Latest news with #FishTales
Atlantic
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Take Your Book Outside
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. When I went outside to read yesterday, the first thing I noticed was the sun on my face. I welcomed it, then wondered, Do I have sunscreen? Then I asked myself if I should have used the bathroom before heading to the park. I made it to a bench and opened my book just as a bold, chittering group of sparrows swooped down from a nearby perch; I watched them jostle one another. Then I set myself to my task: I wanted to make progress on an advance copy of a new memoir, but Michelle de Kretser's Theory & Practice was also in my bag, and I had Sharon Kay Penman's When Christ and His Saints Slept loaded on my e-reader—plus I knew I had just a couple of chapters left in Adam Higginbotham's Midnight in Chernobyl. When I was a few pages into the memoir, a carpenter bee started making lazy laps around me. A leaf drifted onto my head; the light forced me to squint, then dig through my bag for my sunglasses. A cowbird joined the sparrows; the chirping competed with the hum of air-conditioning units. Chapter break: I looked up and a very happy dog was playing fetch in a park specifically marked as not a dog park, and I smiled to myself. A tiny red bug crawled across my phone; boat horns from the nearby Potomac rang out; planes soared overhead. I admired the blooming wisteria, then violently sneezed. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic 's Books section: In the midst of the chattering and barking, the heat prickling my skin and the wind blowing my hair in my face, what did I gain? Certainly not an optimized reading experience. At the office, I could dispel distractions with a quick trip to the bathroom or water-bottle station; automatic curtains would block the bright sun. But I agree with Bekah Waalkes, who wrote for The Atlantic this week that some books just make 'a case for leaving your reading nook and getting out into the world.' It's important to savor pleasant days while they're here, she notes. Outdoor reading is not always idyllic; I was up against pollen, bugs, and the looming threat of bird poop. But it can be sublime. And, in fact, the many distractions forced me to marshal my attention. I pushed myself into a unique state of focus, actively choosing each paragraph over everything that was happening around me. Every page I finished was an achievement, and the author's words floated in my head, on top of the pleasant mix of noises, smells, and breeze. When my mind slipped off the page, I barely cared. My memories of the chapters I read are now tied together with images of the world's natural rhythms: unfurling irises, creeping spiders, the flowing river—and periodically, an unexpected, uncontrollable sneeze. Six Books You'll Want to Read Outdoors By Bekah Waalkes Reading has been unfairly maligned as an indoor activity for far too long. Read the full article. What to Read Fish Tales, by Nettie Jones 'You're not crazy to me,' one character tells the narrator of Fish Tales, a 30-something Black woman named Lewis Jones. 'You're daring. Most people cannot even imagine life the way you live it.' That life includes nights out on the town in 1970s Detroit and disco-fueled Manhattan, copious amounts of cocaine, and sexual encounters both outlandish and, at times, demoralizing. This frenetic novel, first acquired by Toni Morrison and published in 1983, has become something of a cult classic, and it's easy to understand why: It approaches relationships with raw and unvarnished honesty. A new edition forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April promises to bring additional audiences to Jones's sharp, fast-paced look at the highs and lows of the human heart. — Rhian Sasseen Out Next Week 📚 Second Life, by Amanda Hess 📚 Little Bosses Everywhere, by Bridget Read 📚 Old School Indian, by Aaron John Curtis Your Weekend Read Does Anyone Still Hitchhike? By Andrew Fedorov But I also hitchhike because I love it. The rides I've caught across America have opened my sense of the country. Each was an encounter with someone whose perspective I could hardly have imagined, as someone who's spent much of his life on the East Coast and in politically siloed bubbles. Especially when politics feels intense, hitchhiking has kept me from forgetting that decent people are everywhere. It's a way of testing the tensile strength of the social safety net. It shows that when you're at your most vulnerable, whether by circumstance or choice, people will be willing to help. You hitchhike to know you're not alone.
