Dangerous Women: Sloane Crosley, Merve Emre & Heidi Julavits on Dorothy Parker, Caroline Blackwood & Djuna Barnes
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.
Watch the Trailer for the EX-WIFE Audiobook
Fans of Ursula Parrott’s 1929 gem, Ex-Wife, can now listen to this racy and affecting story of a divorce and its aftermath, narrated by introducer Alissa Bennett. Here’s a fun video preview for you, and you can download the audiobook from Tantor Media, Audible, and wherever fine audiobooks are sold.
Join Us at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 29!
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.
Edmund White and Garth Greenwell on ‘Nocturnes for the King of Naples'
Nocturnes for the King of Naples by Edmund White with a foreword by Garth Greenwell reflects on love, life and time in this stunning epistolary novel. Both authors joined the Poured Over Podcast to talk to us about bringing back this novel from 1978, the evolution of style and themes, musicality in creative writing and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.
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.
Announcing the McNally Editions Book Club
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?”
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.