A TIME TO BE BORN, Author DAWN POWELL's scathing social commentary is evergreen

A TIME TO BE BORN
DAWN POWELL
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gorgeous new paperback of Dawn Powell’s razor-sharp comedy of manners, following a glittering tale of ambition and betrayal in prewar New York City.

“Few books have so bitingly and energetically captured the hunger for status and success that animate the city and enrage so many.” — The New York Times

Deemed “wittier than Dorothy Parker, [and able to] dissect the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald” (The New York Times Book Review), Dawn Powell earns her place as one of America’s great novelists with this biting satire of a wealthy, self-involved publisher and his scheming novelist wife.

Amanda Keeler has clawed her way out of the backwaters of Ohio and into the affections of Julien Evans, New York’s most powerful newspaper tycoon. With his ex-wife vanquished, Amanda reigns over their Fifth Avenue mansion, publishing wildly successful (ghostwritten) novels, charming guests at martini-soaked parties and furiously fending off Julien’s pesky advances.

That’s until the past comes knocking in the form of Vicky Haven, a timid school friend desperate for reinvention. Ever the strategist, Amanda lands Vicky a job in listings and a studio apartment—perfect for Amanda’s daytime trysts with old flame, Ken Saunders. But matters of the heart rarely follow orders. When Vicky begins to wise up to her scheme, and sets her own sights on Ken, she ignites a love triangle that threatens to topple Amanda’s carefully constructed empire.

Scathingly funny and irresistibly glamorous, A Time to be Born is a timeless portrait of social climbing, set in a 1940s Manhattan rife with backstabbing charm, brittle friendships and women who always land on their feet–heels first. Reissued in a stunning new package, it is the perfect introduction to Dawn Powell’s wicked wit and unsparing eye, guaranteed to delight both established fans and new readers alike.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: My mother loved The Locusts Have No King and Angels on Toast. She always said it was unkind of Dawn Powell to make her bitches so funny, because in the end it was bitchiness or bust in these women's lives. I've read Edmund Wilson's famous (I think dismissive) "praise" for her writing that her audience...women...never cottoned on to her writing in droves because there was no one to relate to.

That did not age well, Mr. Wilson. It's misogynistic even for a very openly misogynistic age. My own read of the literary marketplace's lukewarm reception of Powell has more to do with my mother's observation that the women were bitches first and foremost: made up of 90% bitchiness, 8% ambition, and 2% fashion. It gets wearing when the glossy surfaces deliver gloss gloss and more shiny gloss. This takedown of Clare Boothe Luce is honest, unsparing, based in the author's cold phony-flensing eye's most well-illuminated view of a woman whose substance could never fill out the image she projected. It was one of Powell's few hot-selling titles on that basis.

But in 2026, most all y'all need to use Wikipedia to know who she is. This vitiates the power of a takedown, a roman à clef of bitter and contemptuous thoroughness, a book-length Vanity Fair hit piece. I think it's delicious. I think most people will read the sentences and enjoy the bitchery, the evocation of a vanished world of unquestionable elite power, no backfooting in this story until we get into the bedroom...it's wonderful at pitting women against each other over a man neither should even notice still less grace with their desires but he was A Man in a time that was enough.

I don't see that catching fire in today's social climate. It's out of step in 2026. It was cold, unfeeling, in 1942; and now it's a relic of a time so distant as to be semi-mythical. Because it is an evocation of coldness, fame, and the callous using of people, it really should work as a reminder that the same kind of people doing the same kind of social climbing are hollow images who stand bestride our world like they did Powell's, and are now forgotten...well, it ought to inspire us to see through them, to see the vapors they conjure for what they are.

It has the uphill battle of ongoing misogyny. It's still true that piercing social commentary is taken more seriously when it treats men as central to the story. Look how much ink is spilled about that traitorous fuck Zuck as opposed to Carly Fiorina, another evil person seen from a labor perspective. It's also the book's enemy, time (ironically enough) that's proving sic transit gloria mundi for the models its characters are based on.

I'm hoping more of y'all will pick up on the story's commentary on fame and see how deeply relevant Powell's observations are for our own time.

