Open Road to Digitally Publish, Distribute, and Market Fifty-Eight May Sarton Titles as Ebooks, Including the Iconic Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
(New York, NY—April 1, 2014)—Open Road Integrated Media, a global digital publishing company, announced today that over the course of 2014, it will release fifty-eight titles by May Sarton, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Open Road’s Sarton collection debuts with eight volumes of poetry, available now in celebration of National Poetry Month. (www.openroadmedia.com/may-sarton)
The second group of Sarton titles—five journals and five works of fiction—is slated for publication in Summer 2014 and will include the classic novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. The digital edition restores Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s introduction, originally printed in the 1974 paperback, which positioned Sarton’s work for use in women’s studies and literature classes. Also among the ten titles to be released in Summer 2014 is Sarton’s bestselling memoir Journal of a Solitude, an account of her experiences as a female artist.
Tina Pohlman, Publisher of Open Road, said, “May Sarton is a national treasure. We are thrilled to bring the talent, versatility, and passion that characterize her body of work into the digital world.”
May Sarton (1912–1995) was born in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, have all been finalists for the National Book Award. An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her memoir Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died in York, Maine.
