This year Bloomsbury US celebrates 25 years of building a proud-making list of groundbreaking, conversation-shaping literary fiction, epic fantasy, hard-hitting narrative nonfiction, genre-bending memoir, graphic narratives, and globally inspired cookbooks on the Adult side. (Our US Children's list began in 2002.) We're a relatively small division, publishing about 50 frontlist titles and 25 paperbacks a year. In the past two years alone, those books have been New York Times bestsellers, Indie Next Picks, Indies Introduce Selections, B&N Discover Picks, and Reese's Book Club picks, and our authors have taken home the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.
One of our early major successes was Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (2000), which chronicled the funny, stomach-turning, hedonistic excursions of a chef named Anthony Bourdain. More than 20 years later, there's still been nothing like it. Bloomsbury published several of Bourdain's impressively rangy, always brilliant books, among them the perennial bestseller Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, which we'll re-release next year for its 20th anniversary.
Another highlight from our early years, this one fiction: Susanna Clarke's Hugo Award winner Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), an instant New York Times bestseller that set the tone for our soaring literary fantasy list, which, 16 years later, now includes Clarke's deeply surreal second novel, Piranesi, along with works by Alan Moore, Samantha Shannon, and Sarah J. Maas. We'll release a 20th anniversary edition of Jonathan Strange next year as well, timed to a new Susanna Clarke story from the Strange universe. These 20th anniversary reissues are especially meaningful for a young company like Bloomsbury; we have an amazing backlist!
Tom Standage's A History of the World in Six Glasses, which tells the story of human culture through its beverages, is a standout example of Bloomsbury's popular history list, where food narratives have an especially strong presence, from Mark Kurlansky's microhistories to Jessica B. Harris's classic history of African American cuisine, High on the Hog.
In 2015, Bloomsbury published journalist Sam Quinones' Dreamland, an on-the-ground view of the confluent forces that led to America's opioid epidemic. In a remarkable feat of storytelling, Quinones drew the connections among the medical establishment's overprescription of opiates, the emergence of a new class of addicts, and the influx of cheap black tar heroin. The following year another urgent and prescient work of social science, Carol Anderson's White Rage, named and contextualized a history of American policies—from the "war on drugs" to ID laws—that undermine Black political advancement. Both books won National Book Critics Circle Awards, and Quinones and Anderson have come to anchor Bloomsbury's issue-driven nonfiction list, which also includes journalists Rachel Louise Snyder, Nicole Perlroth, and many more.
Our stellar fiction list includes the transcendent talent of Miriam Toews, whose work is deadly serious and yet filled with so much humor and love as to become celebratory. Bloomsbury's release of Toews's novel Women Talking in 2019 was like nothing we've seen before or since: authors, booksellers, librarians—everyone seemed to recognize the universality of this singular work. Earlier this year, Sarah Polley's film adaptation of Women Talking won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. We'll publish Miriam's next project, A Truce That Is Not Peace, in the Fall of 2025.
 |
|
|
Adrienne Vaughan, the late President of Bloomsbury US, flanked by Publishing Director Nancy Miller and Editorial Director Callie Garnett, honoring the 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winner Chasing Me to My Grave by the late artist Winfred Rembert, as told to Erin I. Kelly. |
|
This year was marked by the tragic loss of our beloved Bloomsbury U.S. President, Adrienne Vaughan. Adrienne was a beacon and a role model to all of us, a born leader whose vision for what was possible was informed by her brilliant business sense and drive to achieve, but also by her warmth and kindness and her trust and belief in all of us, motivating us to work beyond our best and accomplish so much for Bloomsbury, our books, our authors, our sense of what's possible. In celebrating Bloomsbury's new and upcoming releases, we celebrate her wisdom and her leadership. This issue is dedicated to Adrienne. We strive every day to honor her memory and continue her legacy into the next 25 years of continued growth, success, and publishing of the highest quality.