Our Wishlist (for Mole) 2022

Time to make an updated one! What books are you still really hoping FS will publish?

I would love to see them continue the Bronte collection with Agnes Grey, Villette, Shirley and The Professor.

Continue with the last Game of Thrones book and print all the Earthsea books.

Also:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Stardust~Neil Gaiman
The Graveyard Book~Neil Gaiman
Dandelion Wine~Ray Bradbury
The Halloween Tree~Ray Bradbury
The Woman in Black~Susan Hill
Memoirs of a Geisha
Year of Wonders
Girl with a Pearl Earring
The English Patient
Out of Africa
The Sketchbook~Washington Irving
The Christian Year~John Keble
New Grub Street~George Gissing
The Odd Women~George Gissing
Seven Years in Tibet

I reserve the right to add to my list!!

The Tartar Steppe - Dino Buzzati
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
The Book of Ebenezer LePage - G.B. Edwards (unlikely, I'm afraid)
Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries trilogy - Fernand Braudel
Tain Bo Cualnge - the Thomas Kinsella translation, I assume
Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
The Good Soldier Svejk - Jaroslav Hasek

Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy - Cixin Liu
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
The Border Trilogy - Cormac McCarthy
Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Childhood’s End - Arthur C. Clarke
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - PKD
Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman

Milkman, Anna Burns
Katalin Street, Magda Szabo
Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Machado de Assis
The Lusiads, Camoes
The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano

>4 LBShoreBook: Love the list. I own Milkman and now after seeing your list will read it next. I'd love if Arion or another fine press published Pessoa - what a gem. I love Bolano and Assis and South America has so much more to offer when it comes to authors that aren't Marquez or Borges. I really enjoyed Katalin Street but The Door is my favorite by Szabo but maybe that's just because it was my first novel by her.

Of the books I've read that are mentioned by others, Milkman, Bras Cubas, and Life and Fate certainly deserve Folio editions. Especially Life and Fate. Of the ones I haven't read, I need to finish War and Peace so I can get to some of these books!

>2 coynedj: Yes! Canticle for Leibowitz!
Also more Dosteovsky. The Idiot. Reprint Brothers Karamazov.

All the short stories by John Wyndham (some published under the names John Beynon and Lucas Parkes) and his other novels (i.e. not the three already published and republished) but in a set to match.

China Miéville: everything

Louis de Bernières: everything

Niall Williams: This is Happiness

I second Magda Szabo but prefer The Door

Joining in with the clamours for Dandelion Wine

Emily Carr's books are delightful and would make a great volume if illustrated by her paintings.

>2 coynedj:
Very much agree with:
The Tartar Steppe - Dino Buzzati
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.

I'd also love some Nabokov.

Hans Fallada - Every Man Dies Alone / Alone in Berlin
Haruki Murakami - more works in series with Kafka on the Shore
Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys
H. E. Bates - Through the Woods (with Miller-Parker's original wood engravings)
H. E. Bates- Down the River (with Miller-Parker's original wood engravings)
Clare Leighton - Four Hedges (with Leighton's original wood engravings)

I would love:

Neuromancer
Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion
Star maker
A Canticle for Leibowitz
House on the Borderlands

I'll second the following:

- complete the Bronte collection and continue Game of Thrones
- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
- Michael Ondatjee, The English Patient

And I'd add:

- complete the Bonds, including the short stories
- Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (any Heinlein would be welcome, actually, but this one in particular)
- Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown, The Blue Sword, Deerskin
- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman:,Good Omens
- Terry Pratchett, The Bromeliad
- Joe Abercrombie
- Gabaldon's Outlander series in an illustrated edition would be fun
- since they're already doing Sharpe, I doubt that's going to happen, but I would really enjoy the Lords of the North / aka Last Kingdom series by Bernard Cornwell
- Lindsey Davis, Falco-series

and from a different literary corner:

- a nice edition of the Kalevala (annotated, please) would be very interesting
- Red Magic, illustrated by Kay Nielsen

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.
PKD collected stories in a regular edition. Even a curated book or multiple sets would be great.
Anything by Yukio Mishima.
They've already done the Analects and Daodejing, but I'd love to see a Zhuangzi to go with that.

Edit: Thirding Tartar Steppe and seconding Kalevala.

Javier Marias
Sarah Waters
George Gissing
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Hilary Mantel’s Tudor books

I second Juan Rulfo, Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marías.

Another vote for the Kalevala, the Táin and the Lusiads. I would also add:

The Hero with a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell
A Lord Dunsany collection
Growth of the Soil - Knut Hamsun
The Fragments of Heraclitus
Theogony/Works and Days - Hesiod
The Poems of Ossian - James Macpherson

This seems an incredibly unlikely list though.

I will second the Bradbury books, and Old Man and the Sea, then add every or any Cormac McCarthy, Other Voices Other Rooms by Truman Capote, All the Light We Cannot See by Doerr, A Hard Rains Gonna Fall, or Blowin in the Wind by Bob Dylan, any or all of Lynd Wards novels in woodcuts, Ginsburgs Howl. I have more but hate to be pushy. Has Folio ever published any plays other than Shakespeare? I was thinking about some Tennessee Williams like Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, or Aurthur Miller's The Crucible.

>3 CJR93: Lonesome Dove Larry McMurtry
>11 Jobasha: Neuromancer
>12 SF-72: Joe Abercrombie

Yes to all these.