STEFAN ZWEIG'S PAGE: LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN and Other Stories, & ENCOUNTERS AND DESTINIES: A Farewell to Europe

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN and Other Stories
STEFAN ZWEIG (tr. Anthea Bell)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$7.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Stefan's Zweig's Letter from an Unknown Woman and other stories contains a new translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell of one of his most celebrated novellas, Letter from an Unknown Woman, the inspiration for a classic 1948 Hollywood film by Max Ophüls, as well as three new stories, appearing in English for the first time.

A famous author receives a letter on his forty-first birthday. He doesn't know the sender, but still the letter concerns him intimately. Its story is earnest, even the story of a life lived in service to an unannounced, unnoticed love.

In the other stories in this collection, a young man mistakes the girl he loves for her sister; two erstwhile lovers meet after an age spent apart; and a married woman repays a debt of gratitude. All four tales, newly translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell, are among Zweig's most celebrated and compelling work-expertly paced, laced with empathy and an unwaveringly acute sense of psychological detail.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's the fate pf a popular, I mean with readers more than critics, writer to fall out of favor. Without critics in one's corner, the voice of the people who voted with their time and their treasure to engage with one's stories gets ignored.

This was the public's loved one Zweig's fate. Modern critics don't like him either, one saying he "...tastes fake...the Pepsi of Austrian writing." Ouch.

It's true to my experience of his writing that there's no deathless quality the I can discern, the sort of intense transporting intensity I experience in Thomas Mann or Kafka. At his most eloquent Zweig brings me an appreciative lightness of spirit; at his most Germanic he's pissy, irritable, and unbearably portentous. On balance he's the precise kind of writer who becomes popular because his (very real) talent does not have threatening depths. It seems a shame to me the world that loved him best, the US and Brazil, has left his memory in a drawer. Not a great, but still a good, storyteller, it feels to me like Pushkin Press Classics is doing good work to keep bringing him to our notice.

In my usual, fussy (so I'm told) fashion, the four stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method.

Letter from an Unknown Woman is unsettling, uneasy-making; a woman writes to a famous author in terms of the greatest, most appreciative intimacy...but he has absolutely not one clue who she is. It is clear from the terms she's using for him that there was a legitimate connection between them. It is chilling how deep this connection truly is, given his unawareness of her as a person. (It could have something to do with her age at their first meeting....)

It's certainly true in my own life this kind of connection has formed, so I might be a bit more in tune with the awfulness of it. It ends a damn sight more tragically than anything like I've ever been a party to, and uses what would then be a current event...the 1918 flu pandemic...as both a resolution and an intensification of how terrible his guilt truthfully is.

A 1948 film was made of Letter from an Unknown Woman starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan that did not slap a happy li'l bow on its end. It's been preserved for posterity by the National Film Registry, probably in part for that courageous act of honesty in preserving the source material's more nihilistic intent (despite much jiggery-pokery to satisfy the Hays Code). It would be a terrific adaptation to make, faithfully this time, in the 21st century. all five stars

A Story Told in Twilight explores the first-kiss mishegas of a very ordinary boy. It happens in circumstances that, if you squint, might possibly lead to the, um, inattention and subsequent mistaken identity that plague this most commonplace rite of passage.

The translation's deft, the language felt like the entire enterprise was fun for the translator, but a more outdated premise would be tough to conjure in 2026. Not memorable, not terrible, not much of anything really. 3 stars

The Debt Paid Late looks at the running theme of missed/mistaken connections in these stories at a more mature angle. Like the old saying about "even small men cast big shadows at sunset" comes the accidental meeting of a woman with an old man who once meant everything to her. Because the story is about older people who reconnect from a genuine, if squicky by today's lights, connection it involved me more. Not a lot more, but more. 3.5 stars

Forgotten Dreams happened to me. It was as unpleasant as Zweig writes it. If you put yourself back into the path of your past self you will not come out unscathed. No man should ever expect the women from his past to spare his feelings, I'll tell you that for free. 3.5 stars

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


ENCOUNTERS AND DESTINIES: A Farewell to Europe
STEFAN ZWEIG (tr. Will Stone)
Pushkin Press
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A new selection of essays by Stefan Zweig: tributes to the great artists and thinkers of the Europe of his day

Stefan Zweig was one of the twentieth century's greatest authors and a tireless champion of freedom, tolerance and friendship across borders. Encounters and Destinies collects his most impassioned and moving tributes to his many illustrious friends and peers: literary, philosophical and artistic luminaries from across the Old Europe that Zweig loved so much, and which he grieved to see so cruelly destroyed by two world wars.

