Read Lauren Groff's Foreword to Ann Schlee's 'Rhine Journey'
Excerpts Nathan Rostron Excerpts Nathan Rostron

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.

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A Life Lived with Intensity and Brilliance: Daniel Mendelsohn on Jane Ellen Harrison
Excerpts Nathan Rostron Excerpts Nathan Rostron

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. 

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Announcing the McNally Editions Book Club
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Announcing the McNally Editions Book Club

Held monthly at McNally Jackson Downtown Brooklyn and hosted by Ama Kwarteng, the McNally Editions Book Club is organized around books that have been largely forgotten, the reissued classics and rare finds that have slipped from the mainstream and are waiting to be discovered by a new set of readers. This month we’ll discuss Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, first published anonymously in 1929, a story of a divorce and its aftermath that scandalized the Jazz Age.

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Creditable, Surprising, Abundantly and Elegantly Good: Michael Hofmann on Duff Cooper's Only Novel
Excerpts Nathan Rostron Excerpts Nathan Rostron

Creditable, Surprising, Abundantly and Elegantly Good: Michael Hofmann on Duff Cooper's Only Novel

Duff Cooper (1890–1953): soldier, diplomat, parliamentarian, cabinet minister, man of letters. Also gambler, lover, and bon viveur. He came from a family flecked with elopements and illegitimacies, though also (“a dash of Hanoverian blood”) with ancestral ties to the British royal family . . . Duff Cooper was a product of Eton and New College, Oxford; a war hero, in what appears to have been a somewhat chaotic solitary action in the so-called “Battle of the Mist” on the Albert Canal, for which he received a DSO; and a celebrity husband as the successful wooer of a famous British beauty, Lady Diana Cooper, all by 1920.

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Dinah Brooke, the Brilliant Forgotten Novelist Who Gave it All Up to Live in an Ashram
Interviews Nathan Rostron Interviews Nathan Rostron

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.”

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