Also,

The Road to Serfdom - Friedrich Hayek
The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (unabridged)
Speak, Memory - Vladimir Nabokov
new edition of Thucydides (and not teal in colour either)
new edition of Augustine's Confessions (both recent takes are underwhelming, IMO)
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

>17 SyllicSpell: "This seems an incredibly unlikely list though."

I agree, but a few short years ago it wouldn't have been. It would have been some of the present choices that would have seemed unthinkable then. The wind blows, we shelter in vain.

>20 boldface: Oh yes true.
When I look at the catalogue from past years, I would have been more optimistic that my choices would one day be in Folio edition. But now...not really.

And yes, I'd suggest The God of Small Things.
More books from Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Mario Vargas Llosa.
Books from Indian literature.
Alice Munro short stories

Moby dick reprint since I discovered FS the month it sold out.

Reprint SPQR please

Gormenghast

Woolf anything

Anything by Cormac McCarthy!

Steinbeck Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday double edition, I can imagine splendid illustrations of the row and warf

Call me Poppy but I’d love a version of Carl Sagan’s Contact

I would like to see some more transgressive lit choices -

J.G. Ballard - Crash/Concrete Island (double book, like they did with Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho

William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch

Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club

Charles Bukowski - Post Office

Maybe some Jean Genet, too.

I'd also like to see an anthology "The Folio Book of Devils" with a selection like the old "Speak of the Devil: An Anthology of Demonology" book from the 1940s, plus the addition of a few others like Giosue Carducci's poem "A Hymn to Satan" and maybe an excerpt from A.E. Waite's Devil Worship in France (the crazy chapter 7 summary of Leo Taxil's hoax book Le Diable au XIXe siècle) or some more modern examples of the devil in short stories. They should get Ben Jones (who did Clockwork Orange and The Secret Agent) back to do the illustrations as he's done some fun, devilish type stuff before.

I'd second some more Murakami or any Mishima.

>24 rsmac: "The Folio Book of Devils"

This is a fantastic idea.

>23 simbae: SPQR is coming back at the end of the year or earlier, confirmed in an email to a fellow buyer.

Alec Guinness's memoirs. There are three volumes of them (Blessings in Disguise, My Name Escapes Me, A Positively Final Appearance), and they're wonderful. I've been asking for them in every Folio Society survey for years. :-)

>17 SyllicSpell: it's almost embarrassing that there aren't any fine, or even quality, editions of Hesiod. At least that I am aware of.

>17 SyllicSpell: >20 boldface: unlikely: perhaps, but I think most of these would sell well and, baring horrendous design decision (I'm looking at you, Nights at the Circus), I would buy all of them day 1. Except maybe the Hamsun (because I'm unfamiliar with it).

Campbell and Dunsany are fantasy-adjacent enough to appeal to the genre fiction crowd.

Heraclitus is probably too sparse for a folio treatment unless combined with something else. All the fragments could easily fit in a small chapbook with large typeface... even if bilingual.

I think Ossian might be the only general hard sell.

I would like to see more Hemingway, preferably in the style of A Farewell to Arms.

>28 abysswalker: Officina Serpentis produced a beautiful edition of Hesiod, but it's Greek language only.

>29 abysswalker: Good point on Heraclitus. Maybe FS could look into either Penguin's Early Greek Philosophy or Oxford's The First Philosophers. They've done editions of both publishers works before.

I thought Ossian was a stretch, but since we're wishlisting...

The Radiance of the King-Camara Laye
The Confidence Man-Herman Melville (illustrating each of the confidence men)
Psycho-Robert Bloch (only if they replicate the jagged knife cut lettering of the title on the first edition dust jacket)
Blood Meridian- Cormac McCarthy
Gargantua and Pantagruel-Rabelais (a SE of the recent LE with all the Dore illustrations)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle-Shirley Jackson (after the huge success of the FS edition of The Haunting of Hill House, I expect we'll be seeing this pretty soon)

As far as reprints go, I'd love to see Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea done. I think the binding and illustrations are absolutely gorgeous, but the secondary market prices are wildly high. I'd also like to see a reprint of And Then There Were None.

Another Hermann Hesse book, either Narziss and Goldmund (my personal favourite), Siddhartha (the crowd favourite), or The Glass Bead Game (haven’t read, but apparently his magnum opus).
The Discovery of Slowness - by Sten Nadolny (perfect for FS readers: a brilliant book, a fictionalised biography of Sir John Franklin)
+1 Good Omens (would be a great seller)
And, The Open Society and Its Enemies - by Karl Popper (I haven’t read it but I really want to. Please not at £150 though 🙏)
+1 Book of Disquiet (intriguing title, I’d like to read it)
The Razor’s Edge - W. Somerset Maugham (my favourite by him, haven’t read The Painted Veil though)

Edited for typo and to add The Razor’s Edge

The Flashman Papers

Jonathan Sumption’s 100 Year’s War

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Robert A Caro’s LBJ biographies

David McCullough’s Truman biography

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The moon is a harsh mistress - Heinlein
The never-ending story - Michael Ende
The Android's dream - Scalzi
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
Neuromancer - William Gibson

+1 to Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion, Helliconia, Canticle of Leibowitz, and Memoirs of a Geisha!

I'd also love to see:

Ken Follett - Pillars of the Earth & World Without End
Edward Rutherfurd - Sarum & Russka
Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
Robin Hobb - Liveship Traders Trilogy
Cornelia Funke - Inkheart Trilogy

James Lovelock - Gaia, a new look at life on Earth
Robert Macfarlane - The Wild Places
Robert Graves - The White Goddess

And my personal wish fulfillment would be Caroline Lawrence's Roman Mysteries - perhaps the first three?

