Cover of Evergreen Review, January 1970 (Via Grove Press)
Most people know Grove Press and its onetime sister journal, The Evergreen Review, as the pioneering publishers of Burroughs, Beckett and Brecht, just to name some of the Bs. Grove gave us seminal (in every sense of the word) books such as Valley of the Dolls (the 50th-anniversary edition of which will be published in July) and Please Kill Me (the 10th-anniversary edition of which comes out in April). What’s not so well known is that Grove’s firebrand publisher, Barney Rosset, was a cinema buff who launched a trailblazing film division in the mid-’60s. In May, to mark a new collection of Evergreen essays, BAM will screen 29 titles distributed by Grove and/or championed by Evergreen, including rarities by Godard, Genet, Warhol, and Robbe-Grillet (late husband of that 85-year-old dominatrix) .