Related articles and links |  1 of 3

We've been looking back at books from 2001; now it's time to look ahead. Publishers' catalogues are arriving every day. What follows is a highly selective report from the materials at hand (some publishers have yet to be heard from).

The publishing event of the season is the announcement that Vintage has acquired reprint rights to 17 novels by the sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of fifty-three. Dick's fellow writer and friend, Roger Zelazny, wondered how to go about creating a story "at once puzzling, poignant, grotesque, philosophical, satirical, and fun. There is a very special way of doing this," Zelazny concluded, "and the first step in its mastery involves being Philip K. Dick."

Many readers have become acquainted with Dick through movies based on his fiction, including Blade Runner, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Total Recall, very loosely based on a Dick short story. Last week saw the release of Impostor (from a Dick short story), and a Dick-inspired Steven Spielberg film, Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, is scheduled for May of this year. (Pantheon will publish Dick's story of the same title as a small hardcover.)

Vintage will release the first four of the 17 reissues in May, to coincide with the Spielberg film. Dick's best novels—books like Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch—were reissued in an earlier batch that Vintage began releasing in 1991. But that first batch of 16 novels also included some stinkers—most notably the VALIS trilogy—and (presumably because the rights weren't then available) omitted some good ones, such asTime Out of Joint, which is one of the four titles coming in May, and The Simulacrum, long out of print and very hard to find, also due in May.

Some of the 17 novels that Vintage will be reissuing are exceptionally bad—Vulcan's Hammer, for instance, and The Crack in Space. But even Dick's worst novels are worth reading at least once, and the good ones are unforgettable.

Like Philip K. Dick, Fyodor Dostoevsky often wrote hastily—to meet deadlines, keep creditors at bay, and fuel gambling sprees (an addiction that Dick didn't share; he had plenty of other troubles). And like Dick he was gifted with an imperfect but nonetheless penetrating prescience. In 1976, the scholar Joseph Frank published the first volume of an ambitious biography of the Russian novelist. In May, Princeton University Press will publish Frank's fifth and final volume, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881. Reading Frank on Dostoevsky is to plunge deep into the tangled particulars of late-nineteenth-century Russian culture, yet from this unfamiliar vantage point we gain a new perception on our own time.

One wonders what Dostoevsky, who had a messianic conception of the role of Russia in world history, would make of Philip Jenkins's new book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, due from Oxford University Press in March. We've heard a good deal in recent years about the shift in the center of Christian influence from the Northern to the Southern hemisphere. But no book to date has so powerfully and provocatively considered the implications of that change as Jenkins's does. Along the way he repeatedly jolts comfortable assumptions right, left, and center. Look for a review by Mark Noll in the March/April issue of Books & Culture.

The trends that Jenkins analyzes point toward increasing conflict between Christians and Muslims. At a minimum, post-September 11, the need for greater knowledge of the Islamic world is glaringly apparent. Publishers are promoting backlist titles in this area and commissioning new ones. Among the most promising of the many forthcoming books on Islam are two that share the same rather predictable title. From Yale University Press comes Ahmed Rashid's Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia,due next month. Rashid is the journalist whose book Taliban was discussed in an earlier Corner. And from Harvard University Press, scheduled for April, Gilles Kepel's Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Kepel's earlier books include The Revenge of God, on the resurgence of religion in the face of secularism, and Muslim Extremism in Egypt, a book from the 1980s that is very helpful in understanding the ideological roots of September 11.

next page... |  1 of 3

January (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46