Faber reissues Hardwick's classics with Levy and McBride

Faber will relaunch two classic works by American author Elizabeth Hardwick featuring new covers and introductions by Eimear McBride and Deborah Levy. 

Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency licensed UK and Commonwealth rights to Faber in Sleepless Nights and Seduction and Betrayal. They will be published in July 2019. The reissues will be flapped paperbacks featuring "striking” designs, Faber said, and new forewords by McBride and Levy championing Hardwick's writing. They were previously published in the 1970s by the New York Review Books. 

Faber has described Sleepless Nights, previously published in 1979, as "a kaleidoscopic scrapbook of one woman's memories; a collage of fiction and memoir, letters and essays, portraits and dreams, and one of the greatest New York novels of all time”. 

Seduction and Betrayal (1974) is billed as Hardwick's "virtuoso essay collection: a radical portrait of women and literature that dissects the lives of female writers, literary wives, and fictional heroines to probe the cost of creativity”. 

Hardwick was born in 1916 in Kentucky and died in 2007. As co-founder of the New York Review of Books, she contributed more than a hundred pieces to the magazine, as well as novels, biography and essays, winning various prizes. Hardwick was married to the poet Robert Lowell from 1949 to 1972 and their collected correspondence, The Dolphin Letters, will also be published by Faber in 2019.

Assistant editor at Faber Ella Griffiths said: "I couldn't be more excited to be relaunching these lost American classics at Faber, which are beautifully introduced by Eimear McBride and Deborah Levy. We have never needed Elizabeth Hardwick - her witty provocations, her blazing stylishness, her deep compassion - more. 

"Whether experiencing her prose for the first time or returning as a loyal reader, I hope that everyone will find something transformative in her writing.'