Faber & Faber to Reissue Petina Gappah Short Story as Part of 90th Anniversary Celebration

To mark its 90th anniversary in 2019, UK publishing house Faber & Faber has announced that it will reissue short stories by some of its most celebrated authors whom it has described as “masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.” Among said authors is Zimbabwean writer and lawyer Petina Gappah, who debuted in 2008 with An Elegy for Easterly, the short story collection that won her The Guardian First Book Award. She has since published a novel, The Book of Memory (2015), another collection, Rotten Row (2016), and secured a deal with publishers Scribner for her second novel, Out of the Dark, Shining Light (2019). The title story of the collection will be reissued alongside 19 other stories selected in collaboration with Booker Prize Foundation literary director Gaby Wood:

• Robert Aickman – “The Inner Room”
• Brian Aldiss – “Three Types of Solitude”
• Djuna Barnes – “The Lydia Steptoe Stories”
• Samuel Beckett – “Dante and the Lobster”
• Alan Bennett – “The Shielding of Mrs Forbes”
• Sarah Hall – “Mrs Fox”
• Kazuo Ishiguro – “Come Rain or Come Shine”
• P. D. James – “The Victim”
• Thom Jones – “Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine”
• Claire Keegan – “The Forester’s Daughter”
• John McGahern – “The Country Funeral”
• David Means – “A River In Egypt”
• Lorrie Moore – “Terrific Mother”
• Edna O’Brien – “Paradise”
• Flannery O’Connor – “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
• Julia O’Faolain – “Daughters of Passion”
• Sally Rooney – “Mr Salary”
• Akhil Sharma – “Cosmopolitan”

The reissue, in a book to be titled Faber Stories, is only one item in the publishing house’s anniversary programme, which further includes reissues of children’s books and of music publications in Faber Social’s The Greatest Hits, a decade-by-decade celebration of their poetry list with “ten iconic collections of Faber poetry,” and the publication of Dear Mr Faber: The Untold Story of a Great Publishing House, “told through the words of the staff and authors who lived it – in letters, memoirs and diary entries that capture the excitement, hopes, fears and triumphs of ninety years of Faber.” Faber Stories will be published in January or March of 2019.

“I am delighted to be recognized for my contribution to my favorite form,” Gappah, who was named Brittle Paper‘s Person of 2016, wrote on Facebook. “I am also delighted that the story chosen is one I was told breaks every single rule of the short story, but somehow is also the best story I have written. I am very proud to have written ‘An Elegy for Easterly.’” Here is the rest of her Facebook post:

Earlier in May, her short story, “The News of Her Death,” was named by Sunday Times among their “100 Greatest Short Stories of All-Time.”

Congratulations to Petina Gappah.

Find out more HERE.