July News and Highlights

Art: Michael McMillan Letter from New York City July 2025 Dear Readers, Summer is here and the pavement is sizzling in New York City. If you are anywhere in the northern hemisphere odds are you are feeling the heat with us. We hope that everyone is staying cool and finding opportunities to chill out with a good book. On that note, let's jump right into this missive, which includes summer book picks from our newsletter readers, a deep dive into a Sylvia Townsend Warner gem, and lots of other goodies. Happy reading, The NYRB Staff   What You Are Reading this Summer Last month we asked readers of this newsletter to email us about what they are most looking forward to reading this summer. We've selected a few of our favorite submissions. So many of you are planning to read NYRB Classics, which we could not be more thrilled about.  Congratulations to Landon D. for winning our bag-of-books raffle!  "The top of my list for this summer is Victor Serge's Notebooks, if only to convince myself we can get through the next three years...Please tell me you are planning to publish the two remaining volumes of Konstantin Paustovsky's auto-biography.  And with the same translator, I hope." —David P.  "Every summer I pick a very big book to read during vacations. Last year's was The Magic Mountain, which ended up taking a bit longer than expected :), and for this year I have chosen Peter Esterhazy's Celestial Harmonies and Mircea Cartarescu's Theodoros. Let's see how it goes!" —Carolina S.  "This summer I’m traveling to Portland and taking J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country and Eve Babitz’s I Used to Be Charming to read in the summer sun." —Natalie H.  "After fits and starts, I've embarked at last on The Recognitions by William Gaddis. The ultimate beach read—I'm staying in shape just taking it with me. Steven Moore's A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis' The Recognitions is never far from reach." —Nile A.  "I can't wait to start reading Anne Carson's translations of Euripides (Grief Lessons) and Théophile Gautier's spectral fantasies (My Fantoms) translated by the great romantic biographer Richard Holmes. I've saved these two NYRB Classics for the summer months, anticipating how much pleasure they will bring!" —Jason K.  "This is my summer of rereads—Renata Adler’s books and Keiler Roberts’s diary comics—and reissues—The King of a Rainy Country by Brigid Brophy and The Pilgrimage by John Broderick." —Sarah M.    Hidden Gems: Summer Will Show B-sides and other lesser-known books from the NYRB Classics Series Odds are that if you are a fan of the NYRB Classics, you are familiar with Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes, one of the most beloved books in the series. Warner's story about an unhappy spinster-turned-witch was a best seller when first published by Chatto & Windus in 1926, and it continues to be the work for which the author is most famous. Almost a full decade later, after a long hiatus from writing novels, Warner would write a much subtler paen to female independence, one loved by a smaller but no less fierce group of fans. Summer Will Show, one of Warner's most autobiographical works, is a deep cut with a deep history.  By the time Warner wrote Lolly Willowes in the mid-1920s, she was twenty-nine, unmarried, and living and working on her own, a combination of circumstances that put her more or less on the outskirts of proper "society." As a teen, she hoped to study music in Vienna, a dream demolished by the advent of World War I. After her father's death in 1916, which affected her profoundly, she moved to the London neighborhood of Bayswater and began a musicologist career while also writing poems and stories and sometimes publishing them. She met members of the Bloomsbury group, befriended her literary hero Theodore Francis Powys, and embarked on an affair with a married man old enough to be her father. It was a quintessential bohemian lifestyle, and once her first novel—Lolly Willowes—brought her unexpected fame, she could truly live as she pleased. A seismic shift was about to take place in Warner's life, though, one that would change the author's very way of thinking—and one brought about by love.  Sylvia Townsend Warner and her cat, Tom Photo © STW Estate First UK edition of Lolly Willowes Valentine Ackland Photo © STW Estate Following the success of Lolly Willowes, Warner spent more and more time in the Dorset countryside, near her friend Powys' own country home. She bought a cottage in East Chaldon and it was in the village that she met the person who would change everything: Valentine Ackland. Tall, urbane, and scandalously clad in trousers, Ackland immediately captivated Warner, and vice versa. They began a flirtatious friendship, with Warner helping Ackland with her poetry and the two living together in Warner's Dorset cottage. This friendship would blossom into a lifelong romance and partnership that would more or less define both of their lives. They would go on to publish a book of poems together and, despite strife caused by Ackland's infidelities, would stay together until Valentine's death in 1969.  Ackland's effect on Warner's life was not only romantic. Warner credited Ackland with introducing her to Communism. Feeling that the Communist Party was the most effective avenue of resistance against spread of fascism in Europe, the couple formally joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1935. This allegiance not only solidified their outsider status in England but would guide the path of their lives for the next decade. During the Spanish Civil War the couple travelled to Catalonia to volunteer in the Red Cross there and served as delegates at the International Writers' Conference in Madrid. At the outbreak of World War II, Warner volunteered to care for refugees and lectured on literature and politics to the Workers’ Educational Association, the Labour Party and the troops. At one point, MI5 investigated the couple as leftist agitators and even blacklisted Ackland. Warner would go on to immortalize this transformative decade in her life in Summer Will Show.  Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland with left-wing friends, 24 West Chaldon, 1930s © STW Estate Dust jacket for first UK edition of Summer Will Show Her fourth novel, and the first after a seven-year hiatus, Warner's Summer Will Show was directly inspired by both her relationship with Ackland and her political awakening. The book is set a full century in the past, in 1840s England and Paris. The protagonist, Sophia Willoughby, is a spirited but unhappily married woman who has sent her philandering husband off to Paris. After her children tragically die, she runs to Paris where she forms an unlikely bond with her husband's mistress, the fiery Minna. This happens just as the revolution of 1848 is beginning and Sophia not only finds love with Minna, she finds revolutionary politics as well. Much as in Warner's own life, romantic and political transformation go hand in hand for Sophia. There is no doubt among Warner's readers that, despite the Victorian setting, Summer Will Show was a book aimed at the troubled times of 1930s England.  Sylvia Townsend Warner at Frome Vauchurch. ©STW Estate Warner would go on to write another overtly political novel, the 1938 After the Death of Don Juan, a thinly veiled commentary on the rise of fascism in Spain based on Mozart's Don Giovanni. Though Ackland would abandon Communism later on and, to Warner's horror, convert to Catholicism, Warner would remain stalwart in her political convictions throughout her life. Summer Will Show is just one such monument to her iconoclastic, revolutionary spirit. It is no wonder it is so fiercely loved.  For the next few days, Summer Will Show will be 25% off on our website.  BUY THE BOOK   Haleh Liza Gafori at Bold Tendencies A head up to all of our UK readers, Haleh Liza Gafori, translator of the Rumi collections Gold and Water, will be partnering with Bold Tendencies for an event this week. Join Gafori on Thursday, June 10, 7:30pm GMT for a reading from her translations of Rumi at Bold Tendencies, 7th-10th Floors Multi-Storey Car Park, 95a Rye Lane, Peckham, London. You can purchase tickets here.  Author photo: Haleh Liza Gafori © Beowulf Sheehan   The Weird and Wonderful World of Michael McMillan This month, NYR Comics will publish Terminal Exposure: Comics, Sculpture, and Risky Behavior, the first comprehensive collection of artist Michael McMillan's work. The book, which includes comics by the artist as well as selections of his sculptural work, paintings, and excerpts from his rock climbing journals, gives a generous overview of the artist's singular work. Below you will find a some excerpts from the inside of this mind-bending portal to McMillan's brain.            Terminal Exposure is available for sale on our website now and everywhere else on July 22.    July with Thoreau Our monthly foray into Henry David Thoreau's The Journal: 1837–1861. This month, we have an entry from July 1853. Thoreau was thirty-five.  July 1. I am surveying the Bedford road these days, and have no time for my Journal. Saw one of those great pea-green emperor moths, like a bird, fluttering over the top of the woods this forenoon, 10 a.m., near Beck Stow’s. Gathered the early red blackberry in the swamp or meadow this side of Pedrick’s, where I ran a pole down nine feet. July 12. White vervain. Checkerberry, maybe some days. Spikenard, not quite yet. The green-flowered lanceolate-leafed orchis at Azalea Brook will soon flower. Wood horse-tail very large and handsome there. July 21. 2 p.m.—Went, in pursuit of boys who had stolen my boatseat, to Fair Haven. Painting: Emperor Moth, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889.   July Books THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES by Honoré de Balzac TIME OF SILENCE by Luis Martín-Santos THE STONE DOOR by Leonora Carrington THE ACCIDENTAL GARDEN by Richard Mabey TERMINAL EXPOSURE COMICS, SCULPTURE, AND RISKY BEHAVIOR by Michael McMillan MISERY OF LOVE by Yvan Alagbé THE TEN THOUSAND LEAVES POEMS FROM THE MAN'YŌSHŪ edited by Ian Hideo Levy THE GALLOWS SONGS by Christian Morgenstern THE MAGICIAN'S FLOWER by Marika Maijala (Elsewhere Editions)   The July selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club is Miaow by Benito Pérez Galdós. If you join the NYRB Classics Book Club by Wednesday, July 16, Miaow will be your first selection.    In the Press "Alagbé shrouds his murky ink wash art in purposeful obscurity, with spectral human forms blurring into near-abstract compositions, like Gerhard Richter photo-paintings by way of Hugo Pratt. In haunted ellipses, Alagbé conjures an almost tactile sense of disquiet that isn’t easily shaken. It’s a stunning graphic novel counterpart to the obsessive fever dreams of Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis." —Publishers Weekly, starred review for The Misery of Love by Yvan Alagbé "The ice, the fjords, the harshness of lonely winter and the revitalizing light of summer . . . This is vivid writing, reminiscent of Knut Hamsun on landscape, and Halldór Laxness on the comedy of life." —Danny Morrison, Irish Examiner, on The White Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan “Serra carefully assesses the political twists and turns of Malaparte’s career, analyzing his courtier’s employment of flattery and ridicule with an exactitude that is scintillating.... Here was a liar who could not help telling the truth.” —John Ganz, The New York Times Book Review, on Malaparte: A Biography by Maurizio Serra “Nadja is a precursor to what we now call autofiction; it mines real life for material, and finds in that reality something more profound than what can be imagined by pure invention.” —Ben Libman, The New York Times Book Review, on Nadja by André Breton   Image at top of newsletter: from Terminal Exposure by Michael McMillan   You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. You can choose the types of mailings you wish to receive: Update preferences     New York Review Books 207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016 Not a subscriber? Sign up for our newsletter here. Unsubscribe