Nicola Mason: I recently received word from one of our contributors, Jamie Quatro, that her story collection has been taken for publication by Grove/Atlantic. (CR was lucky enough to present the title story, “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement,” to our readership in issue 6.2.) When I read this excellent news, I was put in mind of a similar email from Ron Currie some years back. Grove/Atlantic also took his first collection, God Is Dead, which included “False Idols” (CR 2.2).
Curiously, there is yet another, albeit more tenuous, connection between CR and Grove that involves an interesting bit of publishing history.
The story begins with the legendary Richard Seaver, who, as a Fulbright scholar in Paris in the 1950s, championed the work of an unknown playwright named Samuel Beckett. His essay on the young Irishman caught the eye of Barney Rosset, who had just acquired Grove Press. Rosset went on to become Beckett’s first American publisher, and a few years later brought Richard Seaver on board as an editor. Grove was already known for being avant-garde, and after Seaver arrived, the press became notorious—issuing US editions of such works as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Story of O, and Che Guevara’s The Bolivian Diary, as well as publishing other controversial texts like Naked Lunch, Tropic of Cancer, Last Exit to Brooklyn, City of Night, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Seaver went on to become Grove’s editor in chief, then in 1988 started his own independent publishing house—Arcade. And here is where, from the standpoint of this post, the tale comes full circle, for it was Dick Seaver—then in his seventies—who acquired the first novel of our fiction editor, Michael Griffith. Spikes was followed by Bibliophilia, but before Arcade could issue Michael’s third book, Seaver suffered a heart attack. He passed away at age eighty-two, and without his vision and force of personality behind it, Arcade went bankrupt. Michael’s marooned manuscript (Trophy) found a home with TriQuarterly Books. Though very happy with his new house, Michael has great memories of his dealings with Seaver, a brilliant editor and one of the last of the midcentury titans of publishing.