New York Times
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Audacious Novelist, Ahead of Her Time, Is Now Getting Her Due
In 1981, Nettie Jones was shopping her debut novel, 'Fish Tales,' a shocking story about a married woman's booze- and drug-fueled sexual escapades. Full of violence, dark humor and graphic erotic scenes, it wasn't an easy sell. One agent put it down after a few pages. The first two editors who read the book rejected it. Then Jones mailed the manuscript to the novelist Toni Morrison, who was working at Random House, editing groundbreaking books by Black luminaries like Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara and Henry Dumas. Morrison liked the voice in 'Fish Tales,' and bought the book for $3,000. When it came out in 1984, 'Fish Tales' caused a stir. Set in Detroit and New York City during the 1970s, it's narrated by a wily, unhinged woman named Lewis Jones, who ricochets between night clubs and sex parties in a haze of champagne, vodka and Valium. Critics did not know what to make of Jones, who confessed that she had based the story on her own life. A New York Times reviewer praised her ambition but found the book 'assaultive' and 'pornographic.' After a brief spell in the spotlight, Jones slipped into obscurity. In the following decades, she bounced between teaching jobs and fellowships, attended divinity school and struggled with addiction and bipolar disorder, eventually ending up in a Manhattan shelter for more than a year. Jones's fortunes shifted last spring, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux made an offer to republish 'Fish Tales,' which had been long out of print. Now 84, sober and living in subsidized housing in Brooklyn, Jones said she's not all that surprised that the book is getting a second life. 'I had — can we just call it faith? — that this would happen,' she said. 'I was just hoping something was going to happen before I died, and then my concern was, Am I going to get paid before I die?' This time, 'Fish Tales' is drawing the rapturous buzz that Jones hoped for 40 years ago. The new edition that came out in the United States this week drew endorsements from acclaimed writers like Justin Torres, Raven Leilani and Angela Flournoy. 'It's a really raucous and raunchy book, but it's also tender and disarming at times,' Flournoy said. International editions are already lined up in Britain, Norway, Poland, Germany and Brazil. For Jones and her admirers, the attention on her work feels overdue. 'I have some wonderful young authors now contacting me,' Jones said. 'I am the grandmother now. Or am I the grand lady? The grand author?' Whatever rank Jones now occupies in the literary world, the modifier 'grand' suits her. Jones, who wore a black beret that accentuated her piercing pale blue eyes, has a big booming laugh and an even bigger persona, a spiky wit and an almost alarming candor. Her voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper when she reflected on the 'Hollywood lifestyle' she once led, and how her undaunted pursuit of pleasure fed into her fiction. 'They say this book is erotic,' she said in a quiet tone, feigning shock, before bursting into a laugh. 'Make me stop,' she pleaded. 'Can't you go home now?' Jones was born in Arlington, Ga. in 1941, the elder of two daughters in a working class family. Her father was in the Army and her mother, who chafed at the lack of opportunity in the South, moved to Detroit to work in the auto industry. Jones was raised by her grandparents until she was 5, when she and her sister joined their mother in Detroit. Kicked out of high school after becoming pregnant, Jones had a daughter at 17. She and the baby's father married and soon divorced; Jones managed to continue her education as a young single mother, eventually getting her high school diploma and then a bachelor's degree in education from Wayne State University. She got married again, to a dentist, and taught high school in Detroit. But Jones felt suffocated by domestic life. After receiving her masters in education, she moved to New York in 1971 to study at the New School for Social Research, but school was mostly an excuse to escape. Her husband and daughter, who was then 13, stayed in Detroit. 'She definitely was a free spirit who set her own rules,' said Jones's daughter, Lynne Harris. Unleashed from family responsibilities, Jones lived with a roommate on Ninth Street in Greenwich Village, and threw herself into partying and sexual experimentation, which was plentiful in 1970s bohemian circles. Her husband tolerated her infidelity, but Jones felt ambivalent about marriage, and eventually divorced him. 'I got tired of being an adulteress,' she said. In the late 1970s, she moved back to Michigan and devoted herself to writing. 