I co-edited one of those doorstop-sized literary handbooks on Agatha Christie, and it's out today. This has been years in the making, and I'm really proud of it.

It's an edited collection with chapters by some of the leading lights in the Christie world, including her grandson, and an introduction by Val McDermid, who will be familiar to readers of crime fiction and watchers of British TV.

I wrote the introduction with my co-editor, and the book includes some of my own work, too. I wrote two chapters, one on Christie's treatment of justice and one on feminist interpretations of her work.

I guess I won't really be an academic until I publish a monograph, but I'm about three-quarters of the way into one of those: Witness to the Evolution: Agatha Christie, Women, Justice, and the Twentieth Century. I figure I'll be shopping it to publishers next year and, if I get lucky, it'll be out the next.

Awesome.

Congratulations!!!

Congratulations!

Thanks, y'all!

Congratulations!!!

Also, very exciting that your monograph is progressing so quickly as well!!!

Congratulations!



I'm not an academic but I'm still waiting for a single professor or even a student in academia to write a literary criticism thesis analyzing the poems of Emily Dickinson as being based on Christianity. I would never have done it because I would have been a history major if I could do it again. I wish someone would steal my idea. I do not expect it to happen. I expect critics to continue to discuss Emily Dickinson and feminism for the foreseeable future. Please forgive my tangent. Congratulations, again!

That’s fantastic Mary Anna!

Congratulations. I think co-authors get to have their name printed on the book’s front cover as well as the title page.

I haven’t read any of Agatha Christie’s books. Is this “doorstop-sized literary handbook” a Cliffs Notes student study guide or something? Cliffs provides a summary of a book usually of a well-known classic.

Fantastic!

Congratulations!

quote:

Originally posted by Qaanaaq-Liaaq:
Congratulations. I think co-authors get to have their name printed on the book’s front cover as well as the title page.

I haven’t read any of Agatha Christie’s books. Is this “doorstop-sized literary handbook” a Cliffs Notes student study guide or something? Cliffs provides a summary of a book usually of a well-known classic.

From the publisher:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/...istie-9781350212473/

Congratulations!

quote:

Originally posted by Qaanaaq-Liaaq:
Congratulations. I think co-authors get to have their name printed on the book’s front cover as well as the title page.

I haven’t read any of Agatha Christie’s books. Is this “doorstop-sized literary handbook” a Cliffs Notes student study guide or something? Cliffs provides a summary of a book usually of a well-known classic.

I'm not sure what you're asking. My name is on the cover as first editor. My co-editor and I recruited a team of scholars with specialties that suited our vision of the book and, between the two of us, we wrote a goodly chunk of it, in addition to editing the contributions.

It's not really for students, although I could see it being used in a graduate class. It's really aimed at literary scholars working on Christie's work or on related work in fields like crime fiction, interwar literature, modernism, and so on. It's a reference work that is largely aimed at those scholars and at academic libraries.

When I was asked to serve as senior editor, Bloomsbury's acquisitions editor described what they wanted as a single-volume compendium that collects current research on Agatha Christie.

These volumes focusing on single authors are common, but there had never been one on Christie before. As she is the bestselling novelist of all time, Bloomsbury saw this as a hole that they wanted to fill.

I like how they say-- "This product is usually dispatched within 10-14 days."

If only I could afford it. Lol.

I guess it's coming from England, where Bloomsbury Academic is located.

I would hope that they'd eventually warehouse some copies here, since I believe it's technically "published in the US," but I'm not privy to the gory details of how publishers work.