Summer Reading Picks from McNally Editions

Dear readers,

As you take off on your summer travels, we’ve got your reading list covered. First, hot off the press, is The Feast, Margaret Kennedy’s ingenious upstairs-downstairs comedy which reads like White Lotus time-machined to 1940s Cornwall: disaster and drama befall the misbehaving rich at a seaside resort. Then we fox-trot across the Atlantic to Jazz Age New York in Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, where we’re brought inside the aftermath of a scandalous divorce as it plays out in smoke-filled clubs and late-night speakeasies. Further delights abound in Alston Anderson’s Lover Man, Gary Indiana’s Rent Boy, and Gavin Lambert’s The Goodby People, to name just a few of our books that will transport you to far-off eras and destinations. 

Scroll down and discover your next favorite. Happy reading, and stay cool,

The McNally Editions team

 
The Feast

Margaret Kennedy

A hilarious and ingenious upstairs-downstairs tragicomedy from postwar England, set at a doomed seaside resort. 

Ex-Wife

Ursula Parrott

Foreword by Alissa Bennett

Afterword by Marc Parrott

An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife is the story of a divorce and its aftermath that scandalized the Jazz Age—and still resonates today.

Lover Man

Alston Anderson

Afterword by Kinohi Nishikawa

A classic of 1950s Black fiction: stories of loners, outsiders, tricksters, addicts, jazzmen, and drifters in the Jim Crow South by “a writer with a perfect ear, a warm heart, and an amazing capacity to seize character and make it live” (Selden Rodman, The New York Times)

Rent Boy

Gary Indiana

A noir tour-de-force set in a world of hustlers by “a shark in US literature’s calm waters” (The Guardian).

The Goodby People

Gavin Lambert

First published in 1971, The Goodby People is perhaps the greatest novel ever written about post-Manson, pre-Disney Los Angeles. “His elegant, stripped-down prose caught the last gasp of Old Hollywood in a way that has yet to be rivaled.” (Armistead Maupin)

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