Издательство Vintage запускает новую серию перепечаток романов Иэна Макьюэна с обновленными обложками

Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know, published last year by Knopf, takes place in an imagined future where the western world has been ravaged by nuclear catastrophe and rising sea levels. Many of the British author’s previous 19 novels, including his 2001 Booker Prize–shortlisted bildungsroman Atonement, probe the ethical dilemmas of the past, rather than imaging how our present ones will play out. But McEwan, now 78, has always had the “uncanny ability” to identify and write through “civilization-scale questions,” Knopf executive editor John Freeman tells PW. This September will mark the 25th anniversary of Atonement, first published in 2001 by Cape in the U.K., and then by Doubleday in the U.S. in 2002. The novel takes place on a dual timeline, allowing readers to witness the protagonist Briony’s girlhood during World War II, and the consequences of a mistake she made as they play out decades later. What distinguishes and unites each of McEwan’s books, Freeman says, is that they are “novels of ideas” that simultaneously contain “the same depths of character that 20th- and 19th-century novels were built on.” For a writer so attuned to the shape of time, it seems fitting that McEwan is currently seeing his oeuvre reissued by Vintage, which has been his U.S. paperback publisher for decades. Beginning last fall, Vintage started repackaging McEwan’s works with fresh, cohesive cover designs by Evan Gaffney. They have already re-released 10 of his seminal novels, including the Booker Prize–winning Amsterdam (Vintage, 1999), Atonement, and Saturday (Vintage, 2006), and will do the remaining titles in the coming months. Over 50 years of publishing, McEwan has “mined one genre after another and opened it up,” in Freeman’s words. Asked which titles he hopes will gain more recognition this time around, Freeman points to the 1981 psychological drama The Comfort of Strangers, which was later adapted into a feature film directed by Paul Schrader, as a personal favorite. He also notes that Saturday (2006), which considers the protest against the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, feels contemporary in “what it says about our ability to live in societies that are made from violence.” When asked the same question, McEwan himself jumps right to Machines Like Me, a 2019 novel centered on an android named Adam. Pulled, as always, to that region where fiction and moral philosophy overlap, McEwan says he wants to see how the generation coming of age with AI responds to the “fundamental questions of machine consciousness” the book addresses. One value of a reissue series for publishers is that it brings backlist titles to the attention of new readers. McEwan tells PW that it would be “deeply gratifying” for younger generations of readers to discover his work through the reissues. In the U.K., Vintage has already redesigned Atonement—which is required reading for many high schoolers across the pond—and 17 other of his works. McEwan describes the experience of signing books belonging to 16 and 17 year olds that are “absolutely impacted with marginalia and a little bit of Post-it notes, and scrawls in every corner.” “I think this is wonderful,” he adds, though he initially had qualms about people being forced to read his work. Having one’s books re-read “is, I think, the most fundamental desire of writers. Because, for most novels over a certain length, you don’t appreciate their structure in a single reading.” The title of What We Can Know implies that there are things we can’t—but McEwan has always tried anyway. For his part, he takes issue with the “endlessly subjective nature” of some contemporary fiction. Today’s writers, he feels, would do good to “try and name the world and take a position on it, with a view to—not quite persuading—but just opening up the major moral questions of our time.”