'I began thinking, What do you write about, what do you know the most about, and this is kind of shameful, but I think I know the most about men,' she said with a smile that made it plain that she did not find this the least bit shameful. Lewis, the protagonist of 'Fish Tales,' is a restless married woman in her 30s with an indulgent husband who supports her while she bounces between Detroit and New York. Lewis and her sidekick and enabler, a gay escort who goes by Kitty-Kat, host sex parties they call 'orgyettes' and consume vast quantities of drugs and alcohol. Lewis cycles through fits of mania, attacking her lovers and slashing her wrists with a broken champagne glass — impulses that lead to her undoing. Jones didn't have an agent, so she sought the advice of a friend, the novelist Gayl Jones, who gave her a list of editors to query, among them her own editor, Morrison. Morrison saw its potential after other editors balked, but rarely communicated with Jones, and quit Random House to focus on her own writing the year before 'Fish Tales' was published. Looking back, Jones still feels stung by how little editorial attention and promotion she received. 'I just don't think I was what she expected, and that was because I had no fear of her — I didn't know I should've,' Jones said of Morrison, then laughed. 'I wish I had kissed her hand, if that's what it took.' Other aspects of the publication bothered Jones. She hated the book's cover, which featured a Black woman, lying naked under a quilt, floating against a blue backdrop under a large green fish. Jones was deliberately opaque about her heroine's race, and left her author photo off the cover because she didn't want her own racial background to shape the book's reception. When 'Fish Tales' came out, Jones was living at Yaddo, an artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. She was already deep into writing 'Mischief Makers,' a novel about race and class that centers on a Black woman from Detroit who leaves the city and adopts the identity of a white woman. Published in 1989, the book received strong reviews and established Jones as a versatile storyteller; on the jacket copy, Jones is hailed as 'one of the major female Black writers in the United States.' Jones started work on another novel, 'Puma,' which followed the themes and characters of 'Mischief Makers.' But drinking and mental illness stalled her progress and strained some of her relationships, she said. 'That period in her life was very disheartening, because I knew that she was a woman that had so much more to offer the world, and she was being cast aside,' said Valerie J. Kindle, the mayor of Harper Woods, Mich., who first met Jones in the 1970s — Jones was her teacher in 7th grade — and has remained close with her. For the next few decades, Jones bounced between academic posts and taught creative writing at colleges around the country. But she was often on the edge of poverty, and rarely stayed put for long. After leaving her teaching job at N.Y.U. in 2010, she spent long stretches in Jamaica, staying with a friend who owned a spa in Negril. Years later, when she decided to settle down again in New York, she was unable to afford rent. In 2014, she ended up living at Lenox Hill Women's Mental Health Shelter on the Upper East Side. A planned two-week stay stretched to 15 months. Eventually, Jones got a studio in a subsidized housing unit in Brooklyn, where she still lives. She gave up alcohol, though she couldn't recall exactly when. 'I've been sober a long time,' she said. 'I cannot tell you the day, because you're sober and then you're not sober and you've got to try again.' In late 2023, Jones was living on $1,600 a month from Social Security, still tinkering with her third novel, when she got an email from the founders of a new publishing venture, Julia Ringo and Naomi Huffman, who were looking for forgotten classics to republish. A bookseller had suggested that they look at the novels Toni Morrison edited. Huffman found a reference to 'Fish Tales' and was intrigued. They found Jones's contact information through Wayne State University. It turned out she was living in Flatbush, just a short walk from Huffman's apartment. They made contact, and discovered that Jones had gotten the rights to her novel back in 1998 and was eager to republish it. Farrar, Straus & Giroux is releasing the text more or less unchanged, with a bold new cover and an afterword by Jones. Jones hopes to live to see 'Mischief Makers' back in print. She also aims to finally publish 'Puma,' which she's been working on since 1992. If literary acclaim eluded her 40 years ago, Jones feels she's better prepared for it now. 'I knew it would happen,' she said. 'It feels like it's happening at the right moment.'
