Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

A descendent of Brigham Young, Marguerite Young was born in Indiana in 1909 and spent most of her life in Greenwich Village, where she associated with writers like Richard Wright, Carson McCullers Truman Capote, and Gertrude Stein. In addition to Miss MacIntosh, My Darling she published two works of poetry, a work of nonfiction (Angel in the Forest), a collection of essays and stories (Inviting the Muses) and Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, which was published posthumously.Meghan O'Gieblyn writes essays, features, and criticism for Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, n+1, The Point, The Baffler, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times, and other publications. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and the 2023 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her essays have been included in The Best American Essays and The Contemporary American Essay anthologies. She is the author of  Interior States, which won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction, and God, Human, Animal, Machine.

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2024"[Miss MacIntosh, My Darling] is an epic of mothers and daughters, rather than of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, or war and peace, and Young's sentences, which marry the breadth of Whitman to the opulence of Nabokov, are among the most virtuosic ever produced by an American novelist." —Ryan Ruby, The New Yorker"Miss MacIntosh is a novel as infinite and mystifying as life itself." —Meghan O'Gieblyn, The Paris Review"Beautiful and strange, too big to understand all at once... there is no other novel like it." —The New York Review of Books"Young’s sentences are some of the most beautiful I’ve ever read, wherein she is prone to gorgeous listing, so that it hardly matters whether her writing is fiction or nonfiction." —Los Angeles Times"This book isn't a doorstop; it's a door, and a house, and windows, and the lot that it all sits on, and the sinkhole that's constantly swallowing it. How can you say that infinite possibility doesn't exist? It's sitting right there, and it's so big. You may not ever reach utopia, but you can always pick up this book again." —Paul Christman, The Baffler"This is a search for reality through a maze of illusions and fantasy and dreams, ultimately asserting in the words of Calderon: 'Life is a dream.'" —Anaïs Nin"Referred to as a 'quantum novel' in The Paris Review, everything within the book is both true and untrue at the same time. Young lays out each character’s inner psychology in baroque prose, and to Young, that inner reality is the purest form of truth. Dubbed the 'longest, least-remembered great American novel' by The New Yorker, Dalkey’s edition may be an extra 122 pages long, but it’s a lush world worth savoring about 10 pages at a time before bed." —Airmail Magazine