New York Review Books – The Bell Bookshop

The Enormous Room

Emma — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A centenary edition of E. E. Cummings’s antic autobiographical novel about his imprisonment in a French military detention camp during World War I.

In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, a recent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. He arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, and they set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences, which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately led to their arrest. They were held for months in a military detention camp, sharing a single large room with a host of fellow detainees. It is this experience that Cummings relates in lightly fictionalized form in The Enormous Room, a book in which a tale of woe becomes an occasion of exuberant mischief. A free-spirited novel that displays the same formal swagger as his poems, a stinging denunciation of the stupidity of military authority, and a precursor to later books like Catch-22 and MASH, Cummings’s novel is an audacious, uninhibited, lyrical, and lasting contribution to American literature.

The Provensen Book of Fairy Tales

Emma — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Alice and Martin Provensen were one of the most talented husband-and-wife author-illustrator teams of the twentieth century. A long-out-of-print cult classic first published 50 years ago, The Provensen Book of Fairy Tales is a treasury of their illustrations accompanied by fairy tales from authors such as A. A. Milne, Hans Christian Andersen, and Oscar Wilde. Here too are clever retellings and newly imagined tales: refined old favourites like Arthur Rackham’s “Beauty and the Beast,” feminist revisions like Elinor Mordaunt’s “The Prince and the Goose Girl,” and sensitive stories by literary stylists like Henry Beston’s “The Lost Half-Hour” and Katharine Pyle’s “The Dreamer.” Full of magic, ingenuity, and humour, The Provensen Book of Fairy Tales is a witty modern descendant of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and a classic in its own right, sure to be beloved by a new generation.

The Open Road

Emma — Tue, 25 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The south of France, 1950: A solitary vagabond walks through the villages, towns, valleys, and foothills of the region between northern Provence and the Alps. He picks up work along the way and spends the winter as the custodian of a walnut-oil mill. He also picks up a problematic companion: a cardsharp and con man, whom he calls “the Artist.” The action moves from place to place, and episode to episode, in truly picaresque fashion. Everything is told in the first person, present tense, by the vagabond narrator, who goes unnamed. He himself is a curious combination of qualities-poetic, resentful, cynical, compassionate, flirtatious, and self-absorbed. While The Open Road can be read as loosely strung entertainment, interspersed with caustic reflections, it can also be interpreted as a projection of the relationship of author, art, and audience. But it is ultimately an exploration of the tensions and boundaries between affection and commitment, and of the competing needs for solitude, independence, and human bonds. As always in Jean Giono, the language is rich in natural imagery and as ruggedly idiomatic as it is lyrical.

Onward & Upward In The Garden

Emma — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In 1925 Harold Ross hired Katharine Sergeant Angell as a manuscript reader for The New Yorker. Within months she became the magazine’s first fiction editor, discovering and championing the work of Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, James Thurber, Marianne Moore, and her husband-to-be, E. B. White, among others. After years of cultivating fiction, White set her sights on a new genre: garden writing. On March 1, 1958, The New Yorker ran a column entitled “Onward and Upward in the Garden,” a critical review of garden catalogs, in which White extolled the writings of “seedmen and nurserymen,” those unsung authors who produced her “favorite reading matter.” Thirteen more columns followed, exploring the history and literature of gardens, flower arranging, herbalists, and developments in gardening. Two years after her death in 1977, E. B. White collected and published the series, with a fond introduction. The result is this sharp-eyed appreciation of the green world of growing things, of the aesthetic pleasures of gardens and garden writing, and of the dreams that gardens inspire.