Visar resultat för..."McNally Jackson Books"

When, in 1927, Dorothy Parker became a book critic for the New Yorker, she was already a legendary wit, a much-quoted member of the Algonquin Round Table, and an arbiter of literary taste. In the year that she spent as a weekly reviewer, under the rubric “Constant Reader,” she created what is still the most entertaining book column ever written. Parker’s hot takes have lost none of their heat, whether she’s taking aim at the evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (“She can go on like that for hours. Can, hell - does”), praising Hemingway’s latest collection (“He discards detail with magnificent lavishness”), or dissenting from the Tao of Pooh (“And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up”).Introduced with characteristic wit and sympathy by Sloane Crosley, Constant Reader gathers the complete weekly New Yorker reviews that Parker published from October 1927 through November 1928, with gimlet-eyed appreciations of the high and low, from Isadora Duncan to Al Smith, Charles Lindbergh to Little Orphan Annie, Mussolini to Emily Post

“A compact, intricately patterned story of unrequited erotic obsession, focused on the relationship between a closeted English novelist and a beautiful Italian philosopher . . . Among the novel’s daring ideas is its suggestion that closetedness and English taciturnity are part of a common condition, each an art of concealment.” —Charlie Tyson, Harper’s MagazineA witty, heartbreaking tale of unrequited love by “one of the finest and most remarkable English novelists of our time.” (The Scotsman)Antonio Valli, a gifted Italian philosopher in his thirties, has left his wife and children behind in Florence for a one-year research fellowship at a provincial English university. Handsome and charming, Antonio is irresistible to men and women both—and he knows it. One who falls under his spell is Dick Thompson, a successful middle-aged novelist from whom Antonio rents a room. For the first time in years, Dick finds himself desperately, passionately in love, but the games the manipulative Italian plays with him throw the older man’s life into chaos.Published only three years after the decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK, A Domestic Animal is Francis King’s most intimate and daringly autobiographical novel: a “wry, anguished study . . . of love and jealousy [that] is hard to forget” (Robert Baldick, The Daily Telegraph).

“Like the diary of Samuel Pepys or the memoirs of François-René de Chateaubriand, Beloved Son Felix [is] an invaluable and entertaining firsthand exploration of a bygone era . . . We are allowed a rare glimpse into the street-level experiences of a common Renaissance man.” —Michael Patrick Brady, The Wall Street JournalThe wildly vivid, rare, and revealing journals of a sixteenth-century medical student.In 1552, sixteen-year-old Felix Platter left Basel, Switzerland, and journeyed 370 miles to Montpelier, France to study medicine. His journals chronicle five astonishing years of youth in a time of plague, war, and awakening. A Protestant in a Catholic kingdom, Felix witnessed blood-chilling executions and engaged in secret religious discussions with his landlord, a Marrano Jew. He learned to play the lute, tasted olive oil for the first time, and swam in the sea. He flirted (unsuccessfully) and danced (disastrously), fled from highway robbers, saw John Calvin preach, survived an outbreak of the bubonic plague, joined in a massive, orange-throwing food fight, acquired a dog, and spent one Christmas Eve alone and afraid of the dark.Most astonishing of all, he wrote it down.As Stephen Greenblatt writes in his introduction to this new edition, “Keeping diaries and writing autobiographies did not become a widespread practice until the mid-seventeenth century”—but Felix created an astonishing document: an intimate, sometimes hilarious chronicle of Renaissance adolescence from the inside, whose “vividness, intimacy, candor, and charm” lend it an “altogether rare and revealing character.”

In their lovely old Cotswolds village, Janet and Susan are known to all the other villagers as “the girls” - a fixture. Partners in love and work, co-proprietors of a picturesque shop specialising in the work of local artisans and farmers, they lead an enviable, enviably settled life.So it’s no catastrophe when Sue, the younger of the two, feels the need to take a month to travel on her own, leaving Jan alone to run their stall at the Inland Waterways Rally Craft Fair. Nor is it any real threat when a kindly gay man named Alan lends Jan a hand in Sue’s absence, or when the two wind up sharing some wine and even a bunk for the night.If Jan turns out to be pregnant some weeks after Sue’s return to the nest, what’s that but cause for joy? And when Alan happens to come visiting, by and by, finding the delighted girls raising a beautiful baby boy, who can blame him for wanting to share in a small part of their bliss?Yes, theirs is an enviable, enviably settled life. And the girls will defend it with every tool at their disposal.