Including pieces on Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky and Arturo Toscanini, this essential collection is also Zweig's tribute to the ideal of friendship: an ideal he clung to as the world he knew was torn apart.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Gorky" means bitter? I'd always known Peshkov chose a pseudonym, who wouldn't with a collection of ugly spitty sounds like "Peshkov" staring you down, but "bitter?" Wow. A lot of details I'd forgotten I noticed clicked into place in my long-ago readings of Gorky...The Lower Depths, The Artamonov Business...suddenly make all the sense in the world.

Zweig knew the great and the good of the Interwar Period wherein he spent the bulk of his life. He would've been a lot of fun at a dinner party because, while it does not seem that he had a bitchy bone in his body, he had a very retentive memory and a strong desire to keep the friends he made so he heard a lot about them.

I am hard-pressed to imagine anyone who does not know who John Drinkwater was without the aid of Wikipedia will be inclined to pick up a book of musings on people like Toscanini, Arthur Schnitzler, and Emile Verhaeren. (For someone who doesn't like poetry, I sure know who a lot of poets are.)

If for no other reason than to bask in the glow of warm, appreciative writing by a friend who treasured friendship writing about his friends, this is a Zweig book to immerse yourself into. It brought me up short to realize how much the culture of that time formed my sense of aesthetics. I still revere Remarque and Joyce. I think many serious readers do. But it goes deeper, forming a bedrock sense of what is "worthy" in the art world, and that interested me to realize.

So here's Zweig, eighty-four years dead and mostly forgotten, still teaching a now-old man about himself. Published again and again after being forgotten for decades.

I hope there's an afterlife just so he can know it was, in fact, all worth it.

HILDA HILST'S PAGE: #WITMonth DELIGHT THE OBSCENE MADAME D; pervy LETTERS FROM A SEDUCER

THE OBSCENE MADAME D
HILDA HILST (tr. Nathanaël, & Rachel Gontijo Araujo)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A wickedly funny work of depraved genius by one of Brazil’s most radical twentieth-century writers; imagine the Marquis de Sade as written by Clarice Lispector

An electrifying masterpiece by one of modern Brazilian literature’s most significant and controversial writers, Hilda Hilst takes us into the disorder and beauty of a mind restlessly testing its own limits.

Every month I ingested the body of God, not in the way one swallows green peas or agrostis, or swallows swords, I ingested the body of God the way people do when they know they are swallowing the More, the All, the Incommensurable, for not believing in finitude I would lose myself in absolute infinity...

The Obscene Madame D tells the story of Hillé, a sixty-year-old woman who has decided to abandon conventional life and spend the rest of her days in contemplation in a recess under the stairs. There, she is haunted by the perplexity of her recently deceased lover, Ehud, who cannot understand her rejection of common sense, sex and a simple life in favour of metaphysical speculations that he considers delusional and vain.

In a stream-of-consciousness monologue that’s part James Joyce, part Clarice Lispector, and part de Sade, Hillé speaks of her search for spiritual fulfilment from a space of dereliction, as she searches for answers to great questions of life, death and the relationship between body and soul.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Wow. *fans self*

Horny, thy name is Hillé. No wonder poor ol' Ehud is (it would seem) grouchy about being dead and about Hillé's decision to take herself into seclusion and contemplate The Divine. Saint Teresa of Ávila got nothin' on her! Observant, intelligent, philosophical, self-reflective...all apply to both women. Such a waste for a pervy old ghost/revenant/remnant.

"You wear a mask, love , a livid and violent mask, to look at you is to penetrate into the vortex of nothingness, may your silence make itself mine and we’ll wander together in a lacunous vastitude, that’s why I speak, speak to exorcise you, that’s why I work with words, also to exorcize myself, that the bitterness of the abysses may cease, that may break in this tide of phonemes, of syllables, that a light may break, exempt of anguish it’s best to be quiet when your name is passion."

In under 100pp, Hillé does more to demonstrate the primacy of sensual awareness as a motivating factor in every mode of life than Freud's entire all-too-male œuvre. It is a work where the images, the words used in forming them, the events described by them, the colors smells sensations all evoke the kind of sexual awareness of the world that slots in with the saint's immanent experiences of her god.

