Just two weeks ago, in a fortuitous event, the Nobel Prize for Literature went to Belarusian journalist and author Svetlana Alexievich, whose best-known title in the United States is Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, translated by Keith Gessen and published by Picador in 2006. "This stroke of good fortune is the type of good turn backlist and reprint publishers hope for everyday," said Morrison, "and the challenge is to build upon those lucky breaks and keep growing books and authors' audience over their long backlist paperback lives."
Other major reprints that have been drawing attention lately include:
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Lila by Marilynne Robinson ($16, 9781250074843) is Robinson's latest award-winning novel and was first published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In Lila, Robinson returns to the town of Gilead, to revisit the beloved characters and settings of her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and Home. Robinson's work continues to ripple outward, finding ever more fans. In recent weeks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks chose Robinson's Gilead for the Wall Street Journal's Book Club, while a two-part series of conversations between Robinson and President Obama is appearing in the New York Review of Books.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert ($16, 9781250062185) explores the detrimental impacts of human activity and climate change on the environment. Published in hardcover by Henry Holt, the book won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and began as a piece for the New Yorker, where Kolbert has worked as a staff writer since 1999. She is also the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Prophet of Love: And Other Tales of Power and Deceit.
Black Chalk by Christopher J. Yates ($16, 9781250075550) is a psychological thriller about six Oxford University students whose game of dares escalates into tragedy. A series of rave reviews, including from NPR's All Things Considered, necessitated multiple printings to keep wholesalers and indies from running out of stock.
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman ($16, 9781250065667) was originally published in hardcover last year by University of Chicago Press. It explores the devastating consequences of the country's tough-on-crime policies in a Philadelphia neighborhood. Sociologist/urban ethnographer Alice Goffman, daughter of influential sociologist Erving Goffman, spent six years among young black men caught in cycles of legal trouble, poverty and violence. Goffman has promoted her book on Fresh Air and in a TED talk. Recent public discussions on policing and poverty in the United States have helped make On the Run a success for Picador.
Picador's backlist continues to be especially popular at independent bookstores, where "a high percentage" of Picador's books are sold.