Summer Reading Picks from McNally Editions
Dear readers,
As you take off on your summer travels, we’ve got your reading list covered. 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: disaster and drama befall the misbehaving rich at a seaside resort. Then we fox-trot across the Atlantic to Jazz Age New York in Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, where we’re brought inside the aftermath of a scandalous divorce as it plays out in smoke-filled clubs and late-night speakeasies. Further delights abound in Alston Anderson’s Lover Man, Gary Indiana’s Rent Boy, and Gavin Lambert’s The Goodby People, to name just a few of our books that will transport you to far-off eras and destinations.
Scroll down and discover your next favorite. Happy reading, and stay cool,
The McNally Editions team
Margaret Kennedy
“The perfect seaside holiday read. We’re in Cornwall in 1947, where a landslide has buried a hotel, fatally crushing guests in the rubble . . . The nail-biting tension to discover who actually survived the tragedy will keep you on the very edge of your deckchair.” —Val Hennessy, The Daily Mail
A hilarious and ingenious upstairs-downstairs tragicomedy from postwar England, set at a doomed seaside resort.
Ursula Parrott
Foreword by Alissa Bennett
Afterword by Marc Parrott
“Precociously aphoristic and coolly unsentimental . . . Like Fitzgerald but from a woman’s perspective . . . As if Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Oscar Wilde had collaborated to examine the war between the sexes in the post-Victorian era.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books
An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife is the story of a divorce and its aftermath that scandalized the Jazz Age—and still resonates today.
Alston Anderson
Afterword by Kinohi Nishikawa
“A gem of Americana . . . These stories span the early decades of the 20th century and address with nuance the Black characters’ negotiations with youthful turmoil, sexual desire, and race in the U.S. . . . This deserves a place on the shelf of mid-century classics.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
A classic of 1950s Black fiction: stories of loners, outsiders, tricksters, addicts, jazzmen, and drifters in the Jim Crow South by “a writer with a perfect ear, a warm heart, and an amazing capacity to seize character and make it live” (Selden Rodman, The New York Times)
Gary Indiana
“Literature with the filter off . . . Rent Boy is a multi-faceted little gem . . . the sort of funny, sick, weird little book you never forget.” —John Self, The Critic
A noir tour-de-force set in a world of hustlers by “a shark in US literature’s calm waters” (The Guardian).
Gavin Lambert
“1971, in the city of Los Angeles, where the earth trembles and the hedonistic sun shines no matter what . . . Like Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust . . . The Goodby People is irradiated by the inherently metaphorical properties of Los Angeles.” —Deborah Eisenberg, The New York Review of Books
First published in 1971, The Goodby People is perhaps the greatest novel ever written about post-Manson, pre-Disney Los Angeles. “His elegant, stripped-down prose caught the last gasp of Old Hollywood in a way that has yet to be rivaled.” (Armistead Maupin)