I don't understand the body either, that caltrop, nor the bloody logic of days, nor the faces that stare me down in this village in which I live, nor what are a house, a concept, what legs are, what is coming and going, toward where and what, Ehud, what these old women are, the howls of childhood, these spent men, what do the fools think of themselves, the children, what is thinking, what is clarity, the sonorous, what is sound, a trill, a cry, a howl, what's a wing uhn?

What happens in these pages is alchemical, psychological simmering and then the transubstantiation of breakdown breaking fracturing into insight:

Dross, yes, the attempt to compose a speech without knowing anything of its beginning nor its end, nor why the necessity for this speech, why the necessity to try to situate oneself, which amounts to attempting to remain clutching a rope over the abyss and without even knowing how it is that one wound up there, nor whether one ought now to move to the right rather than the left, around the fog, bellow a roar, or above it? water? voices? ships? I am reconstituting sophisticated evenings, politics, duties, a sociology of future, a being here, they ask me, kindred with the world, and acting, and authors, citations, foaming verbosity, the ear hearing itself foremost but responding to the people with elegance propriety care as though in fact it had listened to people, theatre, all theatre

I know a lot of y'all don't like long quotes and/or don't see how the quotes I've selected are connected to my ideas in the review. I put them in less and less often because of that feedback.

Here is my last quote from this remarkable fever-dream of a story. It is a summation of life as lived inside a human body. It looks at the processes proceeding all unseen, invisible, hidden and covered up because they're ugly, because to be ugly is terrible and shameful and not to be shared:

Animals, say, why do we kill them? To eat. But eating is abominable, no? All that stuff going down the tube and later becoming mass and even later shit. Close your eyes and try to imagine your body inside. Wriggling, blood. Take the microscope. Ah, not me. What a thing, flesh, nails, hair, and such colors in there, purplish-red. Look at yourself. Where are you now? I'm looking at my stomach. It's horrible Ehud. And you? I'm looking at my lungs. They dilate, compress. Everything enters into me, everything goes out. There's nothing that only goes in? No. And God? God enters and goes out, Ehud? I don't know about that. The priest says that God is inside the heart. So, look at yours, see if it's there, inside. I'm lookin'. Is it? No. Let me listen to your heart. Lord, how it beats!

...and realize Ehud is not alive, a woman in psychological distress is sharing these gobbets of thought and powerfully phrasing the offal in her mind to address it to a man who was but is not.

A deeply, enfoldingly, humanely beautiful story of life and need and longing and love. Profound. Moving. So short it's one long sitting of a Sunday afternoon read. I've left Madame D and her Ehud a warmer, more accepting soul.

Also horny.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


LETTERS FROM A SEDUCER
HILDA HILST (tr. John Keene)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A grand, perturbing erotic novel in which the wealthy, amoral Karl records his sexual life and search for meaning in letters with a surprising legacy

This epistolary novel tells the story of Karl, a wealthy, amoral and erudite man who records his daily life in a series of 20 letters to his sister Cordelia. She is cloistered and chaste, but the letters are wildly promiscuous—not just in their explicit sexual content, which have earned the novel the epithet ‘pornographic’, but in their form. Ranging in style and register from modernist fragments worthy of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, to letters that could have been penned by Enlightenment libertines like Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade, the letters make up a polyphonic text that pushes the boundaries both of fiction and of decency.

The novel—a standalone masterpiece which originally appeared as part of a Brazilian tetralogy—changes form again partway through, when the indigent poet Stamatius finds Karl’s record of his erotic adventures in a trash can, and begins to write stories based on what he reads, and then to break down those stories into even briefer fragments. Karl’s letters inspire Stamatius’ writing, and their narratives and identities become ever more fragmented, until we begin to doubt whether they are truly separate people. What unites them is an abundantly lewd imagination and a fantastically creative relationship to the greatest seducer of all: language.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Straight-people sex *shudder* in astoundingly intense, deeply evocative flashes, fragments, and impressionistic sweeps of imagery. Lovely writing, the imagination behind these pieces is one that gets far, far too little attention in Anglophone readership.

It is going to offend prudes. It will genuinely repulse people who do not like the bodyness of sex. For the rest of us, it's aspirational; it proves the largest human sex organ is the brain. It is also the most important sex organ. The way these bits and moments work is in a frame that might make some unwilling to read the work at all: Karl, a rich, bored jerk writes to his sister about his bedroom gymnastics in detail. It kept me away from the read until, for #WITMonth, I had to become Stamatius...the starving artist whose sections of narrative are no less erotically charged but because he's impoverished it's okay (?...no more sense made here than Karl's wealth TBH), and he's, um, not quite so...he's free-form let's say.

