Nora Allen showing Dad how to use a computer

In October of 2011, Terrace Books, the trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, published a new paperback edition of my first book, THE GREEN SUIT. The book is a collection of interlinked stories about a Kentucky family called the Sackriders–the father is a judge, the mother is a vitamin-pill-popping hothead, and the two children are mistake-prone English majors. The first eleven stories (originally published by Algonquin in 2000 and reprinted by Plume in 2001) are set in Kentucky, New York, Wisconsin, and on the West Coast, and they describe some aspects of American life between the early seventies and the late nineties. The 2011 edition has a new story, about Peter Sackrider, the book’s central character, which is set in Wisconsin, late in the first decade of this century.

The Algonquin hardcover edition of 2000 received a number of nice reviews but did not sell much at all. The Plume paperback came out the day after 9/11, and, to be brief about it, sold probably less than “not much at all.” These two editions were put out of print during the past decade. (The Algonquin edition, which outlasted the Plume paperback by a couple of years, lived longer than I thought it might.) Algonquin returned the rights to the book to me in 2010, and the University of Wisconsin Press, which had published my third book, agreed to reprint it.

Needless to say, writers are always happy to have their books back in print. It’s somewhat as if our children have come home from some faraway place, if only temporarily, of course, but for long enough that we can touch them, breathe them in, again. I happen to be partial to books made of trees, books that you can hold in your hands and sniff and dog-ear and scribble in and flip through and bookmark with a bookmark that your child made for you, but I’m pleased to say that THE GREEN SUIT is available in an electronic version, too.

— Dwight Allen