The Certain Hour

A Certain Hour (1922) is a collection of stories by James Branch Cabell. Recreating the lives of some of history’s most celebrated poets, A Certain Hour is a relative outlier among Cabell’s body of work, and is included in a series of novels, essays, and poems known as the Biography of the Life of Manuel. “Indisputably the most striking defect of this modern American literature is the fact that the production of anything at all resembling literature is scarcely anywhere apparent. Innumerable printing-presses, instead, are turning out a vast quantity of reading-matter, the candidly recognized purpose of which is to kill time, and which—it has been asserted, though perhaps too sweepingly—ought not to be vended over book-counters, but rather in drugstores along with the other narcotics.” Moving away from his usual setting of 13th century France, Cabell begins his collection with an impassioned essay decrying the state of American literature in the early twentieth century. Interested in the nature of literary genius, he imagines the lives of such poets as Robert Herrick and Alexander Pope, whose wit and wisdom remain essential centuries after their deaths. A Certain Hour is a captivating collection of tales from a historical period not so different from our own. Cabell’s work has long been described as escapist, his novels and stories derided as fantastic and obsessive recreations of a world lost long ago. To read A Certain Hour, however, is to understand that the issues therein—the struggle for power, the unspoken distance between men and women—were vastly important not only at the time of its publication, but in our own, divisive world. This edition of James Branch Cabell’s A Certain Hour is a classic of fantasy and romance reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

© 2021 Mint Editions (Ebook): 9781513297248

Release date

Ebook: 3 August 2021