Highly literary porn. It's the kind of "story" one associates with those old-timey one-handed reading letters from "real readers" magazines (do those still exist, or is the advent of streaming porn to blame for another cultural shift?) that kinda petered out when the writer'd uhh finished their thought.

No-plot all-vibes readers will love this little novella-length piece. Those who need an actual crafted narrative aren't really likely to enjoy it. And if reading about the juice and friction of the body in congress with others bothers you, click away, turn the corner, go wash something.

THE KING IN YELLOW (Deluxe edition), is indeed deluxe and handsome to look at!

THE KING IN YELLOW (Deluxe edition)
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
Pushkin Press Classics
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending August 4, 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers is a classic collection of weird tales that has captivated readers since its original publication in 1895. The stories in this collection are linked by the mysterious play "The King in Yellow," a fictional drama that drives those who read it to madness and despair. Set against the backdrop of a beautifully detailed yet unsettling world, the stories explore themes of existential dread, the supernatural, and the fragility of the human mind.

This illustrated edition not only brings the haunting prose to life but also offers captivating illustrations that enhance the eerie atmosphere of Chambers' tales. Alongside the stories, readers will find a summary of the collection, a biography of the author, and a comprehensive list of characters, providing further insight into the dark and mysterious world of The King in Yellow.

Chambers' masterful storytelling and exploration of the unknown have earned this collection a place in the genre of weird fiction, influencing later writers such as H.P. Lovecraft. This edition is perfect for fans of Gothic horror, supernatural fiction, and anyone who enjoys a chilling tale that lingers long after the last page is turned.

Whether you're reading for the first time or revisiting these tales, this edition of The King in Yellow offers a deeper connection to the eerie and the unknown, complemented by stunning illustrations that capture the essence of Chambers' haunting world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A collection of two halves, one being "The King in Yellow" sequence of gothic, eerie tales centering on the eponymous entity in art or (sur)reality; two stories set in Chambers' home country of the US (marked *) and two in the fin de siècle's default setting for perversity, Paris (marked **). These form what deels like a failed novel; like Chambers was heading for a larger goal but, for whatever reason, chose not to go there. I wondered if he simply lost interest once he thought to set the stories acrually *in* Paris, Sodom on the Seine working its decadent way on him as much as on his characters.

The remaining stories are only occasionally tinged with gothic overtones. They tend more towards romantic fiction in the older sense. They're not about modern concerns with coupling up and finding love, they're about the grand emotional sweeps and swoops of Romanticism. It's all very beautifully presented by Pushkin Press in this Deluxe edition.

In accordance with the Prophecy, the nine stories are herein dealt with by the Bryce Method of a short response to the story, a rating of it on its own, and the collection's gestalt being the overall rating.

**The Repairer of Reputations limns the iea of "have you found the Yellow Sign?" into your awareness. It is a strange, haunting, unsettling thing this sogn; it plays on arrogant narcissism ("Mr. Wilde" eh?) to induce paranoia which becomes the impetus for seeking it and the punishment fo seeking it at the same time. Deeply disturbing, very humidly told. 4.5*

*The Mask brings in the play "The King in Yellow," merely reading it will send a person into a spiral of madness! It unhinges all who dare to open it! Talk about a sales job, there's no better way to get huge sales for something than this except maybe banning it on grounds of immorality.

The sufferings of the artist who, drawn to experience these extreme things for Love (of course), mesh with weird period-appropriate pseudoscience in a fun but very, very 1890s way. 4.5*

*In the Court of the Dragon is so flippin' bizarre...why does the old weirdo want the guy's soul? What's the way he knows the guy's soul is of such interest and value? I fear this line of mental inquiry is why I'm just not a gothic-story habitué, but it's sure got the trappings of the best ones! 4*

**The Yellow Sign a coffin worm?!? *shudder* 4*

The Demoiselle d'Ys tells a very charming, if kind of trite in the twenty-first century, time-travel romance (in our modern usage). Left a mildly pleasant but very indistinct impression on me. 3*

