday Telegram

WSJ Reviews How Baseball Happened

 

In a recent review in The Wall Street Journal, Paul Dickson raves about Thomas W. Gilbert’s How Baseball Happened, writing that the book:

“Explores the conditions and factors that begat the game in the 19th century and turned it into the national pastime. The book explains how almost all conventional wisdom about baseball’s origins and formative years is wrong. A delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love from the first crack of the bat.”

More The Wall Street Journal 

Coleman Wins Golden Poppy Award

 

The California Independent Booksellers Alliance has announced the winners of this year’s Golden Poppy Awards—which honor “the most distinguished books written by writers and artist who make California their home”—and Wanda Coleman’s Wicked Enchantment has been named poetry book of the year!

The winners are chosen by California’s independent booksellers, which makes the award especially meaningful given what a truly independent spirit and bookstore lover Coleman was.

More California Independent Booksellers Alliance

 

Everyone’s recommending Meredith Hall’s novel Beneficence!

 

At a recent online book event for RJ Julia Booksellers in Connecticut, New York Times bestselling author Dani Shapiro and book critic/debut author Kerri Arsenault (Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains) were asked to recommend the best book they’ve read recently. Both authors leapt to recommend the same book: the newest novel from Godine, Meredith Hall’s Beneficence.

Shapiro gives the novel what she says is the highest praise she can give a book: she compare Hall’s immersive, deeply felt writing to that of Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner.

Watch the entire exchange here.

Pre-order Beneficence here.

Beneficence: “The weight of ache and grace…”

 

The Boston-based independent online arts magazine The Art Fuse has published an absolute rave about Beneficence, the forthcoming debut novel from New York Times bestselling memoirist Meredith Hall:

Beneficence is a novel that lingers, tucking details into its heavy folds…The weight of ache and grace that anchors [Hall’s] writing is still firmly lodged.”

Read the full review here.

 

 

 

The Millions Raves About Farnsworth

 

Farnsworth’s Classical English Style—our third title in the Farnsworth’s Classical English Series—has received a rave from The Millions. The long review includes many memorable lines, including:

Farnsworth’s Classical English Style is a worthy rejoinder to [Strunk & White’s] The Elements of Style. . . [it] provides some deeper and more useful axioms of writing. . . [the book] is a Molotov cocktail wrapped in paisley; a hand-grenade cushioned in madras.”

Read the entire review here.  

 

 

The Paris Review Publishes McNair


The Paris Review
has just published a gorgeous new essay by longtime Godine author Wesley McNair—whose latest collection is Dwellers in the House of the Lord. The essay, “Donald Hall’s Amanuensis,” illuminates the close, decades-long bond between Hall (below) and his last literary assistant. It begins:

“When Donald Hall interviewed Kendel Currier for the part-time job of typing his correspondence in August of 1994, one of the first things he asked was, “Will you type curse words?” His earlier hire for the position, a woman active in a local church, backed out when she discovered curse words in a letter, and he wanted to make sure Currier wouldn’t quit, too.”

Read the entire essay here.

Photo by Henri Cole, 2014

 

Godine and Black Sparrow titles named as 2 of the 5 finalists in 2020 New England Book Awards


The New England Independent Booksellers Association (NEIBA) has both named Susan Barba’s geode (Black Sparrow Press) and Wesley McNair’s Dwellers in the House of the Lord (Godine) as finalists for in the 2020 New England Book Awards. Winners will be announced in September. 

Barba’s powerful, earth-centric collection just received rave reviews in both the Los Angeles Review of Books and HyperallergicMcNair’s book-length narrative poem grappling with family and politics was recently excerpted in the widely distributed newspaper column American Life in Poetry, and translation rights were recently acquired by Italian publisher Fuorilinea.