“This astutely annotated volume at last provides a robust capture of the other side of the correspondence published in 1987 by editors Melissa Banta and Oscar A. Silverman, James Joyce’s Letters to Sylvia Beach, 1921-1940… Of the edition’s 145 letters, 131 are published for the first time. The compilation offers a vivid portrait in letters of Beach, the owner of the famous Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company, tracing her evolving working relationship with Joyce through its periods of flourishing, tension, and eventual diminution in the 1930s, as Beach ceded her place as Joyce’s primary assistant to Léon…

The editors also usefully frame the correspondence with lists surveying letters gathered in the volume; a timeline of relevant events during this period; and a color-data visualization charting the flow of letters at different moments. (Given the nature of such material, further volumes of this kind would be well served by digital publication.) Moreover, the welcome clarity and elegance of Frehner and Zeller’s accounts of their editorial procedures, the scope of the letters, lacunae, and the backstory of how they became available, bespeaks seasoned professionalism. We reap the benefits of their expertise about supporting apparatus, a new era of editorial transparency, and today’s awareness of the value of what Frehner and Zeller rightly call “epistolary scholarship” (xviii)."
-Miranda Dunham-Hickman, McGill University, James Joyce Quarterly, 60.4 2023, pgs. 623-636.