The Prophets' Paradise compiles a series of prose poems that expand on the love, hubris, and dangerous supernatural bargaining of the first four stories' characters. Seems odd to me not to put it *within* those stories but permaybehaps Author Chambers didn't think of these small moments in time to do so...expanding the quotation from "The King in Yellow" that open the cycle's stories. 3.75*

The Street of the Four Winds is a Parisian tragic story in the era's typical style, with ruin and disaster following on from following a neighbor's cat. Very apt. 3*

The Street of the First Shell tells a deeply sorrowful tale set during the Siege of Paris (1870 through 1871), with tragic results from terrible decisions and awful actions forced by the cruelest of fates. 3.75* despite the melodrama (or because of it, NGL)

The Street of Our Lady of the Fields is another "bohemians bohemianing unoriginally across the dirty foreign streets of dirty foreign Paris' dirty foreign immoral soil." Spare me. 2.5*

Rue Barrée see above, only the story's as sick of the story as I am. Made it more fun to read. 3*
It's a beautiful object, and will no doubt be welcome for decorative value. I think many a gothic-story reader will get one, and that will be its fate. Sometimes it's not great to meet your heroes in person.

WOLF MOON, the platonic ideal of Antifa in literature

WOLF MOON
JULIO LLAMAZARES (tr. Simon Deefholts, Kathryn Phillips-Miles)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A tense, lyrical novel of life on the run in Franco's Spain that offers a bold, timeless challenge against fascism and authoritarianism.

FOR FANS OF ROGUE MALE: A literary thriller full of action and dramatic landscapes, and the first novel to break the national pact of silence after Francisco Franco’s death.

1937. Having lost the Civil War in Spain, four republican soldiers lead a fugitive existence deep in the Cantabrian mountains. They are on the run, skirmishing with Franco's soldiers, knowing that surrender means execution. Wounded and hungry, the hold-outs are drawn from the safety of the mountains into the villages they once inhabited, not only risking their lives but also the lives of anyone caught helping them. Trapped in the lonely mountains, with their harsh winters and unforgiving summers, it is only a matter of time before the Fascists hunt them down.

Living in caves, barely surviving on scraps provided by the villagers they dare to make contact with, Ángel and his friends are tortured by heat, cold, damp, hunger and above all, fear—fear for themselves, and for those still willing to help them. And if they do survive, what kind of country will there be left to live in?

First published in 1985, Wolf Moon was the first novel to break with the Pacto de Olvido, a political and cultural amnesty in Spain, following Franco's death in 1975, which provided cover for the regime's supporters. Brimming with tension and violence, it is a testament to enduring loyalty: to a cause, to justice, and to brothers-in-arms.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Fascism's end is a terrible, trying time: how does a society disfigured from within reckon with the reality that some subset of the population liked this evil, supported it, didn't want it to end while another (probably larger) subset did little or nothing to oppose the way things were? France after WWII, Spain after Franco...they chose to do only a little to reckon with the evils recently departed. It's always interesting to learn about the people who opposed the slide into fascism, as we do here, in the context of reckoning with the way it happened.

A novel about factual events published ten years after Franco's death, this story highlights the tragic terror of night falling across the rural beauty of Spain's Asturias region. Four young Republican soldiers spend nine years resisting Franco's fascist government, abetted by the peasants whose lives are materially worse under this government...until as the Falangistas figure out who's probably doing what to help the men, they're brutalized into acquiescence. That's the end of these Maquis, a name the Deep Space Nine fans are noticing with delight and yes this is where it came from.

Ángel, our narrator, is a schoolteacher. It's how the author gets away with putting in so much beautiful language:

Since we got here I’ve scarcely felt the terrible moaning of the beast in the depths of my stomach, which bayed despairingly so many times in the final months of the war. It was even worse during the five days when we did not eat at all as we fled across the mountains, in the rain, from a more physical beast, more human and bloodthirsty, which pursued us implacably. It is as if the dampness and cold of the cave have penetrated my bones and my soul, imprisoning me here, lying beside the fire day and night with no interest in eating and talking or even peering through the mouth of the cave to look at the hard, overcast sky.

It's evocative. It's lovely, at least it is to me, and it says exactly what you need to know at that point in the plot: they're hunted, they're cold, they frequently have trouble finding food. All without saying that, but talking evocatively about the sensations of it. It's a great technique for keeping a richly satisfying story under 200pp.

