Among the least strange bedfellows of all...

Among the least strange bedfellows of all are politics and publishing. If a news event is likely to generate or increase book sales, publishers are only too happy to oblige by producing those volumes. Hence Scribner’s elegant reissues of Alan Paton’s classic novel of South Africa, “Too Late the Phalarope,” and his short stories from the same crisis zone, the aptly named “Tales From a Troubled Land.” The “timeliness of their themes” was what prompted Scribner’s to reissue the 1953 novel and the 1961 collection of short stories, vice president Susan Richman reported. In South Africa, however, with her husband unavailable for comment, Paton’s wife brusquely dismissed such a suggestion. “It’s not a matter of a reissue,” she insisted. “His books just keep going on and on.”

If AIDS is a social tragedy and a major source of national concern, it is also a budding publishing phenomenon. Two Broadway/Off Broadway plays on the subject, Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” and William M. Hoffman’s “As Is,” are being published as books, the former from NAL/Plume, and the latter from Vintage. An expanded version of “The Plague Years,” articles by David Black that originally appeared in Rolling Stone, will appear this spring from Simon & Schuster. And from Ballantine Books’ Available Press imprint comes the recently published “A Strange Virus of Unknown Origins,” described by its publisher as a French doctor’s “medical detective story.” First published in France in 1984, soon after French and American scientists announced that they had found the HTLV virus that may cause the deadly acquired immune deficiency syndrome, the book has been translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Howard.

Two years before Douglas Messerli had any idea he would move his Sun and Moon Press from the nation’s capital to the movie capital, he planned to have an experimental satire about L.A.’s film industry, Ron Sukenick’s “Blown Away,” top his fall ’85 list.

By the fall of ‘85, Messerli had moved his very literary house right into the heart of Hollywood. “I am very interested in the local film community and scene,” the publisher says; he would like to start a salon to invite film people to hear contemporary literature.

Messerli was teaching contemporary literature at Temple University in Philadelphia at the same time that he was editing a journal of art and literature called Sun and Moon. And he was observing “that remarkable writers were having a terrible time getting anything that was a bit off the mainstream published.”