If the past few years of American literary publishing have had a zeitgeist, it has been more like a series of geists from zeits past.
There have been notable rewritings, novels that self-consciously lift techniques and plotlines from Perec or Bernhard, from Huckleberry Finn or David Copperfield, or—in the odd case of Jenny Jackson’s The Shampoo Effect , a beach-read best seller published this summer — from that scene in Couples where somebody hurts his pinkie playing basketball. There have been big novels published this year about becoming old-world by breaking your phone (Transcription), or becoming old-world by waking up in 1855 (Yesteryear), or sitting out the passage of time altogether (On the Calculation of Volume). And there have been, as ever, plenty of full-dress period pieces about Greek codices and the tribulations of G. W. Pabst. (All but one of this decade’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novels are works of historical fiction .)
More conspicuous than the new novels that feel old, however, have been the old novels that feel somehow new. The 2010s and this first half of the 2020s have featured a seasonal rotation of the dead and the aging: Babitz bubbles, Renata revivals, Hardwick hurricanes, a trail of Cookie Mueller crumbs luring us back to the punky mise-en-scène of ’80s New York. A few summers ago you could go to the beach and spot multiple copies of Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus scattered among the towels — impressive 21st-century saturation for a novel published in 1980. Helen Garner, another Australian prolific in that decade, has swept through book clubs stateside like a low-pressure front bringing brisk winds and brisker sentences from down under. This spring delivered the Nancy Lemannaissance, a multipublisher reissue spree celebrated in a New York Times profile nearly as long as one of the septuagenarian’s novellas. Postwar English women seem to attract a special fervor: Barbara Comyns, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Taylor, Leonora Carrington, Sylvia Townsend Warner — a full-on British Invasion of psychological horror and class system neurosis.
Old-book reading cycles are, so to speak, nothing new. Certain novelists, like Norman Rush or Charles Portis or Dawn Powell, seem to exist in a perennial state of mid-recuperation. But the old writers most of interest lately share a particular flavor: unknown legends in their time, recently rediscovered. They wrote something great, or at least very good, sometime in the previous century, but for reasons of sexism, or ahead-of-its-time-ism, their work got left behind. Maybe the old-new writer’s career looked something like that of the fictional novelist in Lisa Tuttle’s My Death, published in 2004 and reissued in 2023:
Helen Ralston was hardly a household name, now or ever. Her fame, such as it was, rested entirely on one book. In Troy had been published by a small press in the 1930s and developed a kind of underground reputation, read by few but admired by those discerning readers who made the effort . In the 1960s it was published again — in America for the first time — and there was even a mass-market paperback, which is what I’d read in college. It was revived from obscurity once again by Virago in the 1980s, but, from the results of my bookstore visit before lunch, I was pretty sure it was out of print again.
But now she’s out of print no longer. Now she’s been reissued! And this time the bookstores will welcome her with open shelves.
In 2008, an editorial in this magazine, “The Spirit of Revival,” took stock of the publisher that would eventually reissue My Death and many other mislaid gems by old-new writers, New York Review Books Classics, calling it “the characteristic publishing project of the decade” — a canon for a postcanon age. Launched at the tail end of the 1990s, NYRB Classics made its name by resurrecting chiefly Anglophone works that had lapsed into obscurity, or been born into it: lesser Trilling, lighter Wilson, any Steegmuller, many British guys with initials for first names. NYRB Classics’ list was modest next to a behemoth like Penguin Classics, but over the course of the 2000s the publisher built a sound model: Dig up an out-of-print minorpiece, buy the rights for cheap from a dead writer’s nephew, and package it handsomely, with an introduction by somebody important.