As this tale is based on the real experiences of several men it's not necessary for the author to pretend the ending is a surprise. As he was the very first to break the "pact of forgetting" after Franco's death, it was wise for him to stare the law down not try to waffle around it, cutting a bit, refocusing stuff...just put it out there, let the chips fall where they may. (It doesn't hurt that he was only 30ish when it came out, with only two poetry collections before this short novel.)

It's quite the debut, being sad, infuriating, outrageously knowing in that "we're all in on the joke" way that can fall flat, ruining a story's impact on your feelings; this iteration does not. It makes old-man-read-it-before here doff his hairpiece to this talented tyro. Many are the stories flattened and rendered anemic by a misjudged or badly executed tonal choice like this one.

It's a case of biblio-Stockholm Syndrome. Author Llamazares became the moon that lit me over his story's trails, and the brighter suns of later writers on the topic (eg, Javier Cercas' Soldiers of Salamis) merely cause me reader's sunburn.

Get one soonest, because this story will play out again in our lifetimes.

THE STORY OF A SINGLE WOMAN, written in 1972 and still dividing opinion

THE STORY OF A SINGLE WOMAN
UNO CHIYO (tr. Rebecca Copeland)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A piercingly beautiful and candid novel of love, sex and independence in 1920s Japan by a trailblazing Japanese writer.

She left her home, just a girl, determined to live alone. But wasn’t this the very life her late father had most fervently forbidden?

As an older woman, Kazue looks back on her tumultuous younger years with piercing clarity. Growing up in a tiny Japanese mountain village at the start of the twentieth century, her life was shadowed by the demands and expectations of her troubled, alcoholic father. While she is still a young teenager, her family arranges for her to marry an older cousin; Kazue stays with the boy for only ten days before returning home alone.

This is the beginning of a life of questing independence, which will see Kazue forced to leave her home at eighteen following a love affair, going first to Korea and then to Tokyo. Driven by her impulses and an indomitable spirit of hope, Kazue moves from one relationship to another, hungry for experience. As her sense of identity and voice grows, she takes to writing as a means to live a life on her own terms.

Candidly told and full of stunning imagery, The Story of a Single Woman is an autobiographical novel by one of Japan’s most significant 20th-century writers, a trailblazer who lived and wrote like no-one else.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A short work of autofiction, in Japanese called "watakushi-shōsetsu" which Translator Copeland helpfully renders as "I-novel"; very much like the French récit, with the subject one's self but lightly fictionalized. I like this form because it allows us to focus on the experience of the events without dilution by considering other PoVs.

That's also why it's short. It's easy to see that this technique could become overbearing, solipsistic, even unpleasantly claustrophobic, at any great length.

Considering the era...early twentieth century...when this character, Kazue, lived, and considering it's the life of Chiyo herself, this is a remarkably unconventional narrative. Kazue is married off, but decides that is not for her. She simply...leaves. There are women in 2025 who would not be able to muster that up in themselves; she did it over a hundred years ago. Left, never went back, never yoked herself to another man without her choice, just went about the task of living her own life with whatever company from whatever man she chose. Of course, this being a real life's events, there were men who used her; the unusually frank thing is there were men she discussed that she used, too.

I think a lot of readers are inclined to judge the resolute focus on herself, her inner world, unkindly where, for example, they would not judge Cheever or Updike (to name but two navel-gazing solipsistic men of celebrity) in that way. A woman writing so closely about herself, about how her behaviors feel to her and why she decided to do them, is still "transgressive" but it's another unquestioned privilege for men. Reviewers might tut over the man's unreflective gaze but no one would complain that he left no room in the story for others; feelings. He's a man. No one expects him to.

So here's Author Uno making that choice, and many are the assessments of that as a problem; but it's never formulated as taking a man's freedom or something direct like that. It's a quiet assumption that women must always write about, therefore consider and even center, the feelings of others in their lives as well as in their creative ways.

Interesting to me that privilege is not only pervasive but also invisible until you choose to see it. Judging Author Uno as not giving you what you were never promised in her story is, it seems to me, pretty clearly applying misogynist standards to her. Her life was less destructive to others than her own wastrel father's was, yet I know many judge her behavior in their reviews not dismiss that behavior as a product of her upbringing so to be smiled indulgently upon.

