We open every book with the assumption that the writer wishes it to be read. Readers occupy a default position of generosity, bestowing the gift of our attention on the page before us. At most, we might concede that a novel or a poem was written for inward pleasures only, without the need or anticipation of an audience. It is very rare to open a book and to feel—to know—that the writer did not want us to read it at all, and, in fact, tried to prevent our reading it, and that, in reading the book, we are resurrecting a self that the writer wished, without hesitation or mercy, to kill.
This is the case with Rosemary Tonks’s “The Bloater,” published originally in 1968 and reissued in 2022 by New Directions, eight years after the author’s death in 2014. Without this intervention, Tonks might have succeeded in wiping “The Bloater” out, along with five other novels and two books of strange and special poetry, scorching her own literary earth. Before New Directions’ reissue and Bloodaxe Books’ posthumous collection of her poetry, getting hold of any of her work was prohibitively expensive; one novel could cost thousands of dollars.
How we got here is one of the great stories of science and synergy. The emergence of this new large-scale lab-based astrophysics was an unanticipated side effect of a much broader, more fraught, and now quite in-the-news scientific journey: the quest for nuclear fusion. As humanity has worked to capture the energy of the stars, we’ve also found a way to bring the stars down to Earth.
Still, despite all that, readers seemed to enjoy it, and for just the reasons I had hoped: the story lingered in people’s minds from one Friday to the next, and they wondered what turn it would take. As it spun out across the span of a year I got letters (well, emails) from people regularly suggesting possible plot twists or bemoaning the demise of favorite characters. I didn’t consciously adjust the story to fit their requests (and I’d written much of it in advance) but I did take note of what people were responding to.
But even then, I wanted to be more than funny. As is the way with youth, I began experimenting, testing other voices, longer forms. At twenty-one, I drafted an elegiac novel, Kaaterskill Falls. Ted Solotaroff, who edited Total Immersion, my first collection of stories, rejected my manuscript, asking, dismayed, “What happened to the sparkling Allegra Goodman I used to know?”
What happened? I was growing up, graduating, getting married, studying, traveling, having a baby. I published new stories, revised Kaaterskill Falls. and saw that book succeed. I raised four children, wrote five more novels—and finally got old enough to think about being young.
Tom Crewe’s intricate and finely crafted debut novel makes fiction of real history: In London, in the 1890s, two men, John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis, collaborated on a study supporting freedom for “sexual inverts,” or what we would now call gay rights. Their efforts predate popular conceptions of the fight for equal rights, and it’s their lives and work that take the spotlight in Crewe’s reimagining.
In her latest novel, “Sam,” Allegra Goodman delivers a portrait of a girl at risk that shimmers with an unusual intimacy and depth. Her title character is 7 at the start of the book, living in Beverly, Mass., with her mother, Courtney, a hairdresser, and her brother, Noah, who is 2. To get away from Noah, who thinks his name may really be “No,” Sam climbs the walls — or actually the doorjambs — inch by tenuous inch.
In her latest book, the amazing Eva Brann addresses one of humanity’s most universal concerns: the pursuit of happiness. Drawn from the first line of the American Declaration of Independence, her familiar reference suggests that she is a pursuer. Renowned as one of the founding architects of the Great Books curriculum at St. John’s College in Annapolis (and at its cousin college in Santa Fe), she has never stopped serving — she is 93 and has taught at the school for 65 years — as a classicist, tutor, dean, prolific writer, and intrepid explorer of the ideals of American democracy. She describes herself, however, not as a philosopher but as “one of a company of curators of a community of learning.” She has published — written, translated, edited — 39 books. She won the National Humanities Medal in 2005. She is the longest-serving tutor at her college. She is a maestro.