There are some wonderful reissued classics out this month, such as Another Marvelous Thing (1988) by the American writer Laurie Colwin. I was sent a copy of this short novel by Lettice Franklin, the Publishing Director at Weidenfeld and Nicolson who runs the excellent W&N Essentials classics list. She enclosed a letter in which she wrote:
I first read Laurie Colwin on the recommendation of Katherine Heiny, when I was publishing her wonderful Standard Deviation. I bought a couple of Colwin’s novels from eBay and spent a weekend in total bliss. She immediately became one of my very, very favourite authors.
Since then I have rationed our her fiction to take on every holiday I go on, and thrust copies onto friends who needed cheering. I am so, so pleased to now be thrusting a copy of Another Marvelous Thing onto you, in my official role as Colwin’s editor.
I’ve started reading myself and I’m sold! My other recommendation from this list is The Bridge Over the Neroch. I have become fascinated by the Russian writer Leonid Tsypkin since reading his dreamy masterpiece about Dostoyevsky, Summer in Baden-Baden, and this is a collection of his other works: two novellas and a handful of short stories.
Catharine, or The Bower by Jane Austen (1792-3)
While many are familiar with Jane Austen’s groundbreaking novels, few have come across her brilliantly funny unfinished novella, Catharine, or The Bower. Written when Austen was only seventeen, Catharine, or The Bower is a short but important work, as it shows her preoccupation changing from short burlesques to the satirical novels with which her name is so inextricably linked. This edition also contains The Beautiful Cassandra, a very short ‘novel in twelve chapters’ that maps out a parody of the melodramatic novels of Austen’s day – in many ways the prototype for the legacy she left behind.
Renard Press | 80 pages | introduced by G. K. Chesterton [UK]
I Am Alien to Life by Djuna Barnes (1920s and 30s)
Djuna Barnes is rightly remembered for Nightwood, her breakthrough and final novel: a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most brilliant novels of love between women to be published in the twentieth century. Barnes’s career began long before Nightwood, however, with journalism, essays, drama, and satire of extraordinary wit and courage. Long into her later life, after World War II, when she published nothing more, it was her short fiction above all that she prized and would continue to revise. Here are all the stories Barnes sought to preserve, in the versions she preferred, as well as a smattering of rarities as selected by critic and New Yorker contributor Merve Emre.
McNally Editions | 240 pages | edited by Merve Emre [UK / US]
Another Marvelous Thing by Laurie Colwin (1988)
At a perfectly ordinary cocktail party, Francis is introduced to Billy and – although it slips right by him at the time - he falls in love with her at once. Billy is a serious, often glum person. An economic historian, she is indifferent to a great many things (clothes, food, home décor), frowns easily and is frequently irritated. Francis is older. He likes routine and a well-run household; he likes to pay for dinner, open car doors and call Billy at night to make sure she is safe. Both are happily married - but not to each other.
W&N Essentials | 160 pages | introduced by Caroline O’Donoghue [UK / US]
The Crazy Kill by Chester Himes (1959)
Big Joe Pullen is dead and his wake is getting boozy. When the opium-addicted Reverend Short falls out of a window trying to see a thief fleeing the robbed store opposite, his life is saved when he lands in a bread basket, cushioned by the corpse of Valentine Haines. It’s up to detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson to find out who stabbed Valentine – though no one at the wake is keen to say much to the police. Shot through with dry, dark humour, this is Chester Himes at his hardboiled noir best.
Penguin Modern Classics | 192 pages [UK / US]
A Book for Christmas by Selma Lagerlöf
A little girl receives a gift to treasure; the creatures of the forest gather to celebrate the New Year; an evil noblewoman schemes against her beautiful niece; a cantankerous gravedigger dines with an unexpected companion on Christmas Eve . . . In this enchanting selection of winter stories, now available in English for the first time, the beloved writer Selma Lagerlöf weaves together magic and miracles, Swedish folklore and timeless fables, darkness and light, heartfelt joy and festive wonder.
