Star Wars fans are used to having their favorite pieces of the franchise given upgrades, and now that same idea is coming to a bookstore near you. Lucasfilm just announced that for the 20th anniversary, it will be releasing a deluxe edition of Matthew Stover’s novelization of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, widely regarded as one of, if not the, best novelizations in the series and possibly the medium.
“We couldn’t be more excited to publish this incredible deluxe edition of the Revenge of the Sith novelization,” Tom Hoeler of Random House World told Collider, which broke the news.
“It has been thrilling to work with author Matthew Stover and Lucasfilm to create a fully annotated edition that gives readers unprecedented insight to the creation of this masterpiece. Across nearly 50 years of Star Wars books, it stands alone, and even among film novelizations its approach to adapting characters and story from screen to page is unique. Two decades later, this novelization is as essential, enduring, and influential—on readers and creators—as it has ever been. Bringing the book back to hardcover in a stunning deluxe keepsake edition is a perfect way to celebrate 20 years of Revenge of the Sith.”
So, what do you get in this deluxe edition? Well, the book itself is upgraded with “an acetate jacket with foil stamping, a paper over-board book case, gilded and stained edges, illustrated full-color end papers, and a red satin ribbon market.” Most crucially, though, the text has “over 150 annotations” from Stover, giving readers a rare glimpse into the mind of the author who made us think differently about this story.
And really, that’s the best kind of celebration the Revenge of the Sith‘s novelization could have. Even 20 years later, there’s still few movie novelizations that take the approach Stover did—Revenge of the Sith is more than just a retelling of the movie you know, beat by beat of it’s script (with some changes, depending on the drafts the writer had access to). It grants a layer of interiority that adds depth to its characters and world, and Stover’s lavish prose amplifies the mytho-poetic underpinnings of Star Wars to weave the inevitable tragedy of the Jedi Order and Republic’s falls into something far grander. There is a reason people can still quote lines of narration from this book two decades later: it’s a perfect complimentary text to the movie, a grand celebration of one vision of it, told and presented in a way that really does treat it like some long ago fable.
According to the Random House website, the deluxe edition will be out on October 14 and will cost $60. Head here for more info.
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