New Corrected Edition of Evangeline Walton's MABINOGION TETRALOGY

A long time in the making, Abrams Press has released (on September 15th) a new special hardcover edition of Evangeline Walton's Mabinogion Tetralogy, which is made up of The Virgin and the Swine (1936; retitled The Island of the Mighty in 1970); The Children of Llyr (1971); The Song of Rhiannon (1972) and Prince of Annwn (1974). Composed in a different order from the Mabinogion's original four branches, when Walton's novels were first collected in 2002 by Overlook Press, they were presented to match the Mabinogion sequence, with the first book (Prince of Annwn) in the same position as the first branch, and the fourth book (The Island of the Mighty) positioned as the fourth branch. 

The new edition has a new Foreword by Christopher Paolini, a reprint of Betty Ballantine's Introduction from the Overlook Press edition. And it has an Editor's Note by me. As editor I compared line-by-line the copyedited typescripts of three of the books with the versions previously published by Ballantine Books, finding lots of dropped words, phrases, and sentences, and other mistakes. (For the fourth book, I used the 1936 published edition, as no manuscript or typescript survives.) Thus, for the first time, we have a clean, consistent, and corrected text of Walton's signature series. 

The Amazon listing is rather confused, as the  ISBN (978-1419792564) is tied in with the previous trade paperback edition. Thereby the older editions come up when you use the "Read sample" feature for the new hardcover and also for the Kindle edition.  You can see the Abrams edition front matter (by Paolini, Ballantine, and myself) at this link. 

The artist, Nim Ben-Reuven, who designed the casebound cover, posted about the cover at his website, available here.  

An audio book is supposed to be released on October 13th.  

 With the band at rear