Epstein’s idea for quality paperbacks was simple: buy the rights (at low cost) for out-of-print hardcover classics and scholarly works of likely appeal to students and educated general readers—about 10 to 15 percent of the book-buying public, and a dependably steady customer base—and then republish them in affordable paperbound editions. Print them on durable paper with attractive cover designs and sell them in bookstores. If well chosen, the titles could sell respectably (or better) year after year in the backlist.
What can’t be named can’t be questioned in this new novel by Minneapolis writer Kelly Barnhill, which immerses readers in a post-World War II period of conformity and repression with a speculative twist.
It’s hard work, reading breathless accounts of long-ago gossip from parties you weren’t invited to, or descriptions of boozy lunches from days gone by. In Circus of Dreams it’s clear that John Walsh had a fabulous time on the British literary social circuit in the 1980s; perhaps the rule is that the more enjoyable the soirée, the less suited it will be to later recollection.
The reader may raise an eyebrow when imagining Walsh and the novelist Graham Swift emerging from a drunken lunch “sloshed and euphoric, like John Wayne and Lee Marvin singing ‘The Moon Shines Tonight on Pretty Red Wing’ in The Comancheros”. (I think Swift is Wayne in this scenario, and Walsh is Marvin, but frankly the whole thing seems a tad unlikely.) That reader may sigh when Walsh, invited to a party at the Chelsea flat of Lady Caroline Blackwood, reports: “I had to pinch myself to stop blurting out, ‘Oh my God you were married to Robert Lowell – what was that like?’”
Eternal life, in heaven or through reincarnation on Earth, is promised by many faiths. For a simple reason: it eases the fear of death. The idea of living for ever has other devotees, too. It is now pursued by a motley crew of fringe scientists, cultish groups and tech billionaires, united by a conviction that a way to make humans immortal will eventually be found. Meanwhile they pin their hopes on experimental, often fraudulent therapies that promise rejuvenation.
In “The Price of Immortality”, Peter Ward, a journalist who has written for The Economist, delves into the origins of these beliefs and the science of purported cures for ageing. He spends time with groups such as the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida, where congregants discuss food supplements and cryonics (the freezing of bodies at death in the hope that they can be revived later).