Penguin Classics | 112 pages | translated by Peter Graves, Sarah Death and Linda Schenck [UK]
Vacated Landscape by Jean Lahougue (1977)
An editor at a Parisian publishing house receives a manuscript by someone calling himself Desiderio―a manuscript that bears an eerie resemblance to his own life and to a book he was planning to write on a Renaissance painter of the same name. He decides to use his vacation time to visit the place from which it was sent―the quaint, historical seaside town of V.―and believes he has identified the author: one Jean Morelle, himself a tourist, who disappeared the very day the manuscript was mailed. The narrator decides to play amateur detective and track down Morelle, unaware that as he becomes more deeply enmeshed in the mystery, the streets of V. will bend around him like a Möbius strip to form a loop that seems to offer no escape. A portrait of obsession, Vacated Landscape is both ingeniously fractal and exuberantly byzantine. It is the first novel of Jean Lahougue’s to be translated into English.
Wakefield Press | 240 pages | translated by K. E. Gormley [UK / US]
The Question of Palestine by Edward Said (1979)
A major work by one of the great public intellectuals of the twentieth century, The Question of Palestine was the first book to narrate the modern Palestinian experience in English. Edward Said’s project to ‘bring Palestine into history’ was unquestionably a success – there is no longer a question of whether Palestine had a history before colonization – and yet Palestinian self-determination is as distant as ever. With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and shaped by his own life in exile in New York, Said’s account of the traumatic national encounter of the Palestinian people with Zionism is still as pertinent and incisive today as it was on first publication.
Fitzcarraldo Classics | 376 pages | preface by Saree Makdisi [UK / US]
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan (1934)
Depression-era San Francisco, home to the lost souls of many races: immigrants, struggling writers and heartsick adolescents, collecting in automats, night schools, movies and barbershops, working in vineyards, telegram exchanges and as salesmen - and always revelling in being alive. This is the debut collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning (and rejecting) Armenian-American writer William Saroyan. Fusing Whitman’s transcendence with the eccentric characterisation of Steinbeck and Salinger, and foreshadowing the rhapsodies of the Beats, his prose is a heart-expanding experience that intoxicates to this day.
Faber Editions | 256 pages | introduced by Stephen Fry [UK / US]
The Bridge Over the Neroch and Other Stories by Leonid Tsypkin (1970s)
A small town in the Ural mountains is the backdrop to the heartbreak and joys of a Russian-Jewish family, witnessing romance and illness, funerals and friendships, and the catastrophe of wartime invasion. Amidst the snowy peaks of the Ararat valley, a married couple from Moscow admire the view from their hotel balcony, unprepared for the absurdist realities of tourism in the USSR. From chandeliered metro stations to institute bus stops, monolithic skyscrapers and cockroach-infested apartments, Leonid Tsypkin evokes the tragicomedy of Soviet existence in transcendental prose.
Faber | 320 pages | translated by Jamey Gambrell | introduced by Jon McGregor [UK / US]
The Complete Writings by Zhuāngzǐ (4th - 2nd centuries BC)
The Zhuangzi – an anthology of anonymous writings produced in China between the fourth and second centuries BC – is one of the world’s great literary treasures and the single most important source for early Daoist philosophy. It has exerted a profound influence on Chinese thought, literature, and culture, inspiring philosophy, poetry, idioms, proverbs, and even visual art. This volume provides a complete, annotated English translation of the Zhuangzi with a philosophical focus that guides readers in understanding and appreciating the text’s world of thought.
Oxford World’s Classics | 400 pages | translated by Chris Fraser [UK / US]
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
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I love the way these posts not only add new books to my list but remind me of others I want to read too. I’ve had Summer in Baden Baden unread on my shelf for years.
I read half of Summer in Baden Baden while I read Crime and Punishment last year. I laid it aside because I hadn’t finished it before my Russian lit group moved on to another author. It is still in the pile here next to my reading chair, so I must pick it up again. It is beautiful, but disturbing; the realities of being married to a “great” man.