“A precocious literary triumph . . . Élisabeth is far more than a footnote. It would be a rewarding, exciting read even if the identity of its author were unfamiliar.” —Richard Brody, The New YorkerWitty banter, lust, ennui, and an undercurrent of violence percolate beneath a seemingly paradisiacal summer on the eve of World War II, in this landmark translation of the first and only novel by Éric Rohmer, the French New Wave’s most prolific and beloved filmmaker.Fifteen years before completing his first feature film—and ten before beginning a transformative editorial stint at Cahiers du cinéma that would usher the journal, and French cinema, into a new era—the man who would become known worldwide as Éric Rohmer published a single novel. Released by Éditions Gallimard alongside the early works of Claude Simon and Marguérite Duras, Élisabeth was part of the first flowering of what would come to be known as the nouveau roman—and was also the “matrix,” as Rohmer himself later put it, of the images, ideas, and formal concerns of his first sequence of films, Six Moral Tales.Set in the sunstruck countryside east of Paris during the summer of 1939, a year ahead of the German invasion, where the upper-middle-class Roby family and its eponymous matriarch are spending a listless summer, Élisabeth is a war-novel awaiting a war. While the teenage Roby children and their friends swim, flirt, and lie to one another among the baking fields and icy meanders of the Marne, the novel becomes the scene of an anticipatory haunting. The simmering paranoia, calculated blankness, and potential violence of the coming Occupation are already present—as it were, in mufti. With a cool, kaleidoscopic eye, Rohmer lays out his protagonists and their precarious peace—their restlessness, their desperate boredom, their petty romantic agonies—with the unsettling chilliness and the sinister exactitude of details on a tactical map.

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. These are tales of women “‘tragique’ and ‘triste’ and ‘tremendous’ all at once,” of sons and daughters being initiated into the ugly comedy of life, monuments all to a worldview singular and scathing. As Emre writes in her foreword, “[Barnes’s] themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts . . . her characters may be alien to life, but they are alive - spectacularly, grotesquely alive.”

From the groundbreaking author of They comes an "elegantly slender account of a love affair, a death, and a mystery." (Janice Elliott, The Sunday Telegraph)Twenty years ago, Cassandra had an affair with a married woman named Anne. Although begun in passion, their entanglement ended abruptly, shortly after which Anne killed herself. Was Anne beyond help, or did Cassandra bear some responsibility for her lover's demise? Haunted by her memories of their time together, and finally able to tell her story, Cassandra unburdens herself in a letter to her dear friend Francis.Originally published in 1984, and closely based on a tumultuous and ultimately tragic relationship the author had with a married woman two decades earlier, The Shelf is a deeply moving work of autofiction-"Though I shall deny it, of course," Kay Dick told a reporter shortly after its publication. Written with a "quiet elegance" (Elaine Feinstein, The Times), it's a "tour de force" that places Dick "in the same category of sensibility as Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield and Ford Madox Ford" (Gillian Freeman).

Over more than fifty years at the New Yorker, E. B. White came to define a kind of ideal American prose: clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. He also did more than any writer to define his favourite city. His classic Here Is New York captured a moment in the life of Manhattan with precision and love—but his was no fleeting infatuation. In New York Sketches, the first collection of his casual pieces about the city, White ranges at whim from the nesting habits of pigeons to the aisles of a calculator trade-show on Eighth Avenue, from the behaviour of snails in aquariums to the ghosts of old romance that haunt a flower shop or a fire escape or an old hotel. These sketches, some less than a page long, many written for a laugh, or in response to the news of the day, show us White at his most playful and inventive.New York Sketches is a welcome diversion for every New Yorker—native, adoptive, or far from home—and a perfect introduction, not only to what White called “the inscrutable and lovely town,” but to the everyday enchantments of one of her fondest reporters.

