It doesn’t happen often, according to Molly Thomas-Hicks at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), that a regionally based publishing house is selected to publish a work for its Big Read program. So NewSouth Books was especially honored to learn that it had been named to publish The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the 2010 Alabama Big Read.
Sincere thanks go to the NEA and to many folks in Alabama for identifying NewSouth as the publisher of choice, including Patty A. Pilkerton at UAB’s Mervyn H. Sterne Library, Jay Lamar, director of the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities at Pebble Hill, and to all nine Alabama Big Read regional coordinators. NewSouth’s edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is unabridged and annotated, carries a foreword by local Twain scholar Alan Gribben, and includes the NEA Reader’s Guide.
The book will be available for purchase in trade cloth and paperback in August 2009.