Dear classics reader,
In this week’s cold house shed you will find:
The announcement of our November read-along;
This year’s perfect Christmas present;
Miss Lonelyhearts celebrating Nathanael West’s birthday;
Two new classics by Margaret Atwood and Cesare Pavese;
And our second discussion of Toni Morrison’s Beloved – with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
This newsletter may be too long for your email inbox. If so, click ‘View entire message’ at the bottom to see the full newsletter – or visit Substack.
November’s read-along – The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
I’m delighted to announce our read-along for November. Please join me to read Yukio Mishima’s brilliantly twisted The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, his ‘greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century’ (The Times).
What is it?
When an elegant widow begins an affair with a ship’s officer, they are observed by her thirteen-year-old son, who tells his sinister band of schoolmates. He and his friends reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, training themselves in a brutal callousness they call ‘objectivity’.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea was first published in Japan in 1963 as 午後の曳航 (Gogo No Eiko), which translates as Tugging in the Afternoon – a suggestive reference to tugboats and the novel’s nautical setting. The original title also carries a pun: 曳航 (eikō), or ‘tugging’, is a homophone for 栄光 (eikō), ‘glory’.
The American Japanologist John Nathan translated the novel into English in 1965. Nathan was a friend of Mishima’s and when he couldn’t find a matching pun for the English title, Mishima suggested a few alternative titles in Japanese. Together they settled on the one that translated most elegantly: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.
Why are we reading it?
This year marks 100 years since the birth of Yukio Mishima, one of the greatest and most controversial Japanese novelists of the twentieth century.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is quintessential Mishima – a beautifully crafted mixture of eroticism and violence and a fusion Japanese and Western literary styles.
The Times described it as ‘Mishima’s greatest novel and one of the greatest of the past century’.
Which edition should I read?
In the UK, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is published by Vintage Classics. I am reading it in their beautiful 2019 Japanese Classics Series edition:
It is also available as a regular paperback and as a stunning 2024 quarterbound hardback:
In the US, the book is also published by Vintage:
How will we read it?
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is short: 130 pages in my edition. It has two sections, ‘Summer’ and ‘Winter’, and fifteen chapters.
I suggest we read it over two weeks:
We’ll start reading on Friday 7th November.
On Friday 14th November we’ll discuss Part One, ‘Summer’;
And on Friday 21st November we’ll discuss Part Two, ‘Winter’.
Then, if you’re near London, you’d be very welcome to book a ticket for our discussion of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea at the Hatchards Classics Book Club on Thursday 4th December.
We meet downstairs at Hatchards (187 Piccadilly) on the first Thursday of every month at 6.30pm – tickets cost £5 with a free Hatchards Reward Card and include a glass (or two) of wine. These book club events are not live-streamed, but afterwards I post a report of our discussion here on Substack.
These weekly read-along discussions of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea will be for paid subscribers only. More details here.
If you – or anyone you know – would like to join this or future read-alongs, but can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
If you buy a copy of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea through Bookshop.org (UK) or Bookshop.org (US), Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!
In 2026, we will be reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from January to December. This read-along will be available for free to all subscribers.
Our Brothers Karamazov discussions will be gathered here. More details to follow soon!
The Hatchards Classic Book Club Subscription
The answer to your Christmas shopping quandaries!
This week, Hatchards, the oldest bookshop in the UK, launched an annual Classic Book Club book subscription, through which you can receive (or give to a friend) all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world.
Hatchards subscribers also receive a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so each month you can also choose to read along with us, if you wish.
It’s the perfect gift for book lovers – or the perfect treat for yourself! To find out more, follow this link – or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
Happy Birthday to Nathanael West
In other news, today, 17 October, would have been Nathanael West’s 122nd birthday.
Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein was born in New York, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He attended Brown University and lived in Paris briefly, where he changed his name to Nathanael West. He worked as the night manager of two residential hotels in Manhattan and edited the literary magazine Contact with William Carlos Williams before spending the last five years of his life writing scripts for Hollywood. He died with his wife in a car accident at the age of 37, the day after the death of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.
West wrote four short dark comic novels that reframe the American Dream as a grotesque nightmare: The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934) and The Day of the Locust (1939). W. H. Auden called them ‘parables about a Kingdom of Hell’.
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West (1933)
Day after day, ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ sits in his office responding to letters from ‘Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, and Desperate’, dispensing words of hope, inspiration, and other platitudes to get his readers through their tormented days. But it’s all getting to be too much for Miss Lonelyhearts. Under the weight of his colleagues’ mockery and the endless gloom of his correspondence, Miss Lonelyhearts finds himself crippled with cynicism and dysfunction. Set in New York City at the height of the Great Depression, Miss Lonelyhearts stands as one of the most intelligent and hilarious works of the 20th Century.
[UK] Daunt Books | 112 pages
[US] New Directions | 112 pages | introduced by Jonathan Lethem
What’s new this week?
Very few classics were reissued this week, perhaps because this week is Frankfurt Book Fair, the publishing world’s biggest annual trade fair. We have an anniversary edition of Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin, for which she’s written a new introduction, and Archipelago Books have published a new Cesare Pavese translation.
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000)
Decades after Laura’s mysterious demise, her sister Iris recounts her memories of their childhood, and of the dramatic deaths that have punctuated their wealthy, eccentric family’s history. Intertwined with Iris’s story are chapters from the scandalous novel that made Laura famous, in which two unnamed lovers meet secretly in rented rooms and seedy cafés, themselves writing a pulp fantasy novel of a blind killer on a distant planet. As these stories-within-stories twist and turn through love and jealousy, self-sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real narrative, as all move closer to catastrophe in a brilliant and astonishing final twist. By turns lyrical, outrageous, formidable, compelling and funny, this is a novel filled with deep humour and dark drama.
[UK] Virago Modern Classics | 656 pages | with a new introduction by Margaret Atwood
The Leucothea Dialogues by Cesare Pavese (1947)
Pavese’s The Leucothea Dialogues is peopled with gods, centaurs, clouds, poets, hunters, snakes, and nymphs. These are the beings who spoke to him through the ancient plays and poems he read in primary school. Here they speak again in the twenty-seven dialogues that form the novel. Pavese calls mythology a “hothouse of symbols.” His hothouse is liveliest at night, in the peculiar clarity of darkness. Pavese’s characters are more than “characters,” they play like the dreams of earliest childhood, they pose questions that seem to travel through the minds of the dead to the minds of the living and back again. Through reeds, shadows, glens, fields of blazing straw, homes and villages on the edges of valleys, and over cliffs, we follow their harried stories.
[UK / US] Archipelago Books | 256 pages | translated by Minna Zallman Proctor
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