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Six Books That Deserve a Second Life
'To a true collector,' the German philosopher Walter Benjamin noted in his 1931 essay 'Unpacking My Library,' 'the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.' This is an apt way to describe the many lives a single volume may live. On its initial printing, it may receive a flurry of attention from readers and reviewers—or none at all. Some titles go straight from best seller to well-loved classic, with no dip in demand; others, though popular in their author's lifetime, may quickly fade into obscurity. And then there are the 'rebirths' Benjamin described: the second acts, rediscoveries, and renewals that bring older works back into circulation. Happily, unfairly forgotten treasures are in vogue. Major publishers and small presses are reissuing novels long out of print, exhuming unpublished manuscripts from celebrated writers, and championing unpopular works dismissed for their abstraction or difficulty. Reading can offer the delightful opportunity to find your present-day thoughts, worries, and emotions in a book published before you were even born. These books may also change how you think about the past, or feature prose you'd never encounter in contemporary life. The following titles are only a small selection that have, in recent years, through the efforts of obsessive editors and fans alike, found themselves justifiably rescued from oblivion. , by Hermann Ungar, translated by Kevin Blahut 'A sexual hell' is how the German writer Thomas Mann apparently referred to Ungar's debut novel, The Maimed, first published in German in 1923. The tense, terse novel follows a hapless bank clerk, Franz Polzer, as he finds himself drawn into a sadomasochistic affair with his landlady. The Maimed brings Franz Kafka's work to mind, but it is more sexually explicit on the page and made all the more claustrophobic by the introduction of Karl—a childhood friend of Polzer's who may or may not have been his lover, and who is dying of an unnamed degenerative disease. As Polzer's affair turns more and more violent, a murder occurs, as well as a mystery: Who is responsible for the killing? With its swirl of erotic anxiety and its ambiguous ending, The Maimed heralded the beginning of a promising literary career that, like Kafka's, was cut short when Ungar died in his prime, in 1929, at age 36. , by Nettie Jones 'You're not crazy to me,' one character tells the narrator of Fish Tales, a 30-something Black woman named Lewis Jones. 'You're daring. Most people cannot even imagine life the way you live it.' That life includes nights out on the town in 1970s Detroit and disco-fueled Manhattan, copious amounts of cocaine, and sexual encounters both outlandish and, at times, demoralizing. This frenetic novel, first acquired by Toni Morrison and published in 1983, has become something of a cult classic, and it's easy to understand why: It approaches relationships with raw and unvarnished honesty. A new edition forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April promises to bring additional audiences to Jones's sharp, fast-paced look at the highs and lows of the human heart. , by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz First published in 1995 and recently reissued by the Bay Area–based small press Transit Books, the science-fiction novel I Who Have Never Known Men, written by a Belgian psychoanalyst, has received a surprising amount of attention on social media. BookTok contains hundreds of videos of readers discovering and discussing Harpman's haunting feminist dystopia. Told from the perspective of its young and nameless female narrator, the book follows a group of 39 women of various ages who spend their days imprisoned in an underground bunker, which is patrolled by a mysterious series of male guards. After an accident sets the women free, our protagonist finds herself suddenly wandering through a wasteland and learning, from the other women, about the world as it existed before the vault, which she has no memory of. Together, they reconstruct elements of society: devising a system of time-telling through counts of the human heartbeat, rediscovering the existence of organized religion. What stands out most is the philosophical approach Harpman takes as she renders the familiar strange. The New Yorker, by Maeve Brennan The woman wandering the city alone has become something of a popular, even glamorous, figure. She's a variation on the 19th century's flaneur, seen in contemporary works such as Olivia Laing's 2016 memoir, The Lonely City, as well as reissued novels such as Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, from 1979, and Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife, from 50 years before that. The characters in those books would find common cause with the Irish writer Maeve Brennan, who from 1954 to 1981 wrote missives for The New Yorker under the pen name 'The Long-Winded Lady,' a woman who witnessed all kinds of behavior from New York's denizens at all hours of the day. The columns in this collection, first collected in 1969 and reprinted in 2016, depict, in finely rendered strokes, the minutiae of close-quarters living. 