Plus more world epics/classics would be nice - the Shahnameh, Ramayana, Tale of the Heike, the other two Chinese classic novels, etc.

The suggestions above would just about fill the FS publication schedule for the next decade!

>39 Xandian97: "Robert Graves - The White Goddess ... Plus more world epics/classics would be nice - the Shahnameh, Ramayana, Tale of the Heike, the other two Chinese classic novels, etc."

Absolutley! Excellent choices.

Another vote for Cloud Atlas, Sarum, Gibson, Follett, and Stephenson.

Another vote for:
Hesiod
Kalevala
The Gulag Archipelago

Would also like to see:
Swiss Family Robinson

I’m not sure if Folio does a lot of biographies but James Kaplan’s on Sinatra would be neat.

Thanks to everyone for sharing. Interesting to see what people are hoping for.

Another vote for:
-Michael Ondaatje (English Patient makes sense, but anything would be great. Running in the Family for example)
-Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian and Border Trilogy make the most sense. Suttree would be a perfect LE)
-Dostoevsky (anything with more Harry Brockway engravings)
-Michel Chabon (Wonder Boys)
-Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash makes sense, but really want the Baroque Cycle).

and add:
-Thomas Pynchon - Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon
-Angela Carter - Wise Children
-William Gaddis - J.R.
-Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon
-David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
-Don DeLillo - Underworld
-Mordecai Richler - Barney’s Version
-Philip Roth - Nemesis

Given the diversity of views and range of great stuff to choose from, would be thrilled to see more than 1 or 2 of these over the next few years.

Another vote for Grossman's Life and Fate, perhaps partnered with Stalingrad?

Any Zola: the only ones they've ever done are Nana(1956), Therese Raquin(1969), Germinal (2010). I do dream of them actually publishing the full Rougon-Macquart sequence in the new OWC translations, but I've more chance of getting to fly to the moon I suspect.

Any one of loads of great African literature: now that would make a great series.

Olivia Manning's Balkan and/or Levant trilogies.

Virginia Woolf's The Waves, The Years (or any of those they've not done before).

Willa Cather, Elizabeth Taylor, Edith Wharton (beyond the two previously published), Doris Lessing, more Toni Morrison, Clarice Lispector, Isabel Allende, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alice Munro, more Angela Carter, Carson McCullers, Kate Chopin......you get the idea!

I would normally echo >10 ubiquitousuk: suggestions of HE Bates and Clare Leighton, but to be honest I'm quite happy with my Little Toller editions; they may be paperbacks, but I do love their productions, and the range covered. However, some more nature/natural history writing would be very, very welcome!

Thor
Iron Man
Octopussy
For Your Eyes Only

Oh, silly me, those are the books FS will publish.

Here are the ones I wished they would publish:

New Grub Street by George Gissing
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by George Gissing
The Green Man by Kingsley Amis
Money by Martin Amis

The following books mentioned above already have decent editions from Everyman's Library:

Wise Children, by Angela Carter
The English Patient
The Border Trilogy, by Cormac McCarthy

While I know many would prefer a Folio edition (and I might too depending on the execution), all else equal I would rather get editions that don't have any decent options.

Seconding:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Piranesi first though, please and thank you)
Neverwhere
The Graveyard Book
Dandelion Wine
Lord Dunsany
House on the Borderlands
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
Hesiod
Anything by Cormac McCarthy
Anything by Milan Kundera (I'd pick Farewell Waltz first, maybe)
The Buried Giant, by Ishiguro
The Journey to the West, and
Dream of Red Mansions (the other major classic Chinese novels)
American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk

Also more classic Westerns. I'm actually not that much of an expert in this area, but definitely:

Warlock, by Oakley Hall
Shane, by Jack Schaefer

Finally, a few other requests to add:

Continue the Jin Yong Condor Heroes series (started with A Hero Born)
The Devil in Love, by Cazotte (long shot)
Anything Kierkegaard
Anything Rilke (Duino Elegies first maybe)
The Crystal Cave, by Mary Steward (and her other Arthurian novels)

>47 abysswalker: I am not a fan of Westerns but a FS edition of Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers could be pretty cool. That one is kind of like an Alt Country version of a classic Western (the Old '97s for example).

>47 abysswalker:

Definitely second, Anything Kierkegaard, being Danish myself :)

>45 Willoyd: glad to hear you like your Little Toller editions because I have a stack of 15 of them on their way! But I'd still be interested to see what Folio could do with a well curated series of these classic nature works.

>50 ubiquitousuk:
Little Toller did do a full-sized hardback of Clare Leighton's The Farmer's Year, printed in Italy on Munken Pure, long sold out.
I'd sooner buy a Little Toller paperback than most run of the mill British hardbacks. They're sewn, with wraparound covers and good quality paper. Their go-to printer-binder is TJ Books, who produced a number of titles for FS: Le Grand Meaulnes, Casanova, The Monk, Lewis Carroll, etc.

Other than reprints of C&P, Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick & Lolita.... which are all top of my list....

Demons (Dostoyevsky)
The Idiot
To Kill a Mockingbird (updated edition)
Don Quixote (updated edition)
Catcher in the Rye
Les Miserables (updated standard edition)
Shogun
A Thousands Splendid Suns
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Endurance (Lansing)
Siddartha
Half of a Yellow Sun
A Gentleman in Moscow
Wolf Hall

>52 jbuz:
+1

1Q84
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Snow Crash
Cryptonomicon
Watership Down
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
The Mists of Avalon
Parable of the Sower
The Word for World is Forrest
The City and the City
The Crystal Cave

Thank you Mole!