“Can’t sleep tonight. Was lying in bed reading the biography of a great man whose genius deserted him . . . The genius who deserted me was you.” In a series of late-night letters, gorgeous, funny, filled with memory, sensuality, and regret, a seducer calls across the years to the great love of his youth: an older, revered expatriate known, in his adoptive city, as the King of Naples. As the narrator evokes their affair, in scenes of beauty and remorse, his memories range over the men who came after and before, especially the seductive father who still haunts his erotic imagination.First published in 1978, before the trilogy of frankly autobiographical novels that made him famous, Nocturnes for the King of Naples reveals Edmund White at his most poetic, playful, and evocative, a magician on the level of James Salter, James Merrill, or Vladimir Nabokov.

“If Raymond Chandler or Flannery O’Connor had written a vampire novel, it might read with the brutal and passionate clarity of Stainless . . . The ultimate late night in L.A.” —Katherine DunnA bloody, erotic love story from “the greatest horror writer you’ve never read . . . In Stainless, Todd Grimson set out to write ‘the Ultimate, Final Vampire Novel’—and succeeded.” (The Guardian)Justine is a vampire. Keith just lives like one. An ex-junkie and ex-rock star, his hands mangled by his dead ex’s own jealous ex, he’s let go of his ambitions. He’s content to be Justine’s live-in Renfield, helping her pick up dinner when she needs a bite, keeping an eye on her lavish L.A. manor when the sun is out and she’s down for her beauty sleep. It’s true that Justine has been around for a few centuries and Keith barely three decades, but they’re good for each other: Justine is teaching Keith to take the long view; Keith is reminding her how it feels to be alive. Yet a cohort of criminals, desperate artists, dead-enders, hangers-on, and wanna-bes, undead and otherwise, threaten their curious union. Can love stay untainted in a world of monsters?First published in 1996, Todd Grimson’s Stainless is a noir fantasia, a symphony of bloody horror, and a woozy, erotic tour of night-side L.A. Not only is it the greatest vampire novel of the twentieth century, it may be the last, best farewell to the mythic Los Angeles of Bette Davis, Dennis Hopper, and Less than Zero. In a league with the best of James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler—and closing the coffin for good on poor old Bram Stoker—Stainless is the final word on fangs, hangovers, and heartbreak.

“A hidden treasure of Scottish literature, read this and then read all her other works.” —Douglas StuartA mordant, cautionary tale about a working-class woman hemmed in on all sides, written by “the most unfairly neglected of all Scottish authors” (Alasdair Gray, author of Poor Things).“I’ve got a job,” I told Adam.“Good for you. I can now relinquish all responsibility for this household then?”“And I can save up for a divorce.”“So, let’s celebrate,” said Adam.Discovered by three of Scotland’s most celebrated writers, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Liz Lochhead, when they were visiting a local writers’ workshop in the late 1970s, Agnes Owens—then in her 50s—claimed she’d joined the group just to “get out of the house.” She had grown up in a working-class family outside Glasgow, done badly at school, and had worked in factories, as a cleaner, and as an occasional typist. When she published her highly acclaimed first novel at the age of 58, it launched a most unexpected literary career.Nowhere is Owens’s black humor and attention to the surreal banalities and frustrations of ordinary existence better showcased than in her third novel, A Working Mother. Our beleaguered heroine is Betty, beset by her depressed, alcoholic war-vet husband Adam and their smart-mouthed kids. Neither an affair with Adam’s attractive friend Brendan (a disappointment), nor her new job as a typist (for a leerer with roving hands) can lift her out of the rut. Is it any wonder she’s taken to the bottle now too?As Megan Nolan writes in the foreword to this new edition, in a “shrewd and ironic style” that is all Owens’s own, A Working Mother proves that “any given life rewards intelligent attention when it is as fine and as funny and incandescent as hers.”