'There were no seats to be had on the A train last night,' one begins; still another starts in a bookstore and veers off, at the end, into a meditation on Balzac's favorite food (sardine paste, apparently). At a moment when the atomization of interpersonal relationships is at the forefront of public discussion, Brennan's winsome, melancholy-streaked portraits of city life hold particular resonance. , by Giorgio de Chirico, translated by Stefania Heim The relationship between the artist and their audience has been analyzed and fetishized by critics ad nauseam, but Mr. Dudron provides a fresh perspective from the artist's point of view. This previously unpublished novel by the Greek-born Italian painter de Chirico, written fitfully over decades, doesn't have much of a plot, instead unfurling as a series of anecdotal conversations among artists and meandering, essayistic theories of painting. In lieu of a digestible arc, the reader gets a peek inside the head of de Chirico, whose off-kilter paintings of empty city squares in the early 20th century would go on to strongly influence the Surrealists. 'A work of art should never force the viewer nor the maker into an act of reasoning, or criticism, or exposition,' de Chirico writes, per one early translation; instead, 'it should provoke only satisfaction … that is, a condition in which reasoning no longer exists.' , by Edith Wharton 'Mrs. Wharton,' reads a line in The Atlantic's review of her 1927 novel, Twilight Sleep, 'has never really descended from that plane of excellence which since its beginning has characterized her work.' Implicit in this observation: until now. Although contemporary reviewers might not have appreciated Twilight Sleep as much as they did Wharton's previous books, her 17th novel offers an updated, Jazz Age–variation on a familiar, Wharton-esque theme: social ruin. In Roaring '20s New York, Pauline Manford, the book's heroine, inoculates herself from life's unpleasantries—including her second husband's affair with his stepson's wife, Lita—with a busy social calendar, but when disaster strikes and the affair is discovered, not even Pauline's unblinking devotion to rationality, truth, and progress can soothe her emotional reaction. Named after the drug cocktail given to women in the 20th century to ward off the pains of childbirth, which brings to mind the anesthetized attitude of some of its characters, Twilight Sleep was republished in late 2024. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Six Books That Deserve a Second Life
'To a true collector,' the German philosopher Walter Benjamin noted in his 1931 essay 'Unpacking My Library,' 'the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.' This is an apt way to describe the many lives a single volume may live. On its initial printing, it may receive a flurry of attention from readers and reviewers—or none at all. Some titles go straight from best seller to well-loved classic, with no dip in demand; others, though popular in their author's lifetime, may quickly fade into obscurity. And then there are the 'rebirths' Benjamin described: the second acts, rediscoveries, and renewals that bring older works back into circulation. Happily, unfairly forgotten treasures are in vogue. Major publishers and small presses are reissuing novels long out of prin t, exhuming unpublished manuscripts from celebrated writer s, and championing unpopular works dismissed for their abstraction or difficulty. Reading can offer the delightful opportunity to find your present-day thoughts, worries, and emotions in a book published before you were even born. These books may also change how you think about the past, or feature prose you'd never encounter in contemporary life. The following titles are only a small selection that have, in recent years, through the efforts of obsessive editors and fans alike, found themselves justifiably rescued from oblivion. The Maimed, by Hermann Ungar, translated by Kevin Blahut 'A sexual hell' is how the German writer Thomas Mann apparently referred to Ungar's debut novel, The Maimed, first published in German in 1923. The tense, terse novel follows a hapless bank clerk, Franz Polzer, as he finds himself drawn into a sadomasochistic affair with his landlady. The Maimed brings Franz Kafka's work to mind, but it is more sexually explicit on the page and made all the more claustrophobic by the introduction of Karl—a childhood friend of Polzer's who may or may not have been his lover, and who is dying of an unnamed degenerative disease. As Polzer's affair turns more and more violent, a murder occurs, as well as a mystery: Who is responsible for the killing? With its swirl of erotic anxiety and its ambiguous ending, The Maimed heralded the beginning of a promising literary career that, like Kafka's, was cut short when Ungar died in his prime, in 1929, at age 36. Fish Tales, by Nettie Jones 'You're not crazy to me,' one character tells the narrator of Fish Tales, a 30-something Black woman named Lewis Jones. 