I humbly ask Folio to consider the following:

- Dune Messiah

Shogun
Ready Player One

Since Folio has been doing comics anthologies with the Marvel stuff, how about some more graphic novel type titles?

Art Spiegelman's Maus seems like a natural, and a Spiegelman-edited "Best of RAW" excerpted from his legendary eight issue publication (where Maus was first serialized) would be great.

Some others to consider:

Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi

Fun Home - Alison Bechdel

Watchmen - Alan Moore

Black Hole - Charles Burns

The Arrival - Shaun Tan

I wonder if they would consider an LE facsimile of the Golden Cockerel edition of Llewelyn Powys's "Glory of Life"? It looks a gorgeous piece of '30s book production. https://www.maggs.com/glory-of-life_227158.htm
As it's only 34 pages it would fit well into the Fine Press series, as well as being the (long overdue) first FS publication of the Powys family (and yes, a lavishly illustrated two-volume fine edition of John Cowper Powys's Autobiography or "A Glastonbury Romance" or would be great as well).

>58 davidjbrown10: Very nice!

Shogun and Tai-Pan by James Clavell.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.

I neglected to add anything by Gene Wolf, soldier series, short sun, long sun…etc. I’d ask for Urth of the new sun but I just read it in a terrible paperback format. Never read sci fi until I bought FS’s Book of the New Sun and wow, he blew my mind.

>48 LBShoreBook: The Sisters Brothers - yes.

>61 simbae: if you liked Wolfe, try M. John Harrison too, particularly Viriconium.

Would love to see a set of first edition facsimiles of The Jungle Books with the beautiful blue bindings and gilded pictures of the elephants and cobras.

>57 rsmac:
Fully agree with all the suggestions. About time!

I've found that on similar threads my suggestions have been torpedoed by Mole.

Therefore I suggest a new thread: Our Not for Publication List (for Mole) 2022

This may just be what's needed.

LesMiserable with the Jedi mind trick.

>67 strangenews: I do not. Nurse quite possibly, but not Mole.
>68 NLNils: Please do not refer to any more Science Fiction, it will only encourage them to publish more of it.

>57 rsmac: Since Folio has been doing comics anthologies...

Tintin in colour and full size please. Hope they retain the iconic covers for each of the 24 volumes. If doing individual volumes, Neobond covers might help harken back to the days of paperback glory while keeping things acid-free and archival grade!

Does the FS have any Belgian connection apart from Henri Pirenne's Mohammed and Charlemagne, and Poirot?

Some of my favorite books that haven’t been given the Folio Society treatment:

The Swell Season Josef Škvorecký
Silverlock John Myers Myers
Arthur Rex Thomas Berger
City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder Herman Woulk
The Neverending Story Michael Ende
Dandelion Wine Ray Bradbury
The Halloween Tree Ray Bradbury
The original Elric stories Michael Moorcock

Shogun or the Helliconia series, or both!

I have suggested these before but Alan Furst's 'Night Soldiers' espionage novels are a wonderful read. I read all of the series at least twice a year and am always left in admiration at this American novelist's superb writing skills and his extraordinary knowledge of so many European countries in the 1930s and 1940s. His novels are all touching, uplifting and exciting. They make Ian Fleming's novels look third rate. Glad to say that Alan Furst is around to give his agreement to this proposal.

>73 English-bookseller: do you like Eric Ambler's spy novels? That could be another good FS foray.

>74 LBShoreBook: FS has done two of Ambler’s books already. The Mask of Dimitrios and Epitaph for a Spy.

I’m patiently waiting on a lavish nonfiction production of Von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative in the style of Cook’s Journals. I submit the title in every customer poll I receive, but no luck as of yet.

>76 strangenews:

I'd definitely buy that. Wonderful idea.

>76 strangenews: I third this!!

I suggest that from a business point of view The Folio Society should think about publishing some authors which might not appeal to existing devotees but might bring in some new buyers. They are clearly establishing a reputation as the 'Go to publisher' for beautiful editions of certain types of books but perhaps they should try to capture different writers, new customers and new markets.

They might wish to look at saying to those who already receive their marketing 'If you like these books, we suggest you might like some others, such as ...'.

How about a series called the 'The ten best modern novels taken from a particular aspect /class in World literature'.

>73 English-bookseller: You read a series of 15 books twice a year every year!! That's some dedication :-) Might need to try one out. Which is your favourite and can they be read out of order?

>83 English-bookseller: I’m certain that is exactly how we have come to have the current crop of Sci-Fi/Fantasy and the comics in particular. This wasn’t the FS editorial team I used to know.

>75 jsg1976: We need more Eric Ambler.

Also Len Deighton

>84 Levin40: Thank you for your post.

Everyone of them is first rate. I am mortified that I had never heard of Alan Faust until recently.

His novels have been praised to the skies by the following newspapers and magazines: Literary Review; Seattle Times; New York Times; The Guardian; The FT; The Scotsman; The Economist; The Spectator; and The Daily Mail, etc.

A standalone and fascinating start would be 'Night Soldiers'. But all his espionage novels of the 1930s and 1940s are warmly recommended. The historical background to this starting choice seems perfect and the geographical sweep written by this American writer is astounding. After reading that novel, the behaviour of the Russians in the Ukraine will not surprise. I now really want to read an authoritative history of the NVKD. Note that Putin's father worked in a NKVD 'Destruction' battalion. You can guess what their job was.