Nothing, of course, embodies the spirit of revival more than revisiting the pieces one’s magazine published during the Bush Administration. But reissue publishing has transformed since we last checked in, with the NYRB Classics template taken up and refined by a thicket of upstarts eager to recover their own Helen Ralstons. McNally Editions , an outgrowth of the New York bookstore–stationery–reading group empire , has struck a high-end note, publishing French-flapped versions of under-remembered postwar office novels and westerns, alongside, naturally, more British ladies. Following its acquisition by Deep Vellum, Dalkey Archive has been repolishing the dusty fun-house mirror of American experimental fiction, bringing core oddities like Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor back into circulation. Big Five publishers are juicing their reissue efforts (one of last year’s most interesting reissues was Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales, brought back into hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux after being acquired by Toni Morrison for Random House in the early ’80s) and, in the case of Doubleday’s Outsider Editions, launched earlier this year, creating new imprints to lead the charge. Smaller outfits with narrower niches, like Hagfish (focused on spiky and offbeat novels by women) or Mandylion Press (spiky and offbeat novels by women — from the 19th century!), periodically crop up, joining the rush into the past.
These books are old, but not classics; to read them is illuminating, but not credentialing.
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But NYRB Classics continues to tower. The press has sprawled and evolved, now putting out titles at a Stakhanovite clip rivaling that of a major house. These days midcentury women are catching up to midcentury men; the bench is deep enough for NYRB Classics to run increasingly specific sales on dozens of books from dozens of eras: 20 percent off literature of World War II, 30 percent off literature of the interwar years, 40 percent off literature of the Years of Lead. Although Soviets take up a lot of airtime, as they tend to, more titles come from more countries, translated from more languages. For every handful of Life and Fatesthere is a The Lord, Soraya Antonius’s 1986 novel about Mandatory Palestine.1
The demographic broadening could be broader. Of the roughly one hundred and fifty authors NYRB Classics has published since 2020, about a tenth have been writers of color. Elsewhere, some of the most exciting rediscoveries have been works by Black writers: Fran Ross’s Oreo, from New Directions; William Demby’s The Catacombs, from Vintage; Vincent O. Carter’s The Bern Book, from Dalkey;Kathleen Collins’s Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, from Ecco. These publications belatedly and partially acknowledge mainstream publishing’s neglect of Black authors of the 20th century. It’s striking, amid this landscape, that NYRB Classics has reissued only one novel by a Black American this decade, William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face.
At the same time, NYRB Classics has edged closer to the canon of syllabus standbys it initially stood athwart (or at least stood to the side of, affably waving). The esoterica quotient remains high, but NYRB Classics can no longer be said to champion only “the truly minor, overlooked, or forgotten book,” as we wrote in 2008. While it always dabbled in marginal works by major authors — licking clean the golden bowl of neglected Henry James novels — lately the press has traded the hors d’oeuvre for chefs d’oeuvre: a new edition of Mrs. Dalloway, a new translation of Fathers and Children, an Australian translation of Swann’s Way.
Major and minor, Anglophone and not, dour experiments and clockwork whodunits: The reissuers seem in no danger of running out of books to unearth. “The past is a foreign country,” goes the opening line of an early NYRB Classics title, L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, and the reissue reader can feel like a cruising literary tourist, docking in disparate pasts at whim. Yet the number and success of these publishing projects — so unalike in genre, form, sensibility, obscurity, and era — suggest a deeper, more durable readerly desire is at work. What is it?
Different literatures invite different modes of reading. There are books one approaches in a directed way (perhaps for a class) or with a dutiful attitude (for a class one doesn’t like); whole literatures are read furtively, or as proxies for alternative states of mind.
The orientation invited by the old-new novels is a liberated, fun, highly optional noncomprehensiveness. These books are old, but not classics; to read them is illuminating, but not credentialing. They arrive unfreighted with the baggage of the (alas, decreasingly) school-taught major canon, but the odds are still high that they’re pretty good. Higher, really, than the odds that any given contemporary novel is good, since these have been vetted twice over: most recently by a reissue outfit, and before that, by some other publisher in some other time. Readers who first encountered a reissue back when it was just an issue get to experience the satisfaction of watching it finally meet its moment, along with the slightly possessive pride one feels anytime a private affinity goes public.
