B-Side Books

Starred review from May 31, 2021
Plotz (Semi-Detached), editor of the Public Books website’s “B-Side” column, showcases 40 contriubtions to the column in this smart and fun collection. Arranged into seven themes—childhood, other worlds, comedy, strife, home fires, mysteries, and journeys of the spirit—the collection is, as Sharon Marcus notes in her foreword, a “book of books” focused on lesser-known titles. Seeta Changati, for instance, reads Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a lesson in shamelessness and a means of garnering perspective on the Trump administration. Kathryn Lofton writes about her first encounter with Edith Hamilton’s Mythology at age 10 and uses Greek myth as a way of thinking about rape. Ursula K. Le Guin, meanwhile, offers laugh-out-loud praise for the way John Galt’s 19th-century Annals of the Parish defies “the decree of the Iowa Writing School that controls almost all modern fiction” as he “tells without showing.” But more than being just a collection of “what to read next” suggestions, the pieces easily convey a sense of how powerful reading can be. Book lovers are in for a treat.

April 15, 2021
Forgotten books earn their readers' attention. Plotz, a professor of humanities at Brandeis and host of the podcast Recall This Book, gathers 40 essays about "rare, forgotten, and unsung works"--novels, short stories, poetry, a ballad opera, diaries and journals, and a work of scholarship--that, the contributors contend, deserve to be rescued from obscurity. Most contributors are academics, with a smattering of fiction and poetry writers. Their choices are eclectic, their essays enlightening. Plotz organizes the selections into seven sections: Childhood, Other Worlds, Comedy, Battle and Strife, Home Fires, Mysteries and Trials, and Journeys of the Spirit. Some essays focus on little-known works by well-known authors. For example, Steven McCauley praises Christopher Isherwood's Prater Violet, a novel that "contains much of Isherwood's understated elegance, his insight into behavior, and all of his powerful charm. As an added bonus, it's a literary novel about that decidedly unliterary global obsession: moviemaking." Sharon Marcus cites Shirley Jackson's Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, admiring the "mundane chaos" that Jackson portrays in her domestic comedies. Merve Emre finds Natalia Ginzburg's novella The Dry Heart exemplary of "a genre that compresses, with terrible and dazzling force, the violent human entanglements that the novel unravels over a longer span of time." Carlo Rotella writes about Gringos, a novel by Charles Portis, the author of the bestseller True Grit. Many essays examine authors and works that may be unfamiliar to nonacademic readers: Patience Agbabi's poetry collection Transformatrix; Philip Fisher's scholarly study The Vehement Passions; The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, which, Rami Targoff writes, offers "a rich and complex portrait of a Renaissance woman for whom writing was not simply a habit but an essential part of her survival"; and Satomi Myōdō's Journey in Search of the Way, which Theo Davis admires "for the unselfconscious cheer with which Myōdō recounts her misery." Erudite and appreciative essays on what and why to read.

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