HarperCollins to Publish Solzhenitsyn's the First Circle in 2009
HarperCollins, which has the English language rights to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, will publish
the book to coincide with the one year anniversary of the Nobel Prize winning author's death.
The publisher, which reissued the three volumes of the author's Gulag Archipelago--arguably Solzhenitsyn's most well known work--in 2007, had been planning a 2009 release date for Circle. That won't change, though the imprint may consider timing the release of First Circle to the anniversary of the author's death.
Harper Perennial publisher Carrie Kania said the imprint views the book as an important piece of modern literature and therefore wants "time to 'do it right.'" Kania is also hoping Circle--censored by Soviet authorities when it was first published in the former USSR in 1968--will result in more interest in Gulag Archipelago. According to Kania, the reissue of Gulag has been a steady seller; the three volumes, along with a fourth abridged single edition, have sold 25,000 copies in total over the last year.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn recently died of heart failure in Moscow.
