Nonpareil Books

"This is the most glamorous book you'll read this year. Or any year."-Washington Post When forty-year-old Alison Rose got a job as a receptionist at the New Yorker in the mid-80s, she was taken up by the writers there-"a tribe of gods," who turned her from a semi-recluse into a full-fledged writer for the magazine. These kindred souls formed an impromptu club: Insane Anonymous (a "whole other world that was better than sane"). Rose was unlike anyone in the group. As Renata Adler said of Alison's path, "It was the most nuanced, courageous, utterly crazy way to have wended." In Better Than Sane, Rose takes us from her childhood to her years at The New Yorker, revealing how, often, she "didn't care enough about existence to keep it going" and preferred to stay in her room with her animals and think. She writes about growing up in California, daughter of a movie-star-handsome psychiatrist who was charming to friends but a bully and a tyrant to his family; moving to Manhattan in her twenties, sleeping in Central Park, subsisting on Valium, Eskatrol, and Sara Lee orange cake; moving to Los Angeles, attending the Actors Studio, living with Burt Lancaster's son "Billy the Fish," encountering Helmut Dantine of Casablanca fame, who gave her shelter from the storm, and about meeting Gardner McKay, her childhood TV idol, and becoming sacred, close, lifelong friends; and, finally, returning to New York, where she found the inspiration to pursue a career as a writer.

A journey through both family history and the fascinating and quintessentially American history of New England's Merrimack Valley, its farmers, and the immigrant workers caught up in the industrial textile age. After years of living away, Jane Brox made the decision to return to the family farm of her birth, where her aging father still tended the crops. Brox twines two narratives, personal and historic, as she captures the cadences of farm life and those who sustain it, at a time when the viability of both are waning. Amid the turmoil after her father's death, Brox begins a search for her family's story. As Brox explores, she also reflects on the place of the family farm as it evolved from the Pilgrims' brutal progress at Plymouth to the modern world, where much of our food is produced by industrial agriculture while the family farm is both marginalized and romanticized. In the Merrimack Valley brings together for the first time in one volume Brox's timeless trilogy: Here and Nowhere Else (winner of the L.L. Winship/PEN/New England Award); Five Thousand Days Like This One (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award); and Clearing Land (named a Best Book of the Year by the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution). In considering the place of the family farm today, Brox traces the transformation of the idea of wilderness-and its intricate connection to cultivation-which changed as our ties to the land loosened. Exploring these strands, Brox arrives at something beyond a biography of a farm: a vivid depiction of the half-life it carries in our collective imagination. This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by Suzanne Berne, and new afterword by the author.

An illuminating collection of an author widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's great unsung heroes of American literature. As a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975, William Maxwell helped shaped several generations' sense of the literary short story. At the same time, Maxwell himself was also an exceptional novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. Given unique, unfettered access to Maxwell's private papers, Alec Wilkson-whose memoir My Mentor explores his twenty-five-year friendship with Maxwell-has gathered a stunning and revealing collection of some of Maxwell's lesser-known and previously unpublished works of nonfiction and fiction. The Writer as Illusionist includes biographical sketches; remembrances of fellow authors, such as the poet Louise Bogan and short story writer Maeve Brennan; a 1941 nonfiction piece about Bermuda that was the only piece of long reporting Maxwell ever published in The New Yorker; and Maxwell's thoughts on the craft of writing, many of them made privately. While Maxwell often said he never kept a journal because anything worth writing about was something a writer would remember, The Writer as Illusionist proves otherwise: included are many notes from his private journals, including some that became parts of his revered novels, such as The Folded Leaf. Re-reading Maxwell's work leads Wilkinson to think "I am still often amazed-at the subtlety of the art, the depth of what he saw, at his capacity for dramatizing situations that require a rare hand and eye." Maxwell passed away in 2000 at the age of ninety-one. The Writer as Illusionist celebrates his legacy in American letters and is part of Godine's Nonpareil series.

