Books

Summer has arrived in full force — at least here in southeastern Virginia, where the temperature has been creeping up towards 100 degrees — and so, too, have those lists of the best beach books, hottest summer reads, high temp tomes, etc. But fall is just around the corner, so why not take a peek at what’s in store? Here are a few forthcoming books that piqued my interest for one reason or another. This isn’t a list of the fall’s “biggest” books. Some of these might not be covered at all in the national press. But if you want a list like that, just wait. You’ll have 20 to choose from before long. Here is mine. Robert Crawford’s Eliot after The Waste Land (August 23, FSG), the second volume of his biography of T.S.

Anyone under fifty may be unaware of how largely invisible gay Americans were until at least the 1980s. James Kirchick’s incredibly rich and impressively thorough Secret City does not mention Bowers v. Hardwick, the notorious 1986 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the criminalization of gay sexuality, but only post-Bowers did the push for gay equality, and eventually same-sex marriage, rapidly become what he rightly calls “the most successful social movement in American history.” In 1992, a Gallup poll indicated that 43 percent of Americans said they knew a gay person — double the figure from just seven years earlier — and across all of America it was that growing knowledge of the presence of gay people that allowed such a dramatic political transformation to take place.

The writer Maxim Gorky edited the Menshevik newspaper New Life during its short run from May 1, 1917 to July 16, 1918, before Vladimir Lenin gave the personal order to shut it down. Gorky was a one-time friend of Lenin’s and a committed socialist (when Lenin gave the order to shut down New Life, he is reported to have said, “Gorky is one of us”), but he was also a frequent critic of the Bolshevists. In his column for the paper, which ran under the heading “Untimely” — because it focused on culture and morality rather than on practical matters of the revolution — he complained frequently about the politicking of party leaders and the stupidity of the masses.

Recently, several prominent writers have left jobs at national newspapers and magazines to go it alone on Substack or other email subscription services. In 2020, Matt Yglesias left Vox and Glenn Greenwald left the Intercept — both for Substack. That same year, Andrew Sullivan brought the Dish out of retirement and to Substack. Bari Weiss and Charlie Warzel left the New York Times and started a Substack in 2021. Ruth Reichl, the former editor of Gourmet, started a newsletter in 2021. Others who have written for a variety of publications — Matt Taibbi, Glenn Lourey, Jesse Singal, Erick Erickson, Freddie DeBoer, Roxanne Gay — have all made Substack their home. And the list goes on.

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Nine words into her 1925 classic, Virginia Woolf has taken us to another world. London — Westminster to be precise — in mid-June 1913, a world in which it is unusual for a woman to buy the flowers for her own party. Clarissa Dalloway only steps out into the early morning air (“fresh as if issued to children on a beach”) because her maid, Lucy, “had her work cut out for her.” The Wednesday in the “middle of June” on which the action of Mrs. Dalloway takes place is debated. The year is 1923, which would make the 13th of June the most likely candidate. But as academics are wont to do, there has been some disagreement.

I am convinced that the sweet-smelling tycoons that run candle-making companies must have read too much Proust when they were younger. With scents like “Inspire,” “Bohemia,” and “Sunny Daydream,” they cannot be aiming for something as cheap and transitory as mere tawdry olfactory pleasure. They must have become all but obsessed by À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and be aiming for something akin to his narrator’s nostalgic odyssey upon tasting a madeleine: “and at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.” Rather pretentious, oui — but what other excuse can there be for a candle that proclaims it can smell like a cool library at midnight, or the depths of some dreamy reverie?

By her own account, Eudora Welty had an idyllic childhood. Born in 1909 on Congress Street, two blocks from the state capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, Welty spent her early years playing with friends from school, reading voraciously and riding her bicycle to the local store to pick up some flour or eggs for her mother and, of course, a treat for herself. Her father, who was devoted to his wife and children, advanced from a cashier to vice president at Lamar Life Insurance before his daughter had finished high school. He had, as Welty put it, a love for “all instruments that would instruct and fascinate,” including a toy train set, a telescope and a folding Kodak, with which he would teach the young Eudora the pleasures of photography.

The cover blurb, from “Lady Anne Glenconner” on this huge book proclaims: “Brilliant. Tina Brown has inside knowledge and writes so well.” The credit for the author of the 2019 bestseller, Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown should in fact be “Lady Glenconner”. You might not think it matters much these days that, over and over again, Tina Brown gets the titles wrong in this book. But this is supposedly the ultimate insider’s look at the royal family over the last forty years or so. And titles are at the heart of the Firm — think of the agony of Prince Harry and Prince Andrew at no longer being able to use their HRH titles and having to give up their honorary military roles.

When John Keats wrote “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” he had just returned from a long evening at the home of a childhood friend, Charles Cowden Clarke. Charles Clarke was the son of the headmaster of Clarke’s Academy, where Keats had gone to school. A week earlier, Clarke had introduced Keats to one of his heroes, Leigh Hunt, editor of the independent Examiner (Hunt was imprisoned for two years for printing that the Prince Regent was “a fat Adonis at forty”), friend of William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, and literary kingmaker. Hunt despised what he viewed as the overly ornate poetry of Alexander Pope, preferring instead Chaucer’s earthy Old English and the directness of Shakespeare and Milton.