I looked for Signed First Editions of Alan's novels but they are beyond my price range even where there are copies for sale. Reading the stories on new paperbacks is still a wonderful reading experience.

As for reading a great deal, I have a very tolerant wife; the children are well off our hands; I can choose my own working hours as a self-employed bookseller (no Boss!) and find British TV pretty rubbishy.

And - after all - a good novel can be fascinating; can extend your horizons; can take you away from life's cares; and can be read at any time and anywhere.

>73 English-bookseller:
They make Ian Fleming's novels look third rate.
That's not difficult though! ;-)

On a more serious note - any Furst novel in particular you would start with? I just dipped into reviews of some of his books, and the first, Under Occupation, was on the end of some scathing comments, mostly along the lines of "I'm a long-term fan, but this was dreadful". I gather it was well down the line, and authors do have dips and declines.

>88 Willoyd: Thank you for your post.

As I posted above, a standalone and fascinating start would be 'Night Soldiers' (ISBN 9781474611626 which on Amazon UK costs £7.19 for a W&N softback).

I can see that some might feel 'Under Occupation' does not compare so well with some of the others. I thought the writing quality was the same, but it is much less ambitious and probably less than half the length of 'Night Soldiers' although I still enjoyed reading it. The history and background to Occupied Paris 1940 to 1944 is I suppose much more familiar to many than the NKVD in Moscow and their Intervention in the Spanish Civil War.

Generally I find Alan Furst's writing in these espionage novels consistently interesting. The overall collection is a very impressive writing achievement and he seems to have remarkable expertise on the mid 20th century history of a surprising number of European countries. I feel there cannot be many European writers who can claim that.

>88 Willoyd:
I'm a big fan. The remarks about Under Occupation are justified, in my view - well enough written, but without the structure and grip of his earlier work, and I suspect it signals the end of a wonderful road, Furst being now past 80. Otherwise, you might pick any to begin, merely noting that The World at Night and Red Gold feature the same hero, and should be read in that order. As E-b notes, Furst writes well about many places - although best about Paris - and so the books illuminate the war from some less familiar vantage points: you might pick based on place - The Spies of Warsaw, for example. If you get hooked, as well you might (my hook was The Foreign Correspondent), then there would be nothing better than going back to the first, and working your way onwards, but they are in no sense a roman fleuve like O'Brian.

>90 strangenews: only so long as they don’t lose their way; there is a balance to be made, and it feels like they’re still finding it.

>87 English-bookseller: Thank you very much. I've added 'Night Soldiers' to my - admittedly lengthy - tbr list.

I admit I'm rather envious of your generous reading time (though being a self-employed bookseller I suppose you could write it off as work time :-)). I'm deep in the middle of the 'little children' phase myself and personal reading has had to take a backseat. I can snatch 10 or 15 minutes here or there, or a bit longer after lights-out when I'm tired, but it's all a bit frustrating and I'm having trouble getting into books like I used to. Still, swings and roundabouts, eh - I'm also enjoying reading fairy tales, Greek myths and children's poetry and I'm sure I'll miss this phase when I again have oodles of personal reading time.

>93 Levin40: I’m in the same place! I try hard to carve out 30-40 mins per day once the kids are sleeping. Definitely most important to cherish the time with the kids. My son is already three and starting to only want to snuggle with mommy when he’s sad or sick!

>89 English-bookseller: >91 affle:
Thank you both. I shall definitely investigate further. I hadn't even heard of him before!

>66 LesMiserables: ...my suggestions have been torpedoed by Mole.

Perish my naughty thoughts, but since FS have embraced the SFF and comics medium, when might they consider an 'American general-interest family magazine'? Yes, the Reader's Digest! And what better occasion than the 2022 Centenary, to celebrate a century of stories, jokes and recipes in the form of a multi-volume 'collected works' :)

If any suggestion needed torpedoing, this is it!

Isaac Asimov started writing a history series in the 1960s which covered a number of civilizations, including the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The books are usually around 200 pages long, and were mainly aimed towards kids, but they are enjoyable reads for adults as well. Used copies are usually in rough shape and go for uncomfortably high prices on the secondary market. I would love it if they got the FS treatment, and I think they'd be pretty popular too.

If anyone is interested, you check out the titles in the series here:

https://www.goodreads.com/series/135397-historia-universal-asimov

Another one from Asimov I would instantly buy is his annotated version of Paradise Lost. This one is hard to even find on the secondary market, and again, I think it would sell pretty well.

Watership Down

In Hazard by Richard Hughes
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison
The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji

And if they want to pursue an epic fantasy series...

The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny

Was The Witcher ever mentioned in any of the polls?

It's currently a huge hit due to the series, which might be a draw. I must say that I enjoy the books very much. It's not your average fantasy when it comes to the way the story is told, there are very interesting changes in perspective, for example, and the Eastern European mythology is also a nice change to the usual. It already starts out nicely with the first two short story collections, but then really hits its stride with the novels.

>99 Shadekeep: I really wish one of the smaller publishers would do a fine edition of The Invention of Morel. Such a fantastic little book.

>101 SolerSystem: Yes, it's even more suited to the No Reply / Thornwillow treatment. I keep hoping one such press will eventually do it.

And the one book I truly wish FS or Suntup or Centipede Press or SOMEONE would do - Weaveworld by Clive Barker. I so badly want a deluxe/fine edition of this, his greatest novel in my opinion.

