Denis Williams was a painter in London, a novelist in the Sudan, an art historian in Nigeria, and an archeologist in his native Guyana: the polymath’s polymath ...
B-Sides
B-Sides celebrates great books that time forgot.
Editor: John Plotz
B-Sides: Mary Borden’s “The Forbidden Zone”
Mary Borden’s taut masterpiece has long been overshadowed by the other Great War books of 1928–29 (All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms ...
B-Sides: Gene Stratton-Porter’s “A Girl of the Limberlost”
All but forgotten today, Gene Stratton-Porter was—in the early 20th century ...
B-Sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
When should a woman kill her husband? I have turned this question over and over ...
B-Sides: Paule Marshall’s “Brown Girl, Brownstones”
The July 1960 issue of Esquire—dedicated to New York City—included ...
B-Sides: Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”
John Ashbery said he was nice—“nice as a person and nice as an artist.” I think it’s fair to say that we don’t have a rich critical vocabulary for nice artists. (And how ...
B-Sides: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled”
Ryder, the world-renowned pianist whose brief visit to an unnamed foreign city occupies the full 512 pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 The Unconsoled, finds ...
B-Sides: Iraj Pezeshkzad’s “My Uncle Napoleon”
In the central courtyard, in the middle of a family party, in mid-century Tehran, a fart rings out. Or was it a fart? A cat? A cat’s fart? The sound of a chair being ...
B-Sides: J. R. Ackerley’s “We Think the World of You”
J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You (1960) isn’t a novel I’d ever say I ...
B-Sides: Edward P. Jones’s “All Aunt Hagar’s Children”
A Jones story can break just about every writing workshop edict in its handling ...
B-Sides: Russell Hoban’s “Riddley Walker”
Growing up, I knew and loved a string of books written by Russell and illustrated by Lillian Hoban. My sister and I read them—The Mole Family’s Christmas, The ...
B-Sides: Randall Jarrell’s “Pictures from an Institution”
While hard at work on his 1954 Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell ...
B-Sides: Chaucer’s “The House of Fame”
For years, and with particular intensity since the 2015 Dylann Roof shooting and 2016 election, we have debated the fate of not only Confederate monuments but ...
B-Sides: Satomi Myodo’s “Journey in Search of the Way”
As spiritual autobiographies go, Journey in Search of the Way is a bit of a romp ...
B-Sides: Erskine Childers’s “The Riddle of the Sands”
Ever since James Cook nearly wrecked his ship on the Great Barrier Reef in 1770 ...
B-Sides: John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera”
In an age of seamless, brazen, total corruption, how should art be? Should it be savage, grim, driven by white-hot rage? Or should it be smiling, gracious ...
B-Sides: Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt”
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: 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 ...