Above all there’s an implicit pleasure in the reissue’s blend of vintage and contemporary, its transmission from a past whose edges haven’t yet been dulled by repetition. Displayed in a bookstore alongside the new stuff, endorsed and introduced by authors who might have written some of that new stuff, an older novel can feel awfully current — certainly no less current than the historical fiction competing for shelf space. The best reissued fiction seems to scramble temporality altogether. In her introduction to Ross’s Oreo, first published in 1974 and reissued in 2015,Danzy Senna describes the novel as “a strange uncanny dream about the future that was really the past.”
They prompt days of unresolvable chatter about whether Housekeeping is more beautiful than The Line of Beauty, The Known World more brilliant than My Brilliant Friend, Wolf Hall more timeless than In Search of Lost Time.
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Sometimes those pasts look so much like our own time that one has to squint to see the oldness at all. Oreo has a chatty polyvocal bounce and density of wordplay that one might associate with fiction written after the advent of Twitter. Part of the surprise of Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, an early entry in today’s reissue boom, is just how much the novel’s brownstone Brooklyn lifeworld mirrors our age’s own gentrification anxieties, even as it’s populated by Jell-O salads and sketched in language that Jonathan Franzen, in his introduction, calls “creaky.” Sometimes a reissued novel will even capture, like a kind of old-book turducken, the feeling that a superior present might be found in a literature of the past. Here’s one of Desperate Characters’ desperate characters, feeling fed up with his late-’60s surroundings: “‘I’m Zola-crazy,’ said Leon. ‘I’m crazy about everything up to January first, 1900.’”2
Of course, one understands that reading Zola is not just pleasurable but edifying. The 21st-century reader can go back to Zola and feel herself comprehending something about the origins of naturalism, about how the realist novel as we now know it shaped itself around the project of representing class and consciousness. These non-, or a-, or anti-canonical novels are up to something else, and to read them produces an entirely different affect. They seldom reveal much about the development of the form, though they sometimes gesture toward paths not taken. The most exemplary old-new fiction can serve a sociological function, but of a low-key kind: a record of what it was like to be a minor player at a specific moment in a specific place. Take two representative titles reissued by NYRB Classics in the 2010s, Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk and Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries (in a new translation by Damion Searls). Both take place in greater New York in greater 1968, and both observe their heady era chiefly by way of historical scraps: Both novels rely on tape-recorded dialogues, and Johnson’s is ballasted by clippings from the New York Times. These are highly literal fulfillments of one of realist fiction’s most basic tasks — to document how people talk and what they talk about at a given time — but the talking is for the most part quotidian, casual. Most of us are likewise minor players, chatting in the upper balconies of history, and the most beloved reissued literature seems to meet us on our own scale.
It’s fun to drop in afresh on 1968, and on other pasts that look a little livelier or looser than our own, free of smartphones and with cheaper rent — New York before private equity, Paris before seat belts, all manner of interesting times and places where a lot of one’s day was spent getting on and off one’s horse. That ability to drop in, always, is a central source of pleasure. (Sometimes the novels inhabit eras that nobody would confuse for a good time. One doesn’t exactly read Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, asurreal post–October Revolution picaresque about mass starvation in the provinces and mass depravity in the cities, with anything like nostalgia. But then again, look at all those glorious trains! And also they didn’t have smartphones.) Still another source of satisfaction is the paraliterary thrill of the rescue: the sense of reading something that’s lived underground for so long that it’s become like the horse in Zola’s Germinal, trapped in the mine for so much of its life that it only distantly remembers the sun.
It can feel like listening to Spotify, reading this way. A patchy sampling, in which huge expanses of history are available but unintuitively organized, likely to result in having heard rarities and minor B-sides before getting the full feel of a band or a genre. But that’s no bad thing. In plenty of discographies, the rarities are the best parts.