Would like to add North by East by Rockwell Kent. A great true story with beautiful woodblock prints on almost every page. Everyone here seems to love his Moby Dick illustrations, so I think it would be a great seller and a worthy title.

>103 Shadekeep:

There was a fine edition of Weaveworld ten years ago:

http://www.earthlingpub.com/cb_weaveworld_a.php

or here:

https://www.amazon.com/Weaveworld-25th-Anniversary-Clive-Barker/dp/0983807124

"This special edition features new typesetting and design, 2-color offset printing on 80# Finch paper, 7x10 inch oversized pages, Smyth sewing, and THIRTY original pieces of art by Richard Kirk, who has illustrated other projects by Clive Barker"

It's not easy to find these days, though. I stumbled across it by accident back then, and was lucky to get a copy through a small bookseller, who only got two copies, one of them damaged (not mine), from the publisher.

>105 SF-72: Ugh, I missed this one completely. Probably will never run across it in the wild, but thanks for letting me know it's a thing. I still hope for an attainable release.

>106 Shadekeep:

Maybe a saved search on Abebooks or Ebay will do it, you never know.

I would love to see much more modern poetry and drama. Specifically, FS could/should publish volumes of selected poems by:

(American poets)
Wallace Stevens
H.D.
Marianne Moore
Langston Hughes
Elizabeth Bishop
John Ashbery
W.S. Merwin
Louise Glück

(British/Commonwealth poets)
Stevie Smith
W. H. Auden
Ted Hughes
Geoffrey Hill
James Fenton
Thom Gunn
Derek Walcott
Les Murray

The dream-come-true would be beautiful editions of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and other poems, The Bridge by Hart Crane, Omeros by Derek Walcott, and the complete War Music by Christopher Logue.

As for dramatists, an edition of Samuel Beckett's Endgame to have in tandem with the recently published edition of Waiting for Godot would be excellent. It would also be nice to see either individual or selected plays by:

Henrik Ibsen
August Strindberg
Oscar Wilde
George Bernard Shaw
Anton Chekhov
Bertolt Brecht
Luigi Pirandello
Eugene O'Neill
Arthur Miller
Tennessee Williams
Jean Genet
Eugene Ionesco
Harold Pinter
Tom Stoppard
Caryl Churchill

>108 CJDelDotto:

Welcome to LT and the FS Devotees!

I couldn't agree more about these underdone areas of the FS's publishing programme, just pointing out that they did publish a book of Auden's shorter poems some years back. Larkin should have been on your list, and they did a selection of his, and made a mess of it, in my view. Heaney would be welcome - he falls outside both your poetry lists. The FS modern(-ish) drama is certainly neglected - the later years of the LEC showed the way.

>108 CJDelDotto:
Henrik Ibsen
Anton Chekhov
Luigi Pirandello
Tom Stoppard

I would happily buy collections of any of these playwrights. And I would add to the list:

Molière
Alfred Jarry
Mary Johnston

>109 affle:

Thank you!

I'd love to see FS do a selected Heaney or maybe an edition of his 2018 posthumous collection 100 Poems. On the subject of Irish poets, volumes of selected poem by Yeats and Paul Muldoon would also be nice to see.

It really surprises me that the only T. S. Eliot that FS has ever done is a slim volume of Four Quartets from the late 1960s.

I bought the volume of Larkin's Collected Poems, and I'm more or less happy with it, which is why I didn't include him on the list. Of course, if FS wanted to do Larkin's selected poems and maybe do a more interesting job with it, i.e., hiring an illustrator (e.g., Stanley Donwood? I really admire what he did with the Hardy Selected Poems LE) vs. using an assemblage of photographs, I would consider trading out my Larkin volume for it.

>110 Shadekeep:

Molière -- YES! And more playwrights from the 16th-17th centuries, from Jonson, Middleton, Marlowe, and Webster to Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Corneille, and Racine.

>111 CJDelDotto: volumes of selected poem by Yeats

Folio published The Tower (Folio Press Fine Edition) in 1987. Two different editions of Selected Poems in 1998 and 2007.

>104 jfkf: thanks for this, I hadn't taken a close look at it. I might pick up one of the signed copies.

Steve Brusatte's 'The Rise and Reign of the Mammals' as a partner volume to the 'The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs' would be very welcome.

Something by Balzac! Except for Lost Illusions, all other bindings of Balzac books have been really underwhelming. I want a new Père Goriot (oxford translation), new Eugénie Grandet, Cousin Bette, etc.

And some more Zola too! Again, the new Oxford translations! If not the entire Rougon-Macquart, then at least some of the best ones.

If reprint wishes are valid, I'd love one of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

>117 Shadekeep: You can get a near mint copy of this on the secondary market for around £15 so why would you want a new reprint at £49.95 ?!

>118 antinous_in_london: Eh, I'd just like it to be back in print. I'm thinking beyond just myself in this particular case.

And on the subject of the Baroness, I'd also like to see FS bring out a collection of her mystery stories featuring The Old Man In The Corner (aka The Teahouse Detective). More Orczy in general is a welcome thing.

>116 sekhmet0108:

Yes! I read last year FS's edition of Lost Illusions and would snatch up other Balzac volumes in a similar style.

My vote would be for more epic poetry. Here are a few suggestions:

Ariosto, Orlando Furioso; Produced in a style similar to the FS LE “Gargantua and Pantagruel”, reproducing all of Doré’s illustrations.

Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato; Since Doré didn’t produce any illustrations for this one, I would go for something different, maybe in the style of Agnes Miller Parker’s illustrations for “The Faerie Queene” from the Limited Editions Club.

The Nibelungenlied; In the excellent verse translation by George Henry Needler and illustrated in a style similar to Harry Brockway’s illustrations for “The Story of Heledd” published by Gwasg Gregynog

Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered; In the translation by Edward Fairfax and illustrated in a style similar to Clifford Webb’s illustrations for “The First Crusade” published by the Golden Cockerel Press.

Lucan, Pharsalia; In the translation of Thomas May and illustrated in a style similar to the FS “The Destruction of the Jews” by Josephus

>122 Stephan68: On the topic of epic poetry, I'd love to see an edition of Immram curaig Mail Dúin ("The Voyage of Máel Dúin’s Curach"), containing both the prose and poem forms of the story. A wonderful, and sadly overlooked, journey tale.

>123 Shadekeep:
“The Voyage of Maelduin” is part of the FS “Celtic Myths and Legends”. However it is a rather short poem (about 15 pages), and I don’t know if they printed the whole text or only part of it.

>124 Stephan68: Excellent, thank you! I'll check that one out. I suspect it's just one of the formats of the tale, but that's better than nothing, and certainly the most I should expect outside academic or specialist publishers.

>122 Stephan68:

This is an awesome list. It astonishes me how rarely FS has published editions of The Aeneid and The Metamorphoses, to say nothing of these lesser known epics. FS should fill this gap in its catalogue.

Incidentally, when I was an undergraduate English major, I took a course entitled "Spenser and the Epic Romance" in which we read The Aeneid, Orlando Furioso (Harington translation), Jerusalem Delivered (Fairfax translation), and The Faerie Queene. What a mountain of reading! Someday, perhaps when I'm retired, I'd love to repeat the sequence but include Dante, Boiardo, and Milton to round it out.

Speaking of Dante, I also took a course on The Divine Comedy. It was known informally around campus as "the orgo (as in organic chemistry) of the humanities" because of the difficulty of the midterm and final exams. Much like the Spenserian who taught the course noted above, the professor who taught the Dante course was a global expert and wrote a letter to everyone who enrolled in the course with a list of texts to read over the summer before the course started in the fall, including not only the entirety of the Commedia and La Vita Nuova but also several books of the Bible, The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses, Lucan's Pharsalia and Statius' The Thebaid. I must confess that I didn't get around to reading either the Lucan or the Statius. Again, someday, I'd like to.

All the talk in the Cthulhu thread has made me think of dear old Algernon Blackwood. A bumper edition of his best macabre and/or supernatural stories is long overdue, especially amid the current Folio fixations. The great Lovecraft himself described Blackwood's work as 'some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age'.

(His photograph in Wikipedia makes him look as though he came back from the dead to sit for it.)

>126 CJDelDotto:

To my knowledge both Aeneid and Metamorphosis have been published as part of the FS Myths and Legends series in the translation of Dryden and Mary Innes respectively. In addition there are the FS limited editions of the Aeneid (translation by Robert Fagles) and Metamorphosis (translation Arthur Golding). I am lucky to have both of the LEs.

It is interesting that you mention Spensers Faerie Queene. I bought the magnificent FS LE a few years ago, but being not a native English speaker, it took me some time to muster the courage to tackle that work. Last year I finally read The Faerie Queene and too my surprise I found it to be a far more engaging and fluent read than I had expected. It took me only three weeks to get through the whole 1500 pages. Since then I have been looking for some nice editions of Ariosto, Boiardo and Tasso. I sadly missed the chance to buy Jerusalem Delivered in the 1817 illustrated, large paper edition by Bensley, resulting in some serious non-buyers remorse.

I am currently reading Lucan’s Pharsalia in the translation by Jane Wilson Joyce published by Cornell University Press (1993). So far I find the reading experience less fluent then the few excerpts of Thomas May’s translation from 1627 that I found on the internet. This is of course more of a reflection on my own taste than Mrs Joyce’s ability as a translator. I actually bought her translation after reading some very positive reviews of her work.

You mention the Harington translation of Orlando Furioso in your post. I am curious about your view on that translation.

>127 boldface: In case you haven't seen it yet, Beehive Books did a decent edition of some of Blackwood's short stories.

>127 boldface: I agree that a FS collection of Blackwood would be welcome. As you might expect, Centipede Press has issued collections of his works, but in limited numbers and long since sold out.

https://www.centipedepress.com/authors/blackwood.html

>128 Stephan68: >126 CJDelDotto: I second the value of having solid fine editions of the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses, probably the two most influential texts on European literature for a thousand years after they were written. I also own the FS LE of Fagle's translation of Virgil, and think it's excellent, although I would have liked to pay a little less for it than I did. I passed on the Metamorphoses LE because the Humphries verse translation has come to seem a little clunky to me. (I hope FS eventually puts out an edition of the David Raeburn translation.) But I really enjoy Innes's prose translation (FS, 1995), which she did in 1955, the same year Humphries did his. Lucid and direct. We read it to our 13-year-old a few months ago, and he really liked it.

>128 Stephan68: Very glad you ended up liking the Spenser. I think your experience can be broadly extrapolated: stick with it for a few cantos, and the verse somewhat takes you over. But sorry to hear that you're not enjoying the Joyce Lucan: I own, and intend to read, that translation. Years ago I read the Loeb translation, which was literalist and awkward--but I guess that's what Loebs are for.

