(New York, NY—November 8, 2014)—Twenty-six acclaimed classic works by Walter R. Brooks with original black-and-white line drawings by celebrated artist Kurt Wiese featuring the adventures of Freddy the Pig on Bean Farm are now available for preorder as ebooks for the first time from Open Road Media. The ebooks, which will be available for download on December 23rd, are part of Open Road Media’s publishing partnership with Overlook Press. These beloved stories were childhood favorites of Overlook publisher Peter Mayer who began bringing the books back into print more than a decade ago.
Brooks’s Freddy the Pig novels have been praised for their humor, craft, and morality. The Globe and Mail describes the characters of Bean Farm to be as “sharply funny as the Marx Brothers [and] . . . as astute as Noel Coward.” Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times calls them “funny, beautifully written gems,” while Newsday notes, “Freddy is blessed with courage, wit, agility, and a Sherlock Holmes-like capacity for detective work.” When reviewing the books upon publication, Adam Hochschild of the New York Times said they provided “the moral center of [his] childhood universe.”
Originally published between 1927 and 1958, the series consists of 25 novels and one poetry collection, which follow the adventures of a group of animals who operate a bank, a newspaper, a detective business, and the First Animal Republic, among other pursuits. Brooks is also well-known as the creator of Mister Ed, the famous talking horse who was featured in many magazine stories before being developed into a television series called Mister Ed in the 1960s.
The Freddy books inspired generations of devotees who continue to maintain a fan club, Friends of Freddy the Pig, and hold a biannual convention in the character’s honor. This year’s convention will be held November 7–9 in Hamilton, NY.
About Overlook Press
The Overlook Press is an independent publishing house founded in 1971 by Peter Mayer and based in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. It offers an eclectic and distinguished list of titles in the categories of literary and commercial fiction, literature in translation, and drama; nonfiction, including history, biography, popular science, film, art, and design; and children’s and young adult titles. Overlook is the home of Charles Portis, Mervyn Peake, Milton Glaser, Edward Albee, Neil LaBute, the complete works of P. G. Wodehouse, and Walter R. Brooks’s Freddy the Pig series, among others.
About the authors
Walter R. Brooks (1886–1958) is the beloved author of 26 books about Freddy the Pig. He edited several magazines, including the New Yorker. In addition to the Freddy stories, Brooks created the character of Mister Ed the talking horse.
Kurt Wiese (1887–1974) illustrated more than 300 children’s books and wrote and illustrated another 20 books. He received two Newbery Awards and two Caldecott Honor Book Awards.