How do the old-new books find their ways to readers, beyond the basic word-of-mouth channels? NYRB Classics in particular has its shooters among booksellers; a lot of stores have those special racks. Reissued fiction is conspicuously beloved by people who write Substacks about what they’re reading, New Yorker writers sharing affiliate link–strewn book recommendations, and so on. And on BookTok — the decade’s most consequential bottom-up platform for the transmission of literary taste — the old-new can, somewhat surprisingly, outpace the new-new. It’s a curiosity of the platform that the non-romantasy fiction that breaks through has, for the most part, been from ages that long precede TikTok. Published in 1995 and first translated into English in 1997 by Ros Schwartz, Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men became an algorithmic phenomenon after Transit reissued it in 2022, selling more copies for the indie publisher than all its titles by the Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse put together. (Katy Waldman, writing in the New Yorker, attributed Harpman’s posthumous success to the possibility that the novel “is preoccupied with many of the same questions that BookTokers, with their ephemeral medium and their new role as cultural conservators, have reason to care about. What are the creative forms that persist after you’ve disappeared? What enables an art work to transcend the stream?”) The Penguin Classics edition of Dostoevsky’s White Nights, an undergrad stalwart but an even more left-field candidate for virality, has also blown up; Ronald Meyer’s translation is now available as an audiobook narrated by a guy from Bridgerton.
Reissues — and older literature in general — are weatherized against a climate so hostile to criticism that books coverage as we once knew it has gone from endangered to functionally extinct. When Jeff Bezos gutted the Washington Post earlier this year in order to save a few million for his private drone army, he incidentally destroyed the paper’s excellent Book World, the country’s only surviving newspaper books supplement other than the relentlessly mediocre Times Book Review. The loss is acute for public criticism — as the post-Post Ron Charles noted on NPR, “there are more people who have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living” — as well as for publicity, with the reviewing ecosystem now unable to perform the life-giving functions the book industry has long relied on. Celebrity book clubs and the like have helped fill the void, but it’s clear that interesting literature has a far harder time reaching readers than it did even a few years ago. Reissues, however, don’t need to be rereviewed — they can make a splash in the Styles section, where the Times piece about Nancy Lemann appeared, or in a trend story. “Why Is Everyone Suddenly Reading Cassandra at the Wedding?” New York wondered in 2022, presenting a lab leak–style “forensic investigation” of the tastemakers and influencers who turned Dorothy Baker’s novel into a minicultural epidemic sixty years after its initial publication and a decade after its NYRB rerelease.
As if angling to recapture the shrinking readership for their shrinking books coverage, the English-speaking world’s remaining newspapers have been trotting out authoritative-sounding lists of the “100 Best Novels of All Time” (the Guardian, earlier this year) or the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” (the Times, 2024), which sort of seems like it should be a once-in-a-century endeavor. These lists are fun to get mad at. On what’s left of literary Twitter, they reliably prompt days of unresolvable chatter about whether Housekeeping is more beautiful than The Line of Beauty, The Known World more brilliant than My Brilliant Friend, Wolf Hall more timeless than In Search of Lost Time. The Times list was so popular that the paper recently moved its mastermind, the erstwhile Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz, into the newly invented role of “canon editor,” and tasked him with compiling even more “definitive catalogs of culture.” (“Our colleagues in Product are eager to team up with Gilbert to ensure that readers can easily share their own picks,” enthuses the press release announcing his move.) A deteriorating industry is entitled to its viral listicles, but Cruz’s new gig points to a critical culture more equipped to repackage and consecrate than to keep its new talents warm.
So much to say about Patrick Leigh Fermor, so little insight into the texture of the world system.
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On book publishing’s production side, conditions are no less stacked against novelty. After two decades of mergers and layoffs, conglomerate publishing today is populated by a harried and attenuated workforce ill-equipped to discover or deliver the new. Original books need original editors, ones with their ears to the ground and the freedom to actually edit, but those people are dispensable in an industry more concerned with overpaying for celebrity memoirs and middling novels that won’t earn back their advances. Conglomerate logic dictates consolidation — especially bad news for marketing departments, which end up collectively resorting to the same few unlikely-to-pay-off gambles (most of which boil down to trying to get picked for Dua Lipa’s book club). A business incentivized to avoid risk at every step will have a hard time publishing books that feel truly fresh.
