Library of America, the much revered nonprofit publisher of essential works of American literature, will publish a Charles Portis volume in May 2023.

Portis, who died in 2020, is the greatest writer Arkansas ever produced — a brilliant and hilarious novelist who also contributed a fair amount of journalism, including for the Arkansas Times. The collection will include all of his novels: “Norwood,” “True Grit,” “The Dog of the South,” “Masters of Atlantis” and “Gringos,” along with “stories and other writings.” From the Library of America website: “A generous gathering of the Portis’s nonfiction reveals his skills as a reporter, above all in his coverage of the Civil Rights Movement; his appreciation of Arkansas history and landscape; and his poignancy as a family memoirist.”

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Little Rock writer and editor Jay Jennings, who previously edited “Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany,” is editing the Library of America volume. “It will have a good claim to being the funniest book ever published,” he said on Facebook.

“Completists will still need Escape Velocity (now in a revised edition from Butler Center Books),” Jennings said, “because the LOA collection won’t contain his play, Delray’s New Moon; as much of the journalism; the Pryor Center interview he did with Roy Reed; or the tribute essays.”

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