"Riveting . . . rollicking . . . elegantly captures a changing France reckoning with the cultural revolutions of the mid-20th century."-Publishers Weekly (starred review) Enthralling essays on the expatriate experience in Paris and shrewd literary criticism by one of the twentieth century's finest writers. Mavis Gallant is revered as one of the great short story writers of her generation, but she was also an astute observer and formidable reporter. This selection of Gallant's essays and reviews written between 1968 and 1985 begins with her impressions of the Parisian student uprising in May 1968. Originally published in The New Yorker, "The Events in May" inspired Wes Anderson's film The French Dispatch and Gallant herself served as inspiration for the journalist portrayed by Frances McDormand. Paris Notebooks presents a whole range of subjects portraying French society, ranging from architecture and literature to the gripping story of Gabrielle Russier, a young French schoolteacher driven to imprisonment, madness, and suicide as the result of an affair with one of her students. Also included are Gallant's astute reviews of books by major figures such as Vladimir Nabokov, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, and Günter Grass. No matter what form she's working in, Mavis Gallant's flawless prose is always full of wit and acuity. This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by acclaimed literary biographer Hermione Lee.

The acclaimed author's controversial 1967 debut was a novel of men at war-with themselves. Lieutenant Dan Tierney is a Marine aboard the vast but labyrinthine and claustrophobic USS Vanguard, an aircraft carrier on patrol in the Pacific in 1956. Forced by the illness of his commanding officer to assume control of the Marines on board, Tierney must make decisions that will alter the lives of his troops and the shape of own future. When a minor infraction committed by a promising young Private named Ted Freeman leads to a major investigation, a secret culture of initiation rituals and homosexuality is exposed. Torn between protecting Freeman and safeguarding the Marines' reputation, Lt. Tierney must come to terms with the tragic reality of a system he had once idealized. The Lieutenant explores the culture and politics of the United States military at the start of the Vietnam War, and reveals the insecurities of the men whose lives were defined by it.

Attorney Adam Dwyer has six months to live. Carla Dwyer has to try and relax. Lieutenant Tom Cocoran has twenty years on the force. Baby and Skippy have a couple of hours to kill. All five of these people will never be the same after a series of violent events, hilarious as they are tragic, upset the equilibrium of life in a small, strange city. Between Boston and New York City lies Providence, Rhode Island. Long considered one of the most corrupt cities in the country, it was often difficult to discern who was more corrupt, the mafia bosses or the suits at city hall. But as the story begins it was definitely a gangland figure (known as "The Moron") whose slashed, bullet-ridden body Lieutenant Cocoran fished from the Providence River. Providence is a fast-paced black comedy of parallel lives in the small, East Coast port city. Adam Dwyer is a criminal lawyer dying of leukemia. He and his wife Clara receive another blow when their home is robbed by two young thugs, Skippy and Baby. Tom Corcoran, the police officer assigned to the case, becomes involved with Skippy's waitress girlfriend, Lisa. Long out of print, this New York Times bestselling novel is a raucous gallery of grotesques, a litany of sex, violence, crime, and corruption cast against a precisely drawn portrait of Providence, from the streets of Federal Hill (home of the city's mafiosi) to the fashionable upper East Side (rife with homes ripe for robbing). This Nonpareil edition includes a new afterword by acclaimed television and film writer Ian Maxtone-Graham.

A vivid portrait of legendary liquor agent Garland Bunting, an American original who patrolled rural North Carolina when moonshiners worked their stills in the backcountry. For thirty-five years, Garland Bunting slid his "sweet potato shape-small at both ends and big in the middle" onto the front seat of his beat-up pickup with the coon dogs in the back to ride around in pursuit of moonshine stills in Halifax County, North Carolina. Bunting was true a one-of-a-kind, a man who would do nearly anything to get his culprit. To best the bootleggers, Bunting passed himself off as an outrageous array of characters, including a door-to-door fish peddler, a preacher, a farmer, a fox hunter, a sawmill worker, and a woman. Articulate, canny, imaginative, and aware-aware even that he's an unusual character-Bunting fills the foreground of Alec Wilkinson's deeply reported and elegantly told story. This is experiential, immersive, journalism at its best. Moonshine is a wonderfully alive portrait of both Bunting and rural North Carolina's coastal plain, with its landscape of small farms, woods, and swamps. We meet the people Bunting grew up with, his fellow liquor agents, his cronies, and his shy wife, Colleen. Along the way, we learn the history of moonshine and how it is made, and accompany Bunting on the stake-out of a small, backwoods still. For viewers who made Moonshiners a hit for 12 seasons on the Discovery Channel, this is the book they've been waiting for. All readers will find a story where the flavors of the past and present are richly intermingled. This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by acclaimed author Padgett Powell.