In the face of the industry’s shrinking and shirking, the strategy of the reissue houses most resembles the spirit of preconglomeration publishing, in tune with a time when discernment was a press’s value-add and editors didn’t spend all their time anguished about their P&Ls. Where the big houses are in the business of hedging their bets in the least efficient way possible, for NYRB Classics and co., the logic is simpler: Do we like it? Are the rights available? Can we get in touch with the nephew? By no means have NYRB Classics or Dalkey or Hagfish solved every structural malady plaguing literary publishing, nor are they in a position to. But their best efforts can look like a publishing utopia in miniature, countercyclical outposts of cosmopolitan curiosity and nice covers in which many of the industry’s looming existential questions — must every book strive to be a best seller? How to survive the end of popular criticism? Can the editorial sensibility be trusted? — have been dispensed with, as neatly as its best tendencies have been revived.3
Imagine a hypothetical reader — however sociologically unlikely — who only reads NYRB Classics. H.R. would be an amazing interlocutor, quick with insights gleaned from time spent with Max Beerbohm, Randall Jarrell’s Book of Stories (edited and with an introduction by Randall Jarrell), and of course good old Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo). Still, H.R. ’s knowledge would be partial. Since 2020, by our count, NYRB Classics has reissued nineteen books first published between 1900 and 1939, sixteen books from the ’40s, sixteen from the ’50s, twenty-three from the ’60s, and twenty-five from the ’70s. Reflecting on their studies, H.R. would conclude that the middle of the American century was denser than its beginning or its end, and that literary history as a whole slowed down around the time of the great downturn and came to a halt entirely in 2005 — the original publication year of Richard Hell’s Godlike, the newest work of American literature to storm the Classics’ gates. (Though the substantive newness of a rewriting of a fin de siècle Decadent-movement romance, transposed to the 1970s, is up for debate.)
And what features of contemporary life would H.R. fail to see reflected in literature? Cryptocurrency, Instagram face, drone warfare, pickleball, data centers, monthly school shootings, same-day shipping, gooning — not even Guido Morselli’s The Communist could have anticipated all these disturbing developments. And then there are all the 21st-century miracles necessarily left out of H.R.’s canon: Narcan, freedom flotillas, hyperpop, new hybrid fruits, the Paris Agreement, legal weed, Bluetooth. Ivy Compton-Burnett didn’t know about hyperpop, and thus neither would H.R. Poor H.R.! So much to say about Patrick Leigh Fermor, so little insight into the texture of the world system.
In healthier times for reading and publishing, it used to be fashionable to ask whether the novel could bring the news — whether fiction’s old Zola-era aim, to mirror and answer reality as it was being lived, was still possible. Generally, when critics reflected on the question, their answer was no : the novel couldn’t bring the news, although maybe it used to. Writing in Commentary in 1961, Philip Roth bemoaned “a voluntary withdrawal of interest by the writer of fiction from some of the grander social and political phenomena of our times.” In Harper’s in 1989, Tom Wolfe admiringly cited his own writing to argue that “young people with serious literary ambitions were no longer interested in the metropolis or any other big, rich slices of contemporary life.” In 1996 — Harper’s again — Jonathan Franzen grimly asserted that where a century ago, “the novel was the preeminent medium of social instruction,” today “the writer of average talent who wants to report on, say, the plight of illegal aliens would be foolish to choose the novel as a vehicle.”
Today the prospect seems far from foolish. What should the writer of average talent do instead — pivot to front-facing video? Ask Claude for guidance? With postliteracy all but official policy, the lavishly funded assault on thought can’t be resisted through individual action alone — but it has to start there. The writer of fiction must not voluntarily withdraw from the grander phenomena, no, but the reader must also support their most ambitious endeavors.
