Also of interest... in literary rediscoveries
W-3
(A Public Space, $26)
How fortunate that this “remarkably perceptive” 1974 memoir was recently found in a dollar bin by a savvy literary editor, said Katy Waldman in NewYorker.com. Its author, a onetime Saul Bellow protégée, spent time in a Chicago psych ward after a 1968 suicide attempt, and her account of that stay feels both “startlingly unmediated” and meticulously composed. The ward comes to feel totalitarian, “a place that takes over one’s identity so completely that it can seem to predict one’s every move.”
The Hearing Trumpet
(NYRB Classics, $16)
In this “mind-flaying masterpiece” from 1974, artist Leonora Carrington showed what a surrealist novel ought to be, said Blake Butler in The New York Times. A 92-year-old who has been sent to a cultish retirement home winds up resisting complacency, and unlocks a passage to landscapes “populated with orgies, riddles, doppelgängers, and stairways to hell.” The tale upends expectations about time, space, and the psyche, and Carrington’s “gifts of wit, imagination, and suspense” hold it all together.
Tomorrow Will Be Better
(Harper Perennial, $17)
“There’s usually a reason the forgotten work of a prominent author has been forgotten,” said Maureen Corrigan in The Washington Post. But the novel Betty Smith wrote after A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a forgotten treasure. Unlike Francie Nolan, this book’s heroine is mostly past dreaming and soon in a marriage that’s sexually unsatisfying. The book’s cynicism about the American dream cost it readers in 1948 but “makes it a more intriguing novel now,” and its snapshots of 1920s Brooklyn are priceless.
The Copenhagen Trilogy
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $ 30)
Tove Ditlevsen was, before her 1976 suicide at age 58, “one of Denmark’s most famous and extravagantly tortured writers,” said Liz Jensen in TheGuardian.com. But her “mordant, vibrantly confessional” autobiographical work also feels perfectly contemporary. She wrote about her unhappy working-class childhood, her early career, and her warped fourth marriage and addiction in three late books, and that trilogy, though only a small part of her legacy, is “a masterpiece in its own right.”