Lucy Scholes
Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, Paris Review Daily, and New York Times Book Review, and is an editor at McNally Editions.
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.
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.
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In our monthly series, ‘TBR: The Booker Revisited’ Lucy Scholes shines a spotlight on hidden gems from the Booker Library. This month’s selection is ‘A Green Equinox’ by Elizabeth Mavor, a book about love and its multifarious manifestations
“There’s a growing band of people digging through library stacks and second-hand bookshops in search of lost classics. I’m one of them.“
Kay Dick, a queer editor and writer, died in obscurity in 2001. Did her novella “They” foreshadow our present discontent?
Kay Dick
Afterword by Lucy Scholes
“A creepily prescient tale in which anonymous mobs target artists and destroy their art for the crime of individual vision. Insidiously horrifying!” —Margaret Atwood
A rediscovered, dystopian classic about a mass movement to quash individuality and art—“queer, English, a masterpiece.” (Hilton Als)