This really is harder than it was thirty or sixty years ago. The pressing question isn’t whether novels can bring the news; of course they can. It’s whether they can be received as news — or even, amid the decimation of the newspaper sector, received near the news. (Franzen’s great disappointment, after his debut appeared in 1988, “was the failure of my culturally engaged novel to engage with the culture. . . . What I got instead was sixty reviews in a vacuum.” What a vacuum!) Without a critical edifice built to assimilate contemporary fiction, a reader must put in more work to stay current. Perhaps we should all adopt a new rule: For every rediscovered treasure you pick up on the recommendation of a connoisseur of late 20th-century bohemian Australian fiction, read a book published in the past five years. Don’t let the seductions of the past blind you to the fascinations of the present. Be your own canon editor! And ensure that your canon is continually replenishing itself.
Among all the expansionary turns taken by NYRB in recent years, one of the most welcome is the addition of many contemporary titles to its catalog. NYRB’s Originals series now does important work to champion new — not to mention new-feeling — novels like Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed, Mattia Filice’s Driver (translated by Jacques Houis), andJoshua Cohen’s Pulitzer-winning The Netanyahus. (That Cohen’s novel bears several hallmarks of reissued midcentury fiction — campus setting, a disquisition regarding the intellectual’s imperative to create a “usable past” five pages in, even some hijinks about using initials as first names — shouldn’t distract from its publication year, 2021.)
As it happens, the newest NYRB Original, Amit Chaudhuri’s Château Rouge, ends with an homage to an old book. Over the course of the novel, Château Rouge’sunnamed protagonist wanders around the parts of Paris tourists and foreign novelists tend to avoid. As the novel draws to a close, he finally picks up the ultimate foreigner-in-Paris classic, A Movable Feast, given to him by his wife thirty-four years earlier but unread until now. “Thirty-four years!” Chaudhuri writes. “The book contains not only Paris, then, but the arc of our marriage — joys, sorrows, disagreements, displeasures, and inevitability. I’ll start it now. It’s new. This bit of shared existence is unsavoured, uncharted.” Chaudhuri is describing a book written in the 1950s, based on notebooks from the 1920s, and published in 1964. But he could just as well be describing his own novel — as well as any contemporary novel determined to chart contemporaneity and make it new. For all their debts to the old traditions, neither Chaudhuri nor his publisher has left the present uncharted. It’s a direction worth following.
Why are there so many Soviets? As with everything publishing related, the answer lies somewhere between the material and the ineffable. Thanks to the USSR’s initial nonadherence to the Universal Copyright Convention and the robust tamizdat network of the 1970s and ’80s, a great deal of Soviet literature washed up on American shores during the stagnation era. That boom was followed by a bust, as rights were bought and then abandoned. By the time Yeltsin clambered up onto a tank in front of Moscow’s parliament building, a number of major novels—and plenty of minor ones—had fallen out of circulation. (Just think—Fazil Iskander, out of print for decades! Or Venedikt Erofeev, still in print . . . but barely.) Rights, however, only tell part of the story. The fact is that for a critical mass of boomer readers and editors (NYRB Classics founder and editorial director Edwin Frank is 66), Soviet fiction represents the apogee of serious literariness: political, heroic, important— so important the censors did their best to ban it! ↩
The very best 20th-century novel about reviving work from a forgotten past—Alison Lurie’s The Truth About Lorin Jones, in which a plucky feminist art historian attempts to posthumously reestablish the career of a postwar painter—has for some reason not yet been reissued. Publishers, please send finder’s fee to 37 Greenpoint Avenue #316, Brooklyn, NY 11222. ↩
The covers really are nice. Thanks to the pairing of a straightforward info box and an inviting background painting or photo, NYRB Classics has achieved something rare for a book publisher: an immediate recognizability rivaled in Anglophone independent publishing only by Fitzcarraldo, whose fiction titles uniformly resemble Kanye West’s Jesus Is King. The books exude good taste—no trace of pulp or the jolie laide of ’80s Vintage Contemporaries. Even when NYRB Classics tips risqué, as with Bill Brandt’s Nude, Belgravia, London, 1951 on the cover of Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House or Eve Babitz’s bikini-clad breasts on the cover of Eve’s Hollywood, the effect is somehow elevating. ↩
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