The Toilers of the Sea (Smith & Taylor Classics, 4)

The oft-forgotten novel that completes a trilogy with Hugo’s famed The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. 

“No character was ever thrown into such strange relief as Gilliatt… here, indeed, the true position of man in the universe.” —Robert Louis Stevenson 

The Toilers of the Sea tells the fairytale-esque story of Gilliatt, an outcast fisherman who must rescue an engine from a wrecked steamship. If successful, he will win the hand of the shipowner's beautiful daughter, Déruchette. He will brave the harsh rocks, the freezing waves, and even the grasp of a sea monster to prove his worth.

The Toilers of the Sea is a richly detailed study of early nineteenth-century Guernsey. It is a tribute to the drama of nature and the insignificance of man against it, to solitude in exile, and the light we choose to carry in the darkness.

Featuring a conversational afterword from broadcaster Andrew Chater and writer Maya Weeks. 

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was born in Besançon, France on February 26, 1802. Originally on track to become a lawyer, he instead became France’s revered Romantic poet, novelist, and dramatist. He is the author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables, among countless others. For fifteen years, Hugo lived on the island of Guernsey in political exile following the 1851 coup d’état by Napoleon III. There he wrote The Toilers of the Sea, published in 1866. When Hugo died in 1885, he was given a national funeral and burial in Paris’ Pantheon.

Andrew Chater is a broadcaster, storyteller and cultural explorer. The winner of six BAFTA awards for his history programming in the UK, he now lectures in History and Literature at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where he leads students on a series of classes exploring regional cultures through the medium of classic and contemporary fiction — a format he calls “bookpacking” (www.bookpackers.com).

Maya Weeks is a geographer, writer, and artist from rural California working on feminist environmental justice. A first-generation college student, she holds her B.A. in Language Studies (Spanish) from the University of California in Santa Cruz and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Mills College. She earned her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California in Davis, where she wrote her dissertation on marine pollution, gender, and feminist political economy using qualitative and creative methods. Recent poetry has been published in Space on Space and recent nonfiction has been published in Zócalo Public Square. A record, Tethers, is out on Full Spectrum Records. She has exhibited at Vague Research Studios and performed at Historical Materialism. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, How to Be on the Outside of Every Inside/How to Be Inside Every Outside (these signals press, 2016). Residencies include Konstepidemin, The Arctic Circle, Mustarinda, Norton Island, and more. Maya lives and works on unceded Chumash land.

Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA.

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics.