Category: book acquired

Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man (Book acquired, 23 Jan. 2026)

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I started Thomas Kendall’s second novel, How I Killed the Universal Man last night. Good stuff so far. Blurb from publisher Whisk(e)y Tit:

John Lakerman, alternative current affairs journalist for donkeyWolf media, is sent to participate and report on a clinical trial for a newly developed, biopharmaceutical, antidepressant. While researching the article, and the disappearance of its lead researcher, Lakerman is drawn into a complex world of body augmentations, migrant labour, billionaires, a Virtual Reality Game and a series of fatally seductive mutations.

How I Killed The Universal Man is a transhumanist noir taking place in a near future where environmental disaster and the advent of biological A.I is leading to the radical reorganisation of consciousness. A narrative about the unknown forces structuring narrative’s necessity, How I Killed The Universal Man begins from the premise that reality is always virtual.

Richard Hell’s Godlike (Book acquired, 23 Jan. 2026)

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Richard Hell’s 2005 novel Godlike is getting a new printing from NYRB. Godlike reimagines the volatile Verlaine–Rimbaud dyad as a 1970s No Wave New York collision of art, desire, and language language language. Symbolist rebellion transmutes into downtown punk nihilism, drugs, and poetry. This corrosive Künstlerroman was originally issued by Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery (an imprint of Akashic books). Read the description/blurb at NYRB; here’s a taste from Chapter 15, around the middle of the novel:

They spent the greatest amount of their time together reading and writing and sometimes talking in T’s apartment. These were probably their best times too despite being experienced largely as tedium. They preferred the times of thrills, but the thrills grew out of the tension; and the mild, mildly restless, half-frustrated times of the many nights and late afternoons of doing almost nothing in T’s apartment, or walking the streets without direction, were their true lives.

T’s room was like some kind of glum office in its lack of daylight and its featurelessness, but with the little pictures now tacked on the walls, and the typewriter and sheets of paper, and the drugs, it got some character. He’d picked up a few stray pieces of furniture on the streets, including a table and three chairs, crates for shelves, and a beat-up old oriental rug. There was a secondhand portable record player too and a few albums.

They drank coffee and beer and sometimes codeine cough syrup and sometimes smoked some grass or snorted a little THC or mescaline and every once in a while a tiny bit of heroin, but mostly they lay around and lazily, impatiently goofed and wrote and complained, goading each other. Sometimes in the middle of the night one of them would go out for a container of fresh ice cream from Gem’s Spa. They’d go to a movie sometimes, or wander the rows of used bookstores on Fourth Avenue, or drink in a bar, but most of t he time was spent in the dim back apartment.

The days and nights were as endless as wallpaper patterns. Boredom and irritation were normal and lengthened out into sometimes-mean giggles and into pages of writing. Writing was their pay. Books were reality. The room was a cruder dimension-poor annex to the pages of writing. The writing, as casual as it was—smeared eraseable typing-pages with revisions scribbled on and crumpled pages of rejected tries—was the brightly lit and wildly littered universe erupting out from the dark, poor, inexpressive room.

How odd is it to have as a purpose in life the aim of treating life-in the medium created for the purpose of coldly corresponding to it, words—as raw material for amusing variations on itself? Sometimes T. and Paul fantasized about this, imagining themselves as godlike philosopher poets encouched in the advanced civilization, languorously sipping their fermented grain as they spun ideas and mental-sensual constructions of life-language in the air for the pleasure of their own delectation.

 

Guillermo Stitch’s The Coast of Everything (Book acquired, early Jan. 2026)

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Guillermo Stitch’s follow up to 2020’s Lake of Urine is The Coast of Everything, an enormous seven-hundred-and-something pager that with a matryoshka doll (decon)structure. I really liked Lake of Urine, a zany, slapstick surreal adventure story. The Coast of Everything of course intrigues me. It’s also pretty big! It’s been staring at me for a few weeks now, daring me to plunge into something deep. (I’ve been reading only short stories and nonfiction so far this year — story collections by Joy Williams and Robert Bingham, and a depressing and engrossing book called The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp.) So anyway, I dipped in this afternoon, read the preamble, I suppose you would call it, and then dug into the first of what I take to be connected/nested novellas, “The Tale of the Enchanted Road.” I plan to keep swimming.

Indie publisher Sagging Meniscus’s blurb:

To find the center, begin at the edge…

A daughter’s devotion parts her from her father. A dutiful soldier sentences his daughter to a loveless exile and her mother to madness. With her last breath a dying woman exhales the whole world. A young girl with a broken body holds it up.

Their nested stories bleed into one another: tributaries in search of a common sea; parched souls in search of an oasis; ink racing through blotting paper.

A book with no ending and endless beginnings, The Coast of Everything—the long-awaited second novel from the author of Lake of Urine—is an astonishing masterpiece, epic, unfurling, baffling and beguiling. A gumshoe noir, a space opera; a multiverse melodrama, an adventure; a leap of faith, a call to prayer and a call to arms. It is a notification of our first duty wherever our humanity is threatened: to persist.

Includes two free recipes.

Robert Bingham/Harry Crews (Books acquired, 9 Jan. 2026)

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I finally gave in and picked up Robert Bingham’s books, the novel Lightning on the Sun and the collection Pure Slaughter Value.

Bingham was one of the founders of the literary magazine and press Open City. Open City published David Berman’s collection Actual Air in 1999. Bingham was friends with Berman and the Pavement boys. He was also the wealthy scion of an old Louisville family. He o.d.’d in ’99. Both Malkmus and Berman eulogized him in song — SM in “Church on White,” the Silver Jews in “Death of an Heir of Sorrows”:

I wish I had a rhinestone suit
I wish I had a new pair of boots
But mostly I wish
I wish I was with you

I think what really plugged the Bingham back into my brain was going through a July 1999 issue of SPIN magazine. I was looking for something else, but I found an old Pavement profile in which Bingham shows up early with bobo hockey tix. From the profile:

Pavement are standing outside Madison Square Garden, shouldering their way through tens of thousands of burly hockey fans. There’s a sold-out game about to start—the Rangers vs. the Mighty Ducks—and cops, peanut vendors, and entire families in matching red-white-and-blue Rangers jerseys mill about, blocking the sidewalk. “We’ve never gone to a hockey game together,” says bassist Mark Ibold. He is unceremoniously shoved aside by a squall of kids bearing cotton candy. “Usually we go see baseball games.”

Pavement pal Robert “Bingo” Bingham, a New York fiction writer, grows increasingly nervous as they approach the arena. He bought the band scalped tickets, an offense he’s been nailed for once before. “Should we come up with a fall-back strategy?” he says.

“Don’t sweat it, Bingo,” says bandleader Stephen Malkmus, still wearing the track suit and squash shoes he threw on this morning while awaiting clean laundry. The band is determined to get in, as percussionist Bob Nastanovich has already phoned his bookie to bet on the Rangers. “We don’t much care for the Ducks,” Nastanovich says.

“They’re all Steve Garveys,” adds the clean-cut Malkmus. Nastanovich takes a final drag from his Marlboro, then leads the group through the throngs to the ticket line. They cruise right in, home free—until a security squad catches up with them moments later.

“You aren’t going anywhere with those,” a guard says, motioning at the ticket stubs in Bingo’s hand. “They’re fakes.”

“Oh, please,” Bingo says. He knows they’re scalped, but fakes? A bit stunned, the band takes a look. “Well, yeah,” Ibold says. “I can see that.”

The printing is all faded and off-register.

“Mine looks like it was perforated with a cookie cutter,” says Nastanovich. Upon further inspection, they realize they all have the same seat.

Meanwhile, the Garden crowd is going ballistic. Christopher Reeve has just been wheeled onto the ice for the opening ceremony. Security hems and haws for a while, and finally takes pity on Pavement. A bearded fellow rests a cozy hand on Bingo’s arm. “You tell me who you bought these from,” he says, “and if he’s still out there, we’ll bust the fucker.”

Bingo hangs his head. “I don’t remember,” he mutters, and ambles off. Pavement trudge back to the street, reassuring their friend that the night is still young. They end up viewing the game at a nearby sports bar, and work on getting stinking drunk. Nedved is benched. Gretzky is checked. The once formidable Rangers lose handily, 4–1. Nastanovich looks up from his Bass Ale and shakes his head, laughing. He just lost $100.

I also couldn’t resist a signed copy of Harry Crews’ 1998 novel Celebration.

If you can make out the inscription, let me know. I think it’s to Frank, who was on the ultimate quest for…?

 

Joy Williams’ The Pelican Child (Book acquired, 27 Dec. 2025)

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I finally made it to The Lynx bookstore this weekend while visiting some old friends in Gainesville, FL. The Lynx was opened by novelist Lauren Groff and her husband Clay Kallman last year; its inventory emphasizes challenged and banned books, BIPOC and LGBTQ authors, and Florida writers. There was a nice selection of graphic novels, children’s books, and even some zines. A fair bit of the store’s inventory seemed to be given over to the kind of YAified fiction that sells well, along with a lot of books on contemporary social issues. A lot of those titles tended to skew towards what I think of as “in this house” politics — this ain’t your local anarchist bookstore — but it’s pretty well stocked.

I picked up Joy Williams’ latest collection, The Pelican Child, as well as copy of Williams’ history/guidebook The Florida Keys to give to my hosts, who spend six weeks in the Keys every summer. My wife also got the newest Alison Roman cookbook.

Gerhard Rühm’s The Folded Clock (Book acquired, drifted through, last week or the week before, end of 2025)

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I dug/was perplexed by Gerhard Rühm’s Cake and Prostheses a few years ago, so when I got my soft pink hands on The Folded Clock, (translated like C & P by Alexander Booth), I was intrigued. Publisher Twisted Spoon describes The Folded Clock as a collection of “number poems, comprising typewriter ideograms, typed concrete poetry, collages of everyday paper ephemera and scraps, and a wide variety of literary forms where the visual pattern created on the page underpins the thematic meaning.”

Rühm seems to identify Kurt Schwitters as his artistic precursor, or an artistic precursor. Like Cake and Prostheses, the pieces in The Folded Clock defy easy categorization — Is it a script or a poem or art? is probably the wrong question.

Passing eyes over the text is probably not the way to go; Rühm’s asking you to engage. As Joseph Schreiber puts it in his review at Rough Ghosts, you might follow Rühm’s directions and “allow yourself to read aloud and, there are you are, from the very beginning, not simply reading but actively engaging with the poem.”

I don’t really like numbers that much, at least not in a mob, a gang, a swarm. I tried and didn’t work out. Not just with this book but in general. I can’t count sheep, I guess.

I had a better time with Rühm’s forays into music and letters and collages; I enjoyed whatever psychotic version of minesweeper or Sudoku this piece is:

Michel Tournier’s Friday (Book acquired, 12 Nov. 2025)

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Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel Friday is getting a reprint (Norman Denny’s translation) from NYRB. Their blurb:

Friday is the Friday of Robinson Crusoe, and Michel Tournier’s retelling of Defoe’s tale of solitude and survival turns it on its head. Cast away on a tropical island, the God-fearing Crusoe hasn’t the least doubt what he must do: tame the wilderness and stamp it with the sign of civilization, a fool’s errand to which he devotes years and in which he comes close to succeeding. Then Friday shows up, infuriating him with his “irrepressible, lyrical, and blasphemous” laugh, and a new, more challenging task confronts the island’s self-proclaimed master. But after an unforeseen event destroys all of Crusoe’s work, it is up to Friday to teach him just how ignorant he is and always has been.

Friday was Tournier’s first novel, and it quickly found a wondering and delighted readership. Writing about the book in his autobiography, Tournier asks, “What was Friday to Daniel Defoe? Nothing: an animal, at best a creature waiting to receive his humanity from Robinson Crusoe, who as a European was in sole possession of all knowledge and wisdom.” In Friday, Tournier steps out of the secular world of the Western novel into the sacred precincts of universal mythology. The result is radiant, sensual, funny, and utterly unexpected—a modern masterpiece.

Pierre Guyotat’s memoir Idiocy (Book acquired, Oct. 2025)

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Pierre Guyotat’s memoir Idiocy is new in English translation from publisher NYRB and translator and Peter Behrman de Sinéty. NYRB’s blurb–

Pierre Guyotat was one of the most radical and uncompromising writers of the twentieth century, a literary successor to Sade, Bataille, and Genet whose visceral fictions and bold experiments with language have earned him cult status in France and abroad. Idiocy is his searing memoir of coming of age between 1958 and 1962, when he discovered his burgeoning sexuality and aptitude for rebellion—first against his father, whom he escaped to become a writer in Paris, then against the French military authorities as a conscript in the Algerian War.

Guyotat recounts the atrocities he witnessed first-hand in Algeria, as well as his own harrowing experience of being arrested for inciting desertion and imprisoned in a hole in the ground for three months. Guyotat wields his language like a scalpel, merciless in his exploration of human brutality in all its horrible, granular detail. Yet his generous depictions of camaraderie and friendship are just as unflinching.

The winner of the 2018 Prix Médicis, Idiocy is an incisive condemnation of violence and colonialism, and a bracing, hallucinatory late masterpiece from a writer hailed by Edmund White as “one of the few geniuses of our day.”

Gabrielle Tergit’s Effingers (Book acquired, 18 Oct. 2025)

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Gabriele Tergit’s 1951 novel Effingers is out in its first published English translation, by Sophie Duvernoy, from publisher NYRB. From Sandra Lipner’s English-language review of the novel (Lipner is reviewing the original German edition; she concludes the 2020 review by wishing for an English translation):

Tergit writes as both novelist and historian. Her protagonists are complex and so incredibly human that the book reads like a family biography written by a close friend, rather than a piece of fiction based on the author’s imagination. Tergit did write from experience: she was born in 1894 as Elise Hirschmann in Berlin and grew up in the world she describes. Her grandparents were practising Jews from southern Germany, and her upbringing gave her an intimate knowledge of Mathias Effinger’s world. According to her biographer Nicole Henneberg, the three houses featured in the book resemble her and her husband’s childhood homes. Only the fact that her protagonists’ politics, professions, and personalities are so expertly nuanced as to contrast with each other in a panoply of responses to historical currents and affairs suggests that the book is a work of fiction. Tergit’s attention to detail as a writer is astounding and allows her readers to immerse themselves in a world that no longer exists. By chronicling the lives of the two interlinked families across three generations and 70 years, and by including detailed descriptions of furniture, dress, and food, Tergit creates a panorama of a milieu that ceased to exist with the Holocaust. As a result, Effingers will be of interest to everyone who enjoys good fiction, cultural historians and readers with German-Jewish roots.

Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver (Book acquired, 14 Oct. 2025)

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Jan Kerouac’s first autofiction novel Baby Driver is getting a reprint from NYRB. Their blurb:

“Was it January or February? The coconut fronds waving, shining like green hair in the sun, gave no clue.” Fifteen-year-old Jan is pregnant, gamely living off rice and whatever fish her boyfriend John can catch in Yelapa, Mexico. Her sojourn there–both thrilling and heartbreaking–marks the beginning of a life of restless wandering. Jan Kerouac, the only child of Jack Kerouac, first published her autobiographical novel Baby Driver in 1981. Fearless and frank, Baby Driver is the story of a difficult childhood, marked by maternal warmth and paternal disregard, and of the heady freedom and precariousness of self-reliance.

Mattia Filice’s Driver (Book acquired, 26 Sept. 2025)

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Mattia Filice’s Driver is new in English translation by Jacques Houis. Here’s NYRB’s blurb:

Driver is a book about a young man from the provinces who moves to Paris and studies to become a train driver. As he learns about trains and their intricate workings, he is transported into a world in constant motion, with its own laws and codes and specialized language, its own heroes and legends and manifold dangers. Written in a style as surprising and eclectic as a night on the rails—packed with inside jokes and allusions that extend from Arthur Rimbaud to hip-hop and beyond—Driver takes us deep into the world of the train, until it becomes, like the ship in Moby-Dick, a microcosm of the world at large.

Drawing on twenty years of experience driving trains, Mattia Filice writes memorably about solitude and sleepless nights in the cab, accidents and breakdowns, but also about the lives and personalities of his fellow workers and the conversations and solidarity they share, both on the job and on the picket line, in what is a continual struggle to improve the conditions of work.

Unsentimental yet full of feeling, Driver is both an unusual and formally adventurous novel about labor and life and a stirring ode to the power of the collective.

Surprisingly, NYRB’s blurb doesn’t mention the novel’s striking style; on the page, the episodes of Driver look like poems that sometimes coalesce into prose. The chapter titles and section titles also seem to cast the novel as a take on knight’s quest. Compelling stuff.

Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket (Book acquired, 30 Sept. 2025)

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Here are the first four paragraphs of Thomas Pynchon’s ninth novel Shadow Ticket:

When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line. What with tough times down the Lake in Chicago, changes in the wind, Prohibition repeal just around the corner, Big Al in the federal pokey in Atlanta, Outfit affairs grown jumpy and unpredictable, anybody needing an excuse to get out of town in a hurry comes breezing up here to Milwaukee, where it seldom gets more serious than somebody stole somebody’s fish.

 Hicks McTaggart has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats up from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake, the Chicago Outfit handling whatever needs to be taken care of in Milwaukee since Vito Guardalabene cashed in his chips ten years ago, though Vito’s successor Pete Guardalabene is still considered head man in the Ward, gets his picture in the social pages smiling at weddings and so forth.

 Loitering in the alleyway in back of Pasquale’s Bella Palermo, Hicks can hear sounds of noodle-flexing sociability, smell spaghetti sauce and garlic frying and sfinciuni bagherese baking over an olive-branch fire, and it’s making him hungry, though this close to payday his lunch menu is a thermos of coffee and a buttermilk cruller stashed in a pocket someplace.

 The explosion when it comes seems to be from somewhere across the river and nearer the Lake. Forks and glassware pause between tabletop and mouth, as if everybody’s observing a moment of stillness, and nobody seems surprised.

An explosion! There we go.

Ben Passmore’s Black Arms to Hold You Up (Book acquired, 23 Sept. 2025)

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I was psyched to get an early copy of Ben Passmore’s Black Arms to Hold You Up this week. I love the dramatic vibrancy of Passmore’s cartooning, and his economic use of black, white, gray, and red throughout the book. I should have a review out around its release on 7 Oct. 2025.

Here is publisher Pantheon’s blurb:

It’s the summer of 2020, and downtown Philly is up in flames. “You’re not out in the streets with everyone else?” Ronnie asks his ambivalent son, Ben, shambling in with arms full of used books: the works of Malcom X, Robert F. Williams, Assata and Sanyika Shakur, among others. “Black liberation is your fight, too.”

So begins Black Arms to Hold You Up, a boisterous, darkly funny, and sobering march through Black militant history by political cartoonist Ben Passmore. From Robert Charles’s shootout with the police in 1900, to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, to the Los Angeles and George Floyd uprisings of the 1990s and 2020, readers will tumble through more than a century of armed resistance against the racist state alongside Ben—and meet firsthand the mothers and fathers of the movement, whose stories were as tragic as they were heroic.

What, after so many decades lost to state violence, is there left to fight for? Deeply researched, vibrantly drawn, and bracingly introspective, Black Arms to Hold You Up dares to find the answer.

Siegfried Kracauer’s Ginster (Book acquired, 16 Sept. 2025)

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Siegfried Kracauer’s 1928 novel Ginster is forthcoming in translation by Carl Skoggard from NYRB. Their blurb:

Ginster is a war novel about not going to war; about how war, far from the front, comes to warp every aspect of outer and inner life and to infect the workings of language itself. The subject is World War I, but this novel by the brilliant twentieth-century sociologist, journalist, and film critic Siegfried Kracauer, first published in 1928, has as much to say about what it means to live under the sulking great powers and blood-imbrued satrapies of today as it does about the inflamed self-righteousness of late imperial Germany. In Ginster, as in Greek tragedy, massacre occurs offstage, arriving only as “news,” but the everyday horror of a society engineered for the continual production of violence is not to be denied. Ginster, the Chaplinesque antihero, intent chiefly on saving his own skin, works hard to keep his distance from the war machine, and yet making a living, he discovers, is all about keeping it running. How different, in the end, is his dreamy self-absorption from the empty military language that has come to pervade every aspect of civilian life in the homeland?

Bialik/Rilke (Two poetry collections acquired, 13 Sept. 2025)

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Two new collections from NYRB’s Poets imprint: On the Slaughter by Hayim Nahman Bialik, translated by Peter Cole, and Fifty Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Geoffrey Lehmann. NYRB’s Bialik blurb:

Few poets in the history of Hebrew have possessed the power and prescience of Hayim Nahman Bialik. Born in 1873 in a small Ukrainian village, he spent his most productive years in Odessa and in his fifties made his way to British Mandatory Palestine. He died in Vienna in 1934. His body of work opened a path from the traditional Jewish world of Eastern Europe into a more expansive Jewish humanism. In a line that stretches back to the Bible and the Hebrew poetry of Muslim and Christian Spain, he stands out—in the words of Maxim Gorky—as “a modern Isaiah.” He remains to this day an iconic and shockingly relevant poet, essayist, and tutelary spirit.

Translated and introduced by MacArthur-winning poet Peter Cole, On the Slaughter presents Bialik for the first time in English as a masterful artist, someone far more politically and psychologically unsettling than his reputation as the national poet of the Jewish people might suggest. This compact collection offers readers a panoramic view of Bialik’s inner and outer landscapes—from his visionary “poems of wrath” that respond in startling fashion to the devastations of pogroms and revolutionary unrest to quietly sublime lyrics of longing and withering self-assessment. The volume also includes a sampling of slyly sophisticated verse for children, and a moving introduction that bridges Bialik’s moment and our own.

And “The Grown-up,” a poem from Rilke in Lehmann’s translation:

“The Grown-up”

All stood on her, all that has ever been
and was the world, and stood, its fears and grace,
as trees stand straight and rooted in one place, and solemn, like the memory of a race
or Ark of God, all-seeing and not seen.

She carried it; knowledge of who they are,
the flyers, those who flee, the distant ones,
the monsters and the awkward, diffident sons,
casually like a brimming water jar
on her calm head. Then in the midst of play,
preparing, changing slowly, cell by cell,
she did not sense the first white veil that fell
across her open face, bland as the day,

almost opaque, never to lift again.
And she forgot the answers she once knew,
leaving some vagueness she could not explain:
in you, the child who you have been, in you.

Another Dalloway

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Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic Mrs Dalloway is getting a centennial update from publisher NYRB. The new edition is edited by literary critic Edward Mendelson, who makes a persuasive case for his version of the text in the book’s afterword, an essay with the appropriately flat title “The Text of This Edition.” “This edition is an attempt to provide the least bad, perhaps, among many possible editions,” Mendelson writes, before appending after a semicolon: “other editors will rank it more harshly.” I imagine it’s hard work to tidy a giant.

As a point of comparison, I pulled out the HBJ mass-market paperback of Mrs Dalloway that I read at least three times years and years ago; there’s no front or back matter, no intro or afterword, not even a credit for the lovely art. I (a version of myself) had scribbled “symbol is not universal” in the narrow margin of page 41; underlined “narrower and narrower” on page 45; boxed a paragraph catching salmon freely on page 152. Two photographs fell from the book — a picture of my wife and my infant daughter, c. 2008; the other, a picture of my wife and her eighteen-years-younger brother, also an infant in the picture, also held by wife, c. 1998. Those are probably the years I read the book. The older person made more scribbles, I think. What I most remember of the novel Mrs Dalloway is the WWI veteran, Septimus; I recall his anguish as a throbbing (organizing) pulse in the novel’s so-called stream-of-consciousness style. I remember generally enjoying the novel, but preferring Woolf’s Orlando; I remember a sort of sneer on the face of a fellow grad student after this declaration. Orlando is a more fun book, a picaresque sci-fi gender jaunt. I suppose Dalloway is more, like, important.

As another point of comparison, I pulled out the 1990 HBJ trade paperback of Mrs Dalloway that I picked up at the beginning of the summer at a Friends of the Library sale. I wrote in a post about those acquisitions that, “…I’ll be happy to trade out the cheap mass markets of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse I’ve had forever in favor of these HBJ Woolfs (Wolves?)” — but that’s not true. I’ve decided I love the cheap mass market Dalloway. (A sixteen-year-old picture of my wife and daughter falling out of it didn’t hurt.) This 1990 edition features a 1981 introduction by novelist Maureen Howard. She voices her intro in the first-person plural, an unfortunate choice that we employed on this blog in our earlier years, insecure as we were. The occasion of Ms Howard’s introduction is, I think–we think, we mean–the fiftieth anniversary of the novel’s publication, although that math doesn’t add up. I dig Susan Gallagher’s cover art.

The cover for the new NYRB edition features a “specially commissioned” cover that pays “tribute to the original designs by Hogarth Press.” The publisher notes that forthcoming “new editions of To the Lighthouse and The Waves [reprinted] in celebration of their respective centenaries” will also get the cover updates. These editions are also Mendelson edits.

I mostly know Mendelson as the editor of Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, and as the author of “The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49.”

NYRB’s edition of Mrs Dalloway publishes next month.

Dante’s Paradiso (Book acquired, some time in July 2025)

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D.M. Black’s new translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy concludes in this volume. Publisher NYRB’s blurb:

Paradiso brings The Divine Comedy to a virtuosic and visionary end. This final leg of Dante’s journey from Hell into the presence of God is for many the most memorable stretch of the poem, a musical and mystical interveaving of mind and heart and transported sense that is unlike anything else in world literature. This new English rendering of Paradiso by the poet D.M. Black, whose Purgatorio won the 2022 National Translation Award in Poetry, re-creates this masterpiece with fidelity and clarity.

Cleansed of sin after his grueling trek up Mount Purgatory, Dante’s pilgrim sets out to explore the celestial spheres under the guidance of his childhood sweetheart and lifelong muse, Beatrice. As he moves from the moon to the planets to the Primum Mobile and beyond, encountering emperors, heroes, saints, members of his family, and various other redeemed sinners, he contemplates optics, angels, free will, mercy, and love. The transcendent actuality of bliss is ever more palpable as the poem unfolds, and yet in the background remains the carnage of history and the deforming bitterness of the human heart, not to be denied—Dante is nothing if not a realist—even in the supreme light of “the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.”

Written at a time of great political turmoil in Italy and great personal anxiety in Dante’s life, Paradiso wrestles with many questions that have echoes in our own disturbing times. It is a book about the shape of the universe and how to find one’s place within it, composed with inventive daring and linguistic ingenuity as Dante stretches language to its very limits, striving to make vivid and tangible the ineffable and sublime.