Forty essays on history, art, and literature from one of the most incisive, and most exhilarating, critical minds of the twentieth century. Guy Davenport was perhaps the last great American polymath. He provided links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present-and pretty much everything in between. Not only had Davenport seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also had the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to draw connections between how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization. In this collection, Guy Davenport serves as the reader's guide through history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. In these forty essays we find fresh thinking on Greek culture, Whitman, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Melville, Tolkien, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Marianne Moore, Eudora Welty, Louis Zukovsky, and many others. Each essay is a tour of the history of ideas and imagination, written with wit and startling erudition.

A stirring memoir of a young, single woman's laborious struggle to save her family's New England apple farm from going under during the Great Depression. The Orchard is an exquisitely beautiful and poignant memoir of a young woman's single-handed struggle to save her New England farm in the depths of the Great Depression. Discovered by the author's daughter after the author's death, it tells the story of Adele "Kitty" Robertson, young and energetic, but unprepared by her Radcliffe education for the rigors of apple farming in those bitter years of the early 1930s. Alone at the end of a country road, with only a Great Dane for company, plagued by debts, broken machinery, and killing frosts, Kitty revives the old orchard after years of neglect. Every day is a struggle, but every day she is also rewarded by the beauty of the world and the unexpected kindness of neighbors and hired workers. Animated by quiet courage and simple goodness, The Orchard is a deeply moving celebration of decency and beauty in the midst of grim prospects and crushing poverty. In addition to a foreword and epilogue by Betsy Robertson Cramer, the author's daughter, this Nonpareil edition includes a new afterword by award-winning author Jane Brox.

"A remarkable book written with such dazzling verbal imagery and such relish in all the sensations of being alive that it is magically contagious."-New York Times A beloved classic-more than six million copies sold worldwide-that celebrates a bygone world and the author's own unforgettable journey from the wonder of childhood to the awkward agonies of adolescence. Laurie Lee was born in 1914 in Gloucestershire, then a remote corner of England. Abandoned by her husband, Lee's adoring mother becomes the center of his world as she struggles to raise a family on her own. "I was perfectly content," Lee writes, "and tumbled through the hand-to-mouth days, patched or dressed-up, scolded, admired, swept off my feet in sudden passions of kisses, or dumped forgotten among the unwashed pots." As his childhood passes, very unexpectedly one day, the center of Lee's world shifts when he meets someone very special... "I turned to look at Rosie. She was yellow and dusty with buttercups and seemed to be purring in the gloom; her hair was rich as a wild bee's nest and her eyes were full of stings. I did not know what to do about her, nor did I know what not to do. She looked smooth and precious, a thing of unplumbable mysteries, and perilous as quicksand." Throughout, Lee illuminates an era without electricity or telephones, an England on the cusp of the modern era, the cadence of village and family life, with a poignant lyricism that has captivated readers since it was first published in 1959. This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by award-winning author Simon Winchester.

Novelist Robert Olmstead journeys back to his youth on his grandfather's New Hampshire dairy farm to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him in this coming-of-age memoir. Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the rough-hewn farmers, loggers, and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. In Stay Here with Me, Olmstead lays bare the acute pain of his father's alcoholism and the decline of his grandfather, the family patriarch. With delicate sensuality, he also traces the flowering of his first love for a woman who "walks like light would walk if it could." Authentic, intimate, and intense, Stay Here with Me is about growing up and leaving home and about the acts of rebellion that free the body even as they bind the soul to a place forever. This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by novelist and essayist, Brock Clarke.