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.
"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.
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.
“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.
See Spreads from the Limited-Edition ‘Cafe Gitane: 30 Years’ Coffee Table Book
Something in the Dark: Merve Emre on the Short Stories of Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes’s short stories return again and again to characters suffering from love, fear, and alienation.
The Book That Prepared This Veteran Editor for a Literary Life
A 1966 novel captures a publishing world full of chronic malcontents, strategic lunches and ideas that mattered.
Read Lauren Groff's Foreword to Ann Schlee's 'Rhine Journey'
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.
Garth Greenwell on Edmund White’s Brilliant Neglected Novel About the Search for a Lost Older Lover
Nocturnes for the King of Naples, by Edmund White, stands outside current fashions, with its refined pleasures and its nuanced accounts of gay lives.
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.
Creditable, Surprising, Abundantly and Elegantly Good: Michael Hofmann on Duff Cooper's Only Novel
It is a book with information, even wisdom, to burn: that spilt champagne should be dabbed behind the ears; that something happens to men at fifty; that a promotion to the rank of major can be called getting a majority (and Felicity got her name because she was born the day her father came into one); that Scots make the best spymasters.
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?”
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.”
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.
On Novocain: An Excerpt from Michael Clune’s ‘White Out’
From the foreword to White Out, to be republished by McNally Editions this month.