Round-up – New Classics, August 2024
from Appelfeld and Baldwin to Stewart and Tevis
Another excellent selection of reissued classics this month, across the publishing houses. I read Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife (Faber Editions) recently and loved it – it’s fresh, funny and still very poignant 100 years after it was first published.
Most notable, perhaps, is Fitzcarraldo’s choice for the sixth title in their new classics series. They are celebrating the centenary of Janet Frame, the New Zealand writer, who was born on 28 August 1924, with a reissue of her novel The Edge of the Alphabet. John Self calls it ‘charming, lyrical, unconventional’ in the Times. Likewise, to mark 100 years since Frame was born, Virago Modern Classics rejacketed their edition of her masterpiece, the autobiography An Angel at My Table.
Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld (1978)
Badenheim, a resort town near the forests of Vienna, is preparing for the arts festival of the summer season. The hotel workers and local tradespeople rush to prepare the small town for the influx of vacationers. But just as the season is getting into full swing, a small note appears on a municipal notice board: the Sanitation Department is announcing an increase in its jurisdiction. An allegory, satire and fable all in one, Badenheim 1939 is a story of denial and normalisation, masterfully creating an atmosphere of impending dread and horror. Gripping and unforgettable, this is one of most intriguing and eerie books ever written about the Holocaust.
Penguin Modern Classics | 144 pages | translated by Dalya Bilu
No Name in the Street by James Baldwin (1972)
In this deeply personal book, Baldwin reflects on the experiences that shaped him as a writer and activist: from his childhood in Harlem to the deaths Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Exploring the visceral reality of life in the American South as well as Baldwin’s impressions of London, Paris and Hamburg, No Name in the Street grapples with the failed promises of global liberation movements in fearless, candid prose.
Penguin Modern Classics | 160 pages
The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood (1976)
A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation. J is a lonely woman without even the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, but he’s left J not only with their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but with the sulky cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood’s first novel stands as proof positive of her eternal mastery―and mockery―of the darkest depths of human feeling.
McNally Editions | 112 pages | foreword by Heidi Julavits
The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame (1962)
Toby Withers, a young man with epilepsy, leaves New Zealand after the death of his mother. While on board a ship to England, he meets Zoe, a middle-aged woman looking for a life of meaning and Pat, an Irishman who claims to have many friends but treats people with carelessness. Alike in their alienation, all three embark on a new life in London, piecing together an existence in the margins of the urban world.
Fitzcarraldo Editions Classics | 296 pages | introduced by Catherine Lacey
New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
In late-Victorian London, two writers of radically different temperaments pursue contrasting approaches to the literary life. The first, the talented and cerebral novelist Edwin Reardon, appears to be doomed by his idealistic nature to a life of impecuniousness, whereas the second, the driven but cynical journalist Jasper Milvain, continually reaps the material rewards of a career devoted to market-driven hack writing. When Reardon’s intransigent sense of artistic integrity leads to the breakdown of his marriage, he begins to learn the true cost of his commitment to elevated principles and his refusal to pander to the demands of the marketplace, as the fates of the two rivals become ever more intertwined.
Alma Classics | 672 pages
The Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (1929)
New York, 1924. Patricia and Peter are a thoroughly modern married couple. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work. Both believe in ‘Love-Outside-Marriage’. Until they don’t. Or, really, until he doesn’t. So when Peter pushes for divorce with increasing violence, Patricia has to forge a new life as a single woman: as an ex-wife. A sensational bestseller in 1929, yet utterly timeless, Ex-Wife plunges us into the ‘era of the one-night stand’. It evokes not only the Manhattan bars, fashion advertising offices, female friendships and all-night parties of a dazzling city, but the hollow affairs, emotional hangovers, backstreet abortions, and struggles for sexual freedoms amidst the moral double standards of a patriarchal world.
Faber Editions | 304 pages | introduced by Monica Heisey
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki (1914)
In the seaside city of Kamakura, a student is drawn to an enigmatic older man who swims at the same beach. The man becomes his Sensei. Against a backdrop of the rapid modernisation of Japan, their relationship endures – until one day, the young man receives a letter that divulges the full story of his Sensei’s past. One of Japan’s most admired and bestselling modern classics, Kokoro is a psychologically rich, delicately drawn meditation on loneliness, desire and duty.
Pushkin Press Classics | 256 pages | translated by Edwin McClellan | introduced by Damian Flanagan
Fire by George R. Stewart (1948)
Spitcat, a raging forest fire in the Sierra Nevada of California, had a lifespan of merely eleven days, ‘yet its effects could be reckoned ahead in centuries.’ So writes George R. Stewart in this engrossing novel of a fire started by lightning in the dry heat of September, and fanned out of control by unexpected winds. The book begins with the origins of the fire – smouldering quietly at first, unnoticed, then suddenly bursting into a terrifying inferno, devouring trees and animals over acre after acre and leaving nothing but desolation in its wake.
NYRB Classics | 336 pages | introduced by Emma Rothschild
The King is Dead by Walter Tevis (1954-81)
This long overdue collection establishes Tevis’s rightful place as a maestro of the short form. In one story, a man receives a phone call from his future self and follows their instructions to unpredictable, calamitous results. In another, a famous actor and a young actress showcase their talent for acting both on and off the stage. In all of them, Tevis reminds us again and again why his writing has long been revered for its roving curiosity and innate humanity.
W&N Essentials | 400 pages
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oooooh! Bookmarking these. I've got Ex-Wife on my nightstand and keep picking up other books. I'll reach for it next time.
The cover designs and choices are so interesting. I would love to learn more about differences between the publishing houses in how they approach their classics series, if you have any perspectives on that.