Published 10 July 2009
in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, & Burlington, Massachusetts.
HOPE-IN-THE-MIST
The Extraordinary Career &
Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees
by Michael Swanwick
Preface by Neil Gaiman
Original frontispiece illustration by Charles Vess
6 x 9 inches, xii+100 pp. Illustrated.
30 copies, hand bound in Asahi book cloth with Ann
Muir marbled endsheets,
signed by Michael Swanwick and Neil Gaiman,
and with
the frontispiece
signed by Charles Vess.
Five copies
lettered A - E, hand bound in iridescent ripe plum silk
(with
chartreuse cloth covered slipcase), for presentation.
Subscribers issue, 25 numbered copies hand bound (chartreuse cloth).
Fully subscribed upon publication. All copies delivered
to subscribers.
Trade issue, 200 copies in paper
covers.
ISBN : 0-976-4660-5-8 / ISBN 13 : 978-0-976-4660-5-5
Sold out. As of 18 December all copies have been distributed
to
readers
throughout
north
America and western Europe, as well as Australia and
South Africa.
Henry Wessells
P.O. Box 43072, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043-0072 USA
Electronym : wessells@aol.com
HOPE-IN-THE-MIST
The Extraordinary Career & Mysterious Life
of
Hope Mirrlees
by
Michael Swanwick
Hope-in-the-Mist is the first book-length study
of British author HOPE MIRRLEES, whom Virginia Woolf described as “her
own heroine
— capricious, exacting, exquisite, very learned, and beautifully dressed.”
Raised in Scotland and Zululand, Mirrlees studied with the great classical
scholar
Jane Harrison
and later lived with her in Paris and London. Mirrlees wrote one major poem, Paris (1920),
the missing link between French avant-garde poetry and her friend T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land (1922) ; her novel Lud-in-the-Mist is an acknowledged
classic of fantastical literature. An earlier version of Hope-in-the-Mist was
published in the journal Foundation in 2003.
Photograph of the author (detail above) courtesy of M.C. Porter.
Michael Swanwick is
author of What Can Be Saved from the
Wreckage ?
(2007), a monograph on American author James Branch Cabell. His novels include
The Dragons of Babel and In The Drift, and his short story
collections include
Gravity’s Angels and The Dog Said Bow-Wow. He is at
work on a novel featuring his characters
Darger and Surplus.
Neil Gaiman is the Wild Man of Wisconsin. His novels
include Stardust (illustrated by Charles Vess), Coraline,
and American
Gods.
Charles Vess is an acclaimed artist with lifelong ties to fantastical literature.
One of his latest projects is a nine-foot tall bronze statue of Titania.
Hope-in-the-Mist was published 10 July 2009 at Readercon in Burlington, Massachusetts, where the author interviewed Hope Mirrlees (recording to come). Temporary Culture also exhibited at World Fantasy Convention in San José, California, 30-31 October 2009.
Hope-in-the-Mist includes “ A Lexicon of Lud ” prepared by Michael Swanwick (published in shorter form in The New York Review of Science Fiction in July 2005).
In March 2010, Hope-in-the-Mist was nominated for the Hugo award for best related work. Temporary Culture congratulates the author !
