This is the case with Rosemary Tonks’s “The Bloater,” published originally in 1968 and reissued in 2022 by New Directions, eight years after the author’s death in 2014. Without this intervention, Tonks might have succeeded in wiping “The Bloater” out, along with five other novels and two books of strange and special poetry, scorching her own literary earth. Before New Directions’ reissue and Bloodaxe Books’ posthumous collection of her poetry, getting hold of any of her work was prohibitively expensive; one novel could cost thousands of dollars.
