I really can't thank you all enough for all the encouraging words and reassurance in your comments on my last post. It's pretty inspiring to be told, "Write about whatever you want and we'll enjoy it." It's unlikely that I'll take up trigonometry or the mechanics of nuclear fission as my next obsession, so you can feel reassured about that, but you've given me some ideas about directions I might take with the blog. I really appreciate your support.
On a brief reading note, I finished Eça de Quieroz' The Maias and really loved it. Part soap opera (with an incest theme no less!), part a mockery of Romanticism and noble feelings, it's entirely entertaining and has a perfect, melancholy but funny ending. Do have a look at it if you're at all into sprawling 19th-century dramas, and give Portugal's native son a bit more of the attention he deserves.
One other quick note before The News. Several people have asked me about my 2024 Furrowed Middlebrow Dozen, the dozen that wasn't (as it were). Actually, I confess that even in the midst of my dervish-like mental spinning around the holidays, I did manage to make some preliminary notes toward my Dozen, but then I got derailed and overwhelmed and it never went further. I'm going to go back to those notes and see what I can come up with. A 2024 highlights post may not be the most timely or relevant thing you'll read in July of 2025, but I enjoyed some wonderful books last year and should share them with you. Stay tuned for that (I'm not going to promise a definite timeline, as I know myself too well, but it will happen...).
Now, for news about new FM titles!
There's still a bit of time to prepare yourselves, as we're anticipating a late summer/early autumn 2026 rollout for the new books. But it will be worth the wait, as we'll have SIX new titles being released then, and they'll be from two "fan favorite" authors who are already members of the FM family.
I've long wanted to get back to DOROTHY LAMBERT after we published the wonderful Much Dithering back in 2020 (time doth flit!). She tends to be a wildly uneven author (and, unlike Mae West, when she's bad she's really NOT better), but there are some real gems among her ouevre, and we've selected four of them for release. You know that one of these has to be All I Desire (1936), which I raved about here, and which I might like even better than Dithering (!!). Also from 1936, we'll reprint the delightful Scotch Mist, reviewed here. From Lambert's World War II novels, which are, alas, quite variable in quality, we're plucking the treasure, Staying Put (1941), which, as I noted here, may not be her most polished novel but perhaps contains the single funniest scene she ever wrote, when the villagers engage in some spy-catching... And last but certainly not least, we'll also sample Lambert's post-war novels, with 1950's Harvest Home, which involves a set of eccentric Londoners being roped in to help with the harvest on a family farm.
And then, we're returning to one of our favorite FM authors for two more titles. I don't want to suggest that any kind of devious readerly conspiracy has been going on. Perhaps it was mere coincidence that several people emailed us about the same two books. (Really, I'm the first to understand that needs must when it comes to getting hold of the books one wants). At any rate, several years after Rupert and I announced, following the release of our last batch of D. E. STEVENSON titles, that we were finished with DES, some of you have sought to make it quite clear that DES is, in fact, not finished with us, so we are adding two more of her titles, Bel Lamington (1961) and its sequel Fletchers End (1962), to our paperback-only repertoire. As with several titles in our last big batch of DES, these two are already available in e-book from "another publisher," and so Dean Street Press will only be releasing a paperback version.
Some lovely person uploaded the original covers of these two novels to Amazon, and I couldn't resist swiping them and showing them to you here.
