A Talent for Living: Yiyun Li on Beryl Bainbridge’s ‘An Awfully Big Adventure’
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.
Rumaan Alam on the 1970 novel "worth writing twice."
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.
Why Authors Can’t Let Go of Greek Myths
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.
The Art of the Schemer: Pamela Hansford Johnson’s Masterpiece Returns
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.”
"An Obsession Revisited": Dinah Brooke on Her Unobtainable Father
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.
Myths of Meaning: Rachel Cusk on Kay Cicellis’s The Way To Colonos
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.
“Is There More to Life Than This?” Emma Cline on Dinah Brooke’s Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady
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.
Remembering Maxine Clair: An essay by W. Ralph Eubanks on Clair’s Masterpiece, Rattlebone
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.
Join McNally Editions at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, September 21
We are thrilled to be attending the Brooklyn Book Festival again this year! The festival is from 10 AM to 6 PM on Sunday, September 21. Come and meet us at Table 335, east of the Christopher Columbus Memorial. We’ll have books, galleys, hats, and more. Hope to see you there!
A Nocturne for Edmund White
We remember the transformative gay writer and celebrate Pride month with a trio of queer stories of love and lust.
Stephanie Danler and Griffin Dunne on John Gregory Dunne’s ‘Vegas’ at 92NY
Stephanie Danler, author of the international bestseller Sweetbitter and Stray, joins acclaimed actor Griffin Dunne for a reading and conversation about Dunne’s uncle, John Gregory Dunne, and his classic memoir recently reissued by McNally Jackson Editions, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season.
‘Vegas’ Brooklyn Launch Party with Stephanie Danler
Raise a glass with us as we celebrate the reissue of John Gregory Dunne's Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season
Announcing Marginalian Editions
We’re delighted to announce the launch of Marginalian Editions — a collaboration between McNally Jackson Books and Maria Popova, the visionary writer and creator of The Marginalian (born under the name Brain Pickings).
Ariane Bankes & Kate Bolick Discuss ‘The Dazzling Paget Sisters: The English Twins Who Captivated Literary Europe’
Small-Town Sex: Colm Tóibín on John Broderick’s ‘The Pilgrimage’
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.
Cafe Gitane’s 30th Anniversary Book Launch Party
Join us on Friday, December 13 to toast the release of McNally Jackson’s limited-edition, slipcased coffee table book celebrating 30 years of Cafe Gitane
“Small But Unforgettable Moments.” What E.B. White Loved About New York City
Martha White Remembers Her Grandfather’s Lifelong Relationship With the Big Apple
Dorothy Parker and the Art of the Literary Takedown
Her reviews are not contemptuous, a common pitfall for her imitators. They are simply unbridled in their dislike.
Gary Indiana’s Exuberant Venom
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.
