Interesting stuff, worth reprinting in full from the Kindle Daily Post, the official Kindle blog:
In a world where it takes us seconds to Tweet, John Gardner was an author who spent months on a single page.
October Light, winner of the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award, is among fifteen John Gardner titles that have been taken out of the vault and are newly available to Kindle readers. Gardner, who died at the age of forty-nine in a motorcycle accident, taught and championed writers such as Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates, while writing more than thirty works of his own.
An archival 1977 letter from Oates to Gardner reveals how highly his contemporaries thought of him: “October Light has some truly beautiful things in it. I think your writing style—or voice, whatever—has never been more lyric and human and convincing. One simply believes in these people and their world.” Clearly, Gardner is an author we should all have on our bookshelves.
We are pleased to be able to share with Kindle readers some images from the John Gardner Papers in the Department of Rare Books/Special Collections at the University of Rochester, which were collected by Open Road Media. These can be found in the illustrated biographies, which are included at the back of each ebook in the John Gardner collection. This is the first time that works from one of the most eclectic, brilliant minds of the twenty-first century are available to Kindle readers.
I guess the press release worked because I just bought his Life and Times of Chaucer.
Likewise, the other titles didn’t interest me and one can always add another Chaucer biography to the Archive.
How disappointing. I thought this was going to be about the late John Gardner, author of James Bond novels post-Ian Fleming, not some other random John Gardner even fewer people have heard of!