![]() ![]() But the publisher had also sent something else: a laminated booklet of thick, glossy pages, displaying the same cover as the ARC but with additional text printed along the left edge: “A Reader’s Companion to The Books of Jacob by Nobel Prize-Winning Author Olga Tokarczuk.” It did not look different from other ARCs. ![]() I ripped open the envelope to unveil a stepstool of a novel, more than 950 pages long: The Books of Jacob, in paperback proofs, translated by Jennifer Croft and published by Riverhead Books. Sometimes I received PDFs, as all the printed copies had been shipped to other reviewers. ![]() Publishers have sent me ARCs before, but those deliveries were unbranded, the books often folded or creased, battered from their journey from the epicenter of American publishing to the Midwest. This, I understood, would not be the typical advance review copy. On the back, I found, adhered to the envelope mailer, an image of a comet set behind a quotation: “I have always been interested in the mechanisms of forgetting, and fascinated by how much of people’s lives and realities they fail to remember.” The attribution showed these words were Olga Tokarczuk’s, “winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.” EARLY IN OCTOBER, I received a package from New York: one of those mailers padded with bubble wrap. ![]()
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