Grove Press: Background information when reading Shred Sisters

Grove Press

This article relates to Shred Sisters

Grove Press, the publisher of Betsy Lerner's Shred Sisters, formed in New York City in 1947. Four years later, it was purchased by Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr., who took chances by publishing books that were considered edgy: the Beats, modern plays, and sexually explicit literature and works with gay themes that had been banned elsewhere — the likes of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (see our article about its publication journey), Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and Pauline Réage's The Story of O. He also pushed the envelope by publishing political material, including Che Guevara's and Malcolm X's autobiographical work, and international authors only recently becoming known in English translation, such as the Nobel Prize winners Pablo Neruda (Chilean) and Kenzaburo Oe (Japanese).

In the 1980s and 1990s, mergers expanded the company. Joining forces with Atlantic Monthly Press (established 1917) led to the creation of Grove Atlantic in 1993. Grove Press continues as the name of one of its imprints; some of its prize-winning titles are Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, and Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain. The Atlantic Monthly Press imprint has likewise issued many notable books, among them Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down, Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City, and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain.

Other Grove imprints include Black Cat (for trade paperback originals) and Roxane Gay Books, which launched in May 2021 and publishes three works of fiction or nonfiction, edited by Gay, each year. The Mysterious Press, which ran from 2011 to 2020, published mysteries in collectible slipcase editions. Grove Press UK is the publisher's London arm.

Here at BookBrowse, we frequently review Grove titles. Some other recent Grove books that we have covered are So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan, Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver, and The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese.

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This article relates to Shred Sisters. It first ran in the October 2, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.