Congrats to Portland’s Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts, which, for the last ten years has been elegantly publishing the likes of Poe Ballantine. Hawthorne is celebrating its tin anniversary this year and has posted this tribute to Ballantine, who’s been with them from the start (they’ve published two of his books of essays and two novels).
We once described Ballantine as “an author so frustratingly under-celebrated and so heartbreakingly open and funny and insightful, you’ll look up his town, Chadron, Nebraska, on a map and calculate the hours it will take to get there (1336.96 miles from my house).” Not that we would be stalking him or anything. We were excited to read that Ballantine is currently working on two upcoming Hawthorne Books titles: Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere (nonfiction) and a novel. Hooray for us, for Hawthorne and for Ballantine!