'You're daring. Most people cannot even imagine life the way you live it.' That life includes nights out on the town in 1970s Detroit and disco-fueled Manhattan, copious amounts of cocaine, and sexual encounters both outlandish and, at times, demoralizing. This frenetic novel, first acquired by Toni Morrison and published in 1983, has become something of a cult classic, and it's easy to understand why: It approaches relationships with raw and unvarnished honesty. A new edition forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April promises to bring additional audiences to Jones's sharp, fast-paced look at the highs and lows of the human heart. I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz First published in 1995 and recently reissued by the Bay Area–based small press Transit Books, the science-fiction novel I Who Have Never Known Men, written by a Belgian psychoanalyst, has received a surprising amount of attention on social media. BookTok contains hundreds of videos of readers discovering and discussing Harpman's haunting feminist dystopia. Told from the perspective of its young and nameless female narrator, the book follows a group of 39 women of various ages who spend their days imprisoned in an underground bunker, which is patrolled by a mysterious series of male guards. After an accident sets the women free, our protagonist finds herself suddenly wandering through a wasteland and learning, from the other women, about the world as it existed before the vault, which she has no memory of. Together, they reconstruct elements of society: devising a system of time-telling through counts of the human heartbeat, rediscovering the existence of organized religion. What stands out most is the philosophical approach Harpman takes as she renders the familiar strange. The Long-Winded Lady: Notes From The New Yorker, by Maeve Brennan The woman wandering the city alone has become something of a popular, even glamorous, figure. She's a variation on the 19th century's flaneur, seen in contemporary works such as Olivia Laing's 2016 memoir, The Lonely City, as well as reissued novels such as Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, from 1979, and Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife, from 50 years before that. The characters in those books would find common cause with the Irish writer Maeve Brennan, who from 1954 to 1981 wrote missives for The New Yorker under the pen name 'The Long-Winded Lady,' a woman who witnessed all kinds of behavior from New York's denizens at all hours of the day. The columns in this collection, first collected in 1969 and reprinted in 2016, depict, in finely rendered strokes, the minutiae of close-quarters living. 'There were no seats to be had on the A train last night,' one begins; still another starts in a bookstore and veers off, at the end, into a meditation on Balzac's favorite food (sardine paste, apparently). At a moment when the atomization of interpersonal relationships is at the forefront of public discussion, Brennan's winsome, melancholy-streaked portraits of city life hold particular resonance. Mr. Dudron, by Giorgio de Chirico, translated by Stefania Heim The relationship between the artist and their audience has been analyzed and fetishized by critics ad nauseam, but Mr. Dudron provides a fresh perspective from the artist's point of view. This previously unpublished novel by the Greek-born Italian painter de Chirico, written fitfully over decades, doesn't have much of a plot, instead unfurling as a series of anecdotal conversations among artists and meandering, essayistic theories of painting. In lieu of a digestible arc, the reader gets a peek inside the head of de Chirico, whose off-kilter paintings of empty city squares in the early 20th century would go on to strongly influence the Surrealists. 'A work of art should never force the viewer nor the maker into an act of reasoning, or criticism, or exposition,' de Chirico writes, per one early translation; instead, 'it should provoke only satisfaction … that is, a condition in which reasoning no longer exists.' Twilight Sleep 'Mrs. Wharton,' reads a line in The Atlantic 's review of her 1927 novel, Twilight Sleep, 'has never really descended from that plane of excellence which since its beginning has characterized her work.' Implicit in this observation: until now. Although contemporary reviewers might not have appreciated Twilight Sleep as much as they did Wharton's previous books, her 17th novel offers an updated, Jazz Age–variation on a familiar, Wharton-esque theme: social ruin. In Roaring '20s New York, Pauline Manford, the book's heroine, inoculates herself from life's unpleasantries—including her second husband's affair with his stepson's wife, Lita—with a busy social calendar, but when disaster strikes and the affair is discovered, not even Pauline's unblinking devotion to rationality, truth, and progress can soothe her emotional reaction. Named after the drug cocktail given to women in the 20th century to ward off the pains of childbirth, which brings to mind the anesthetized attitude of some of its characters, Twilight Sleep was republished in late 2024.
