Scenes of near rape would not sit well with a contemporary audience, we were quite convinced. Social behavior-such as hitting a woman-that would be considered totally unacceptable now was quite common sixty years ago. But once we immersed ourselves in the text, our eyes grew wide.
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“Remember, our intention was to publish the stories in their original form. Several were eliminated, no matter how striking the cover!”Ī hip art project gone very bad. “But in some cases,” Zinberg continued, “once we started reading the text, we simply couldn’t see publishing the story, for a host of reasons….content, language, political correctness, etc. We wanted books whose cover art appealed to us, and we had to be in physical possession of the book.”
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The assignment, according to Executive Editor Marsha Zinberg in Harlequin’s blog, was to piggy-back onto the success of a recent a 60th Anniversary art exhibition featuring vintage paperback covers from Harlequin’s origins and “choose six books and reprint them, EXACTLY AS THEY WERE THEN, as a small collection to celebrate our sixty years in business. The series’ genesis was as a hip art project in celebration of Harlequin’s 60th Anniversary. Last October they reissued six titles from their Top Secret vault as their Mini-Series Vintage Collection. So being a part of it is incredibly exciting.Those who know Harlequin Books only as a major publisher of romance novels will be startled to learn that it has a shady past: It once issued pulp-noir in the murky post-WWII era. And the frame for how we see that type of traditional romance has shifted. I grew up always wanting to be a part of that, but I never thought there was a place for me in those very typical small-town events.Īnd I've realized that since I was a kid, those things have really shifted. This book is really a traditional romance in so many ways, and it's about small towns and it's about the feeling that happens in river towns and small villages. The first time I entered the Harlequin author network portal online, it felt like entering the gates of someplace very sacred and very special. But what's the significance of Harlequin, the biggest of these enterprises, now doing this?
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Smaller presses have been publishing this kind of work for a while about LGBTQ relationships. And I think for people reading those books who don't have to do the emotional work of translating the experience to themselves, I think that can be very empowering. I think for me as a kid, it taught me empathy and sympathy for lots of different points of view because I was constantly trying to navigate that for myself.īut I was never really sure where I fit in that equation. Cameron's The Girl Next Door is another LGBTQ novel just published by Carina Adores. They always have miscommunication with the people they love.īut they're different in that these are stories that I really connect to, and that I really understand, and that I really think are important to be told.Ĭhelsea M. In some ways their stories are very similar. But you were writing books mostly for teenage girls. You have been a successful writer for some time. It tells the journey of a man who returns to his home town and discovers that the person he's had a crush on since childhood is "exactly the same person he thought he was." The story is a "very traditional romance in many aspects," he said. Stover told As It Happenshost Carol Off that being able to tell love tales from his own perspective is "very empowering."
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The novel is one of the first two to be published by Harlequin under its new Carina Adores line, which is dedicated to LGBTQ romance. That is something author Philip William Stover is trying to correct with his new book The Hideaway Inn. Harlequin romance novels are a big business but they haven't always been a terribly inclusive one.