That feels essentially unfair to me. I'm pretty sure I'd've done it too until recently. The world has changed, and it took me with it.

But for all my appreciation of Kazue's candor, I was not convinced that this story should not have been a novel-novel instead of an I-novel. It wasn't always clear to me that we gained enough by that technique to make it worth losing the richness of a novel's scope for settings and emotional responses to events. I'm not quite, then, at all five stars, but no lower than four and a half because, even in the twenty-first century it feels radical to many readers for a woman to be so unapologetically focused on herself and her feelings.

THE BOOK OF PARADISE, translation from Yiddish highlighting global rise in anti-Semitism this Translation Month

THE BOOK OF PARADISE
ITZIK MANGER (tr. Robert Adler Peckerar)
Pushkin Press Classics
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The raucously witty Yiddish classic about a Jewish Paradise afflicted by very human temptations and pains—a delightful new translation perfect for fans of Michael Chabon

Witty, playful and slyly profound, this story of a young angel expelled from Paradise is the only novel by one of the great Yiddish writers, which was written just before the outbreak of World War II.

As a result of a crafty trick, the expelled angel retains the memory of his previous life when he’s born as a Yiddish-fluent baby mortal on Earth. The humans around him plead for details of that other realm, but the Paradise of his mischievous stories is far from their ideal—a world of drunken angels, lewd patriarchs and the very same divisions and temptations that shape the human world.

Published here in a lively new translation by Robert Adler Peckerar, The Book of Paradise is a comic masterpiece from poet-satirist Itzik Manger that irreverently blurs the boundaries between ancient and modern and sacred and profane, where the shtetl is heaven, and heaven is the shtetl.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A wild, funny, irreverent take on how power looks to the powerless, how memories of Home persist in the exile, how impossible it is to fit into pre-existing systems when you're not One Of Us. Manger's entire life, a Jew in the nexus of a Jew-hating country be it the Habsburg Empire, Romania, Ukraine, or Poland. Escaping certain death in France, another deeply anti-Semitic place, by running to the United States in 1939 before coming to rest in newly-founded Israel, where he died in 1969, a man without a homeland or a language to speak in. Yiddish culture, alive and vibrant in ancient Imperial Austrian lands, in independent Poland, Romania, Soviet Ukraine and their cousins in the wide-open United States, vanished entirely after the Holocaust. One of many, many crimes against humanity that occurred during that brutal time, it's one that most of us just don't even slightly realize took place. We don't, most of us, remember hearing elders speak Yiddish, don't recall the culture's last lingering gasps of the 1930s being part of even our parents' knowledge base. It was embarrassing, it was Foreign, it was lower-class. It was also the home of millions and millions of people whose passports, like Manger's, could be yanked by the issuing country because they simply didn't like the person holding it for being Other.

Does all this ring any bells yet?

Samuel Abba, as our kicked-out angel's human form is called, recalls his time in Paradise to the delight of his human mother, the fearful shushing of his human father, and the stern corrective admonitions of the Elders of their community to change his tune. Paradise can't be like that! Power dynamics are *good*for*us*! (The question of who exactly "us" consists of is answered thus.) Abusive parents, cheating lovers, Authority out of touch with lived reality, these are Earthly problems...these can't be your memories.

The standard invalidation of a thousand Nos, in other words, used to teach all of us to stay in our appointed places. Not "this isn't true" but "this can't be true," an entirely different assertion of the consensus world-view that QUILTBAG people know so very well. The translator's HUGE challenges in making the ideas of the storytelling format, harkening as it does back to the school of creating midrashim, as well as the very specific cultural usages like Abba's Paradise-bound friend "Little Pisser"'s name...literal translation of "pisher" but lacking the affectionate, dismissive, gentle put-down of the Yiddish term for a more biological and rude one...highlighted for me the sad, irreplaceable loss of the globe-spanning Yiddish culture. It's one thing to revive individual artists' work; the gestalt is still gone. Another black mark on the souls of the multinational fascist bastards whose tiny little hearts had no room for Others.

If you have even a particle of resistance to the recrudescing idea of All Must Be One, I can't encourage you strongly enough to read this story by a man who lost every single thing he'd grown up with, every sound out of his mother's mouth, the mouth itself, the music the poetry the food the films...all of it slaughtered and burned and vanished to serve the "ideal" of "One Fatherland"...and look around you at what's happening in our world today.

Resist.