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I had lunch and several meetings with the editors of Bloomsbury/Walker Children’s today. It was a day at the Flatirons.

Jenny Shank takes a look at Charles Portis's classic novel True Grit in New West, the fine magazine and website that bills itself as the "Voice of the Rocky Mountains." Shank suggests that "the irresistible voice of Mattie Ross rings as clear today as it must have in 1968." Overlook has reissued True Grit in new paperback edition featuring in introduction by novelist Donna Tartt.

In a recent essay on Salon, Allen Barra celebrates the 40th anniversary of True Grit, the Charles Portis classic recently reissued by The Overlook Press: "True Grit shares this with Portis' other novels: His characters are relentlessly grim while his prose is relentlessly funny. As Roy Blount Jr. put it, "Portis could have been Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he'd rather be funny." That humor is often grim and always subtle; Portis is light-years from being 'the quintessential Southern humorist' he is often reputed to be, because he isn't a quintessential anything except original. I will leave it to others to determine whether True Grit is Charles Portis' best or quintessential novel, but it is the best Portis novel to read first."

Great notice today of Overlook's triumphant reissue of Charles Portis' True Grit, with a foreward by Ms. Donna Tartt on Papercuts, Dwight Garner's New York Times Book Blog:

Last week, when I posted some samples of Eliot Fremont-Smith’s memorable reviews from the mid-1960s, there was one I forgot – his piece on Charles Portis’s 1968 masterpiece “True Grit.”

Fremont-Smith effortlessly nailed the book’s breathless comic tone:

True Grit is when you are a 14-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, and you’ve just shot a dangerous outlaw and the gun’s recoil has sent you backward into a pit, and you are wedged in the pit and sinking fast into the cave below where bats are brushing against your legs, and you reach out for something to hold on to and find a rotting corpse beside you and it’s full of angry rattlers, and then it turns out you didn’t kill the outlaw, he’s up at the rim of the pit laughing at you, about to shoot you – and you don’t lose your nerve. That’s True Grit.

We were all like, hey, howcome Charles Portis' The Dog of the South is our #1 book on amazon this week? We're the proud papa publisher of many of the great Portis' great books. And last year True Grit was featured on NPR as a great summer read by George Pelecanos. So what gives? Why the sudden blast-off in booksales for this true book genius? Turns out Larry Doyle of the New Yorker wrote about Mr. Portis in The Week. Se-weet. I thought maybe it was the cool new cover David designed for it. Which is very cool indeed. For whatever reason you pick it up you won't be sorry. Casually compared to Pynchon and A Confederacy of Dunces, Charles Portis is an essential author you need to check out immediately. And, if you're into Afterwords, there's one by Ron Rosenbaum called "Our Least Known Great Novelist." Help Charles Portis become a better known great novelist--you and your favorite bookstore will be glad you did.