An Excerpt from ‘An Awfully Big Adventure’ by Beryl Bainbridge, Selected by Lucy Scholes
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.
"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.
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.
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
Meet the Archive Moles
“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.“
The New Yorker: Rediscovering a Lost Dystopia and Its Prescient Author
Kay Dick, a queer editor and writer, died in obscurity in 2001. Did her novella “They” foreshadow our present discontent?