>131 Eumnestes: >128 Stephan68: I enjoyed The Faerie Queene. At its best, I think Milton's Paradise Lost is the greater text, but overall, from first line to last, I prefer Spenser's text. When I was an undergraduate, the first of the two gateway survey courses required to major in English included Book I of The Faerie Queene in the syllabus. I don't think that's the case any longer, which is a shame.

Incidentally, Robert Fagles founded the comparative literature department at the university where I did my undergraduate work. His Odyssey was published my freshman year. Later on, when I was a junior, in the week-long "intercession" between the fall and spring semesters, I read his translations of both Homeric texts and enjoyed them very, very much. Moreover that spring, I took his course on tragedy, which ran the gamut from Sophocles and Aeschylus (Fagles' translations, of course) to Brecht and Beckett. He was a marvelous lecturer. I'm glad that he was eventually able to complete The Aeneid before passing away. Before I took the Dante course, I read Fitzgerald's Aeneid, which I found dull and dry. Perhaps I should have chosen another translation, e.g., the translation by Mandelbaum, which I've dipped into and found quite good, or Day-Lewis. If only Fagles' had been available!

As for Harington's Orlando Furioso, I thought it was an excellent Elizabethan text. That might be another way of saying that Harington took liberties with Ariosto's text that more contemporary translators (e.g., Barbara Reynolds, David Slavitt) don't take.

>116 sekhmet0108:
Yes,I've long argued for more of these 2, especially Zola, a huge gap IMO in the FS catalogue (back and current). I'm very much enjoying the new translations of the R-M series by OWC, but have pretty much given up hope on FS actually publishing in SE any classics other than rehashes or reprints.

>111 CJDelDotto: I asked Joe Whitlock Blundell about TSE and getting a good LE and he said they would love to do that but Valerie and Faber didn't want FS doing anything - they hadn't been keen on the Four Quartets - presumably this is not a problem anymore since various Fine presses have done TSE since Valerie's demise

>129 Xandian97:
>130 Shadekeep:

Thanks for the info on these alternatives. My old trade hardback of two of the original story collections is full of miipfints.

>132 CJDelDotto: I'm basically on the same page regarding Spenser and Milton. The verse of PL reaches heights difficult to match, but overall the FQ presents a more lively and various world. I own the LEC FQ, and it's a beautiful edition to read.

Glad you had the chance to study with such a celebrated teacher as Fitzgerald, and that he demanded such relevant auxiliary reading from his students. That kind of experience has become rather rare in college, I believe. Yes, Mandelbaum would have been a better way to go than Fitzgerald. And yes, literal completeness not the primary goal of Elizabethan translation practice. This is apparent enough in Spenser's translations of Du Bellay.

>134 lgreen666: This is interesting information. Thanks for sharing. I'd love to obtain a copy of the Thornwillow Press LE of The Waste Land, which I think is very nice. However, TWL seems like a literary text that demands some sort of high-end illustrated letterpress edition. I hope that the Folio Society is able to eventually secure the rights to publish one some day.

>114 ubiquitousuk: Hope you find a nice one,you wont be disappointed.He is also a good writer in my opinion,some people have all the talent.

Putting a Faust LE on the wishlist. Something along the lines of the recent Dante LE sans the odd drawer situation. I like the fine edition they produced but have been put off by the immense size of the thing.

>139 L.Bloom: Considering that it's probably the most important literary work in all of German-language literature, it's remarkable that the FS has published only the one edition of the text. I'd love to see a LE, specifically with Stuart Atkins' Princeton UP translation.

>139 L.Bloom: That gets a vote from me as well. Suitably illustrated, preferably.

Surely due.

George V Higgins. - The friends of Eddie Coyle - Classic Boston crime fare.

And in the same vein. Some American crime pulp fiction titles.
Build my gallows high for example by Geoff Homes.

No coincidence both titles became GREAT Robert Mitchum vehicles.

Eye of the needle - Follet
Papillon - Chariere
Where Eagles dare - Mclean
Ivanhoe - Scott

And many more ..

It looks like one of the items on my wish list, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, is coming out at some point this fall. Whoo-hoo!

Neverwhere was on my list, so I am very excited to add it to my collection!!

>145 Lady19thC: quality is great. Just got it in the mail

>145 Lady19thC:

It was on my list, too, and I received it a few days ago. It's a very beautiful and well-done edition. I'm very happy with it.

>147 SF-72: Huzzah! Mine should come later this week!

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

This is my absolute number one book I would like to see a Folio edition of. Any of his books would be great, but particularly this one.

Others of the top of my head include:
China Miéville - The Scar, Perdido Street Station
Henri Charrière - Papillon
Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas

Frans G. Bengtsson - The Long Ships

Robert Penn Warren - All the King's Men

>151 jswift81: I would die if the did All the King's Men. I would just throw my bank account at them.

>152 Jason461: if you have a bank account to throw, the late phase LEC did a nice edition. Two volumes, letterpress, quarter leather binding, fine art photography illustrations. Link to an eBay listing that has some decent photos (no relation to seller):

https://www.ebay.com/itm/294433872249

(Signed by Warren and the artist. The whole thing is printed on Italian Magnani paper.)

>152 Jason461: There is absolutely no way they could do it better than the LEC edition

>154 gmacaree: I completely agree with you, but the cheapest price I've ever seen for it is $600. A little too steep for me, unfortunately.

>153 abysswalker: That's gorgeous. I don't have the money, unfortunately, to justify it. My children continue to want lessons for various things. But perhaps one day.