My family lived in a “flyover state” for five generations. I grew up in one of those middle American cities that Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt holds up to the light ...
B-Sides
B-Sides celebrates great books that time forgot.
Editor: John Plotz
B-Sides: Ivan Olbracht’s “Nikola the Outlaw”
Some of Central Europe’s greatest political novels have been meditations on disillusionment. Many of them—from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon to ...
B-Sides: Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris”
Is there a more entrancing account of an encounter with nonhuman sentience than Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris? The reputation of this 1961 masterwork of Polish science ...
B-Sides: Mary McCarthy’s “Rogue’s Gallery”
About her wit there was never disagreement. It was sharp, and it was cold. Even by her own account, Mary McCarthy’s pen was a scalpel, her eye ...
B-Sides: Alexei Tolstoy’s “Road to Calvary”
If you are a Russian writer called Tolstoy, you forever lurk in the great shadow cast by your namesake. After all, what could compare to War and Peace? Now ...
B-Sides: Marion Milner’s “A Life of One’s Own”
I rarely fail to remember my first encounter with a book—it usually becomes merged with the story of the book itself—so it is disconcerting to me to realize ...
B-Sides: David Garnett’s “Lady into Fox”
The publication of David Garnett’s first novel, Lady into Fox, shot the author into literary stardom, winning both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tate ...
B-Sides: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “Lolly Willowes”
The year 1936 was a watershed for Bloomsbury fellow traveler Sylvia ...
B-Sides: “The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’”
On November 26, 1893, a 13-year-old Anglo-Brazilian girl opens her diary to record a rescue mission. Helena’s father, a diamond miner in Diamantina, in ...
B-Sides: “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”
If you last read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight long ago, you might mainly remember the striking and supernatural image of a huge green warrior riding ...
B-Sides: Dambudzo Marechera’s “The House of Hunger”
Contemporary southern Africa is littered with the detritus of grand schemes—imperialism, apartheid, development, independence, socialism. Wrought first by colonial violence and then by anti-colonial ...
B-Sides: Celia Fremlin’s “The Hours Before Dawn”
As Celia Fremlin told it three decades after the fact, The Hours Before Dawn was written at night. Lurching around Hampstead Heath behind a stroller that ...
B-Sides: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Farce
Anyone who has spent at least three hours in sole charge of two or more children has stories to tell, but few faculties left with which to tell them. Luckily, we have a ...
B-Sides: Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood”
I first read it as a teenager in Cleveland, Ohio: sitting on a concrete wharf by Lake Erie with the interstate at my back; sitting on a bench in the hardwood forest of a ...
B-Sides: Gustav Hasford’s “The Short-Timers”
The most persistent source of anguish in war stories may be the inability to tell them: the sense of a vast experiential and moral distance between the battlefield ...
B-Sides: Charles Portis’s “Gringos”
Faithful readers of Charles Portis tend to be rabidly in love with his writing, but a little mystified by its potency. Like a retired Crown Vic Interceptor acquired ...
B-Sides: Isherwood’s “Prater Violet”
Judging from his writing, Christopher Isherwood must have been an ideal guest at a dinner party: intelligent, witty ...
B-Sides: John Galt’s “Annals of the Parish”
For 30 or 40 years a book has been lurking on my shelves, a beautiful little Everyman’s Library edition published by Dent and Dutton, undated, with red fake leather binding …
John Williams’s Perfect Anti-Western
Canyonlands National Park, Utah; 103ºF under a cloudless summer sky. I’d call the canyon floor below “bone-white,” if it looked like anything had ever lived there long enough to leave its bones ...
