When Preachers Were Rock Stars: Louis Menand on 'Free Love: The Story of a Great American Scandal'
A classic New Yorker account of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial recalls a time in America that seems both incomprehensible and familiar.
A Life Lived with Intensity and Brilliance: Daniel Mendelsohn on Jane Ellen Harrison
Reminiscences of a Student’s Life focuses on the dazzling highlights of a life lived with intensity and brilliance: the chit-chat with crowned heads, the amusing, ever-so-slightly self-deprecating anecdotes that nonetheless sneakily illuminate either her independence of mind or her personal glamor, the intellectual enthusiasms, evoked with such memorable and even touching energy and candor.
Announcing the McNally Editions Book Club
The McNally Editions Book Club, hosted by Ama Kwarteng, is organized around books that have been largely forgotten, the reissued classics and rare finds that have slipped from the mainstream and are waiting to be discovered by a new set of readers.
Creditable, Surprising, Abundantly and Elegantly Good: Michael Hofmann on Duff Cooper's Only Novel
Duff Cooper (1890–1953): soldier, diplomat, parliamentarian, cabinet minister, man of letters. Also gambler, lover, and bon viveur. He came from a family flecked with elopements and illegitimacies, though also (“a dash of Hanoverian blood”) with ancestral ties to the British royal family . . . Duff Cooper was a product of Eton and New College, Oxford; a war hero, in what appears to have been a somewhat chaotic solitary action in the so-called “Battle of the Mist” on the Albert Canal, for which he received a DSO; and a celebrity husband as the successful wooer of a famous British beauty, Lady Diana Cooper, all by 1920.
When They Were Pretty: An Excerpt from ‘Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes’
“Heavens, Harriet,” Mrs. Klein said when Aunt Harry gave her the hot rum drink, “I need to send you to bartender’s school. Did you put any rum in it?”
What Kind of Reader Are You? Take the McNally Editions Quiz
What type of reader are you? A realist, an escape artist, or a decadent? Find out by taking the McNally Editions reader quiz, which matches readers with a tailored subscription carefully curated to your tastes and sensibilities.
Dinah Brooke, the Brilliant Forgotten Novelist Who Gave it All Up to Live in an Ashram
She had never, she says, intended Lord Jim to be shocking. “I was just fascinated by the upbringing of murderers,” she tells me. “Miles Giffard’s nanny would lock him for hours at a time in the cupboard. His father had insisted he went to Rugby, but it was clear he wasn’t cut out for it. He was apparently a completely cut-off child – he didn’t connect properly with people.”
A Lot of Pain and A Lot of Humor: Ottessa Moshfegh on Dinah Brooke’s ‘Lord Jim at Home’
"I didn’t care, and I didn’t worry, but I was suspended, consistently and dramatically, in the mirage of the novel.”
The First Masterpiece of the Decade: LARB on Henry Bean’s ‘The Nenoquich’
No one’s got anything better up their sleeve than Henry Bean’s born-again debut The Nenoquich, out for resurrection this week by McNally Editions. This debut, or better say rebut, is our first masterpiece this decade—and it was written in 1982.
The Booker Prize Revisited: Why you should read ‘A Green Equinox’ by Elizabeth Mavor
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
A Master Novelist Visits Hell: Valerie Stivers on Mary Gaitskill’s ‘The Devil’s Treasure’
Gaitskill is an era-defining talent, one of the best American fiction writers working today, and the book is a collage of fiction, autobiography, and fairy tale that seeks, through “ordered disorder,” to approach a fundamental thing about making art—one that defines Gaitskill’s oeuvre.
Superfluous Men and Rakish Heroes: Christian Lorentzen on ‘The Nenoquich’
Cynicism, laziness, anger, misplaced righteousness, vacillation between vanity and self-loathing: Such are the qualities of the superfluous men we’ve encountered in novels for centuries. Existing somehow outside the structures of family and regular employment, these prodigal sons have too much time on their hands — time to spend thinking, ranting, writing or intoxicating themselves.
None-Too-Gay Divorcées: Joyce Carol Oates Reviews 'Ex-Wife'
Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel Ex-Wife was a scandalous, best-selling portrayal of the era’s “new woman,” but in her own life she remained trapped in conventional views of marriage and relationships.
Where Be Your Jibes Now? Patricia Lockwood on David Foster Wallace’s Last Great Work
It begins with the flannel plains of Illinois. The year is 1985, and the place is the IRS Regional Examination Centre in Peoria. Something to Do with Paying Attention first appeared as a long monologue in The Pale King – it comes about a quarter of the way through the book as Pietsch placed it – though Wallace had toyed with the idea of publishing it as a stand-alone novella. It is enthralling.
Summer Reading Picks from McNally Editions
We’ve got recommendations galore for your reading list. 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.
The Campus Job Talk From Hell
In January 2007, I was desperate. After completing my Ph.D., I’d managed to stave off academic annihilation by getting a two-year postdoc at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. But now that postdoc was ending.
A Coiled Spring: An Excerpt from Mary Gaitskill's 'The Devil's Treasure'
Mary Gaitskill’s hybrid work ‘The Devil’s Treasure: A Book of Stories and Dreams,’ explores the connections between her life, work, and obsessions.
Celebrate Pride with McNally Editions
We’re offering 15% off our LGBTQ+ books all month long.
The Divorce Novel That Captured the Mores of Jazz Age New York
Ursula Parrott’s “Ex-Wife” caused a sensation when it was published in 1929. But it wasn’t the racy, frothy endorsement of sexual liberation readers were primed to expect.
A Starred Review for Emily Dickinson Face to Face
Publishers Weekly raves about Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s memoir of the poet, her aunt.