“‘Them’ remakes the naturalist tradition of novels for a society that seems … incapable of ending an addiction to racist violence.”
B-Sides
B-Sides celebrates great books that time forgot.
Editor: John Plotz
B-Sides: Neil M. Gunn’s “Highland River”
Freud taught that childhoods shape our adult selves with unresolved trauma. But this novel shows that childhood joy can shape adulthood, too.
B-Sides: Georges Perec’s “W, or the Memory of Childhood”
One of the strangest, most devastating works of Holocaust literature is about games.
B-Sides: Colson Whitehead’s “Apex Hides the Hurt”
“Whitehead’s satire takes aim … at a capitalist system that senses the profits to be made from proclaiming that systemic racism is a thing of the past.”
B-Sides: George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy”
If George Eliot was interested in religious coexistence, she was also interested in unbelief.
B-Sides: Daphne Du Maurier, “Monte Verità”
Few writers have been as beloved by readers and underrated by reviewers as Daphne du Maurier. What irked them?
B-Sides: Haruki Murakami’s “After the Quake”
How, Murakami asks, can community after the earthquake be structured around self-reflection rather than cruelty?
B-Sides: Reading, Race, and “Robert’s Rules of Order”
The famous guidebook of rules, motions, and meetings has a darker history than you might think.
B-Sides: Fran Ross’s Oreo
“Oreo” is not the easiest read, but it is a book that is, in many ways, written against ease.
B-Sides: Juan José Saer’s “The Investigation”
How to catch a killer who only exists in a parallel world?
B-Sides: J. G. Farrell’s “Troubles”
His characters—in 1919 Ireland, 1857 India, and 1940 Singapore—intuit that the world is about to collapse. But they can do nothing to save it.
B-Sides: Agatha Christie’s “At Bertram’s Hotel”
Agatha Christie’s “At Bertram’s Hotel” allows us to have our nostalgic cake and read it too.
B-Sides: Jesmyn Ward’s “Where the Line Bleeds”
Novelist Jesmyn Ward is known for historical grandiosity, but her long-overlooked book “Sing, Unburied, Sing” turns away from realism into the realm of generic strangeness.
B-Sides: Lucy R. Lippard’s “I See/You Mean”
“Few libraries list it among their holdings, and sometimes I have wondered if the book in my possession actually exists.”
B-Sides: Agnes Smedley’s “Daughter of Earth”
Very much against the grain of most standard leftist work, “Daughter of Earth” remains unsettled and unsettling throughout.
B-Sides: Janet Frame’s “Living in the Maniototo”
Few novels are so crammed with invention. Yet the interlocking richness of her ideas does not derail your reading.
B-Sides: John Keene’s “Annotations”
Annotations isn’t a book you read for the plot. It’s more of a “Notes toward...” that remains just that: always towards, never quite arriving.
B-Sides: Bessie Head’s “The Collector of Treasures”
South African literature has long struggled to become drought-resistant: its plotlines, and even its paper production, presuppose abundant water.
B-Sides: Elinor Wylie’s “Atavism”
Caesuras do things to stories—and to readers, even readers too young to know the term.
B-Sides: Helen DeWitt’s “The Last Samurai”
Impossible to summarize, The Last Samurai is deeply political—anti-capitalist and thoroughly feminist—without ever becoming preachy or moralizing.