I can't recall when it was that I first read Beryl Bainbridge. Growing up in the UK, she was always there—on the bookshelves alongside Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and any number of other literary grande dames. She was a writer known for her macabre, fearless, hugely entertaining, extremely funny, and deliciously clipped novels. Imagine my surprise then when I learned her name doesn’t quite elicit the same recognition in the US.

An Awfully Big Adventure is set in Liverpool around 1950, when the city was still under the long shadow cast by World War II: men and women walk around with visible and invisible scars; material comforts are scarce. Memory is the only possession many characters can claim. And claim it they do, bittersweet or purely bitter, inconvenient at times, often untrustworthy.

I expected A Domestic Animal to be a document of gay life in a benighted past. It isn’t, exactly. The American Psychiatric Association notoriously considered homosexuality a pathology until 1973. Dick does them one better; maybe love is a private experience by definition, maybe—gay or straight—it’s a disease without a cure.

The Way to Colonos ruthlessly dramatizes the limits of individual freedom and the agony of facing one’s powerlessness. The book has recently been reissued at what feels like a propitious moment, when modern treatments of Greek myth proliferate, many of them adapting stories about destiny and order for a chaotic and individualistic time.

Skipton’s devious ruses and desperate escapades prove diverting. He amuses with his vicious thoughts and diatribes as well as his brutal depictions of those who have wronged him. He believes his book will be “the greatest novel in the English language.” When finished, it will secure his reputation and bring him glory and riches, “the joy of lordliness, the majesty of the peaceful mind in the well-fed body.”

Our relationship was one of intense passion, devotion, rage, hatred, anguish, desire, disgust, but it was all on my side. I don’t know what he felt about me. He read the book I wrote about his life, but made no comment. Whenever I made an emotional demand on him he retired rapidly into his madness; otherwise he was polite, humorous and amenable.

This savage little book is a recasting of three Sophoclean tragedies into the modern era. It unfolds for its reader certain human situations that are familiar enough, with an absence of sentimentality that renders them entirely shocking and strange.

In one version of Italy, you find yourself. In another, to your horror, you find no self. Deprived of the context of home, thrust into the exaggerated pressures of vacation, you start to dissolve. In this novel of intense and often violent description, the more you pursue transformation, grasp at a different self, the more the possibility disappears from reach.

As the African American literary canon grows and is defined and refined, a few bright sparks of creativity continue that eternal pattern of being obscured, whether by evolving tastes or by brighter lights. Maxine Clair’s coming-of-age novel in stories, Rattlebone, is one of those books that deserves to be brought out of the shadows of African American literature and back into the spotlight it so rightly deserves.

We remember the transformative gay writer and celebrate Pride month with a trio of queer stories of love and lust.

What Broderick is attempting is a French novel set in an Irish town; he wishes to put dangerous liaisons into the Irish midlands, to allow his Irish characters the freedom to pray to God for their eternal souls and then get into a state of mortal sin with agility and ease.

David Bowie loved its couscous. Norman Reedus hung out there. It put avocado toast on the map. Thirty years later, and with a new book honoring it, Cafe Gitane is drawing a fresh crowd.

Martha White Remembers Her Grandfather’s Lifelong Relationship With the Big Apple

Her reviews are not contemptuous, a common pitfall for her imitators. They are simply unbridled in their dislike.

The hater was at his most affecting when confronted with obsessive love, a feeling that commingles tenderness with disdain. Infatuation opens his characters to, and delimits the extent of their participation in, the world.

Djuna Barnes’s short stories return again and again to characters suffering from love, fear, and alienation.

Fans of Ursula Parrott’s 1929 gem, Ex-Wife, can now listen to this racy and affecting story of a divorce and its aftermath, narrated by introducer Alissa Bennett. Here’s a fun video preview for you, and you can download the audiobook from Tantor Media, Audible, and wherever fine audiobooks are sold.

A 1966 novel captures a publishing world full of chronic malcontents, strategic lunches and ideas that mattered.

Rhine Journey is graceful, economical, and emotionally acute, but, to me, the most astonishing aspect of this novel is the precision with which Schlee replicates the customs, language, and atmosphere of 1851, hewing so closely to the feeling that a book written in the early Victorian era stirs in the reader that, upon learning that Rhine Journey was only first published in 1980, I did a double take.

Nocturnes for the King of Naples by Edmund White with a foreword by Garth Greenwell reflects on love, life and time in this stunning epistolary novel. Both authors joined the Poured Over Podcast to talk to us about bringing back this novel from 1978, the evolution of style and themes, musicality in creative writing and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. 

Nocturnes for the King of Naples, by Edmund White, stands outside current fashions, with its refined pleasures and its nuanced accounts of gay lives.