Dorothy Parker and the Art of the Literary Takedown
Gary Indiana’s Exuberant Venom
See Spreads from the Limited-Edition ‘Cafe Gitane: 30 Years’ Coffee Table Book
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
Watch the Trailer for the EX-WIFE Audiobook
Join Us at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 29!
The Book That Prepared This Veteran Editor for a Literary Life
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.
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
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.
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.
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