August News and Highlights

Letter from New York City August 2025 Dear Readers, In the interest of letting everyone get along with their summers, we have a short newsletter this month. Below you can learn more about a Barbara Comyns cult classic, events happening this month, and some things to look forward to for fall.  Happy reading, The NYRB Staff   Hidden Gems: The Vet's Daughter B-sides and other lesser-known books from the NYRB Classics Series Barbara's Comyn's 1959 novel The Vet's Daughter, her fourth book of fiction, is hands-down one of the strangest entries in the NYRB Classics series—which is saying something. It is also one of the most fiercely, albeit furtively, loved NYRB Classics—fiercely because it is very good and lovable, furtively because it is assuredly not for everyone. This description can apply to much of Comyns's writing. As noted in the many obituaries written after her death in 1992, Comyns was a true original, impossible to categorize, barely recognized in her time, and still mostly under the radar today.  Barbara Comyns and her daughter Caroline, 1938 Like other female writers before her, Comyns's writing career had domestic origins: She wrote stories to entertain her children. These were often stories about her colorful, free-range upbringing at Bell Court, a manor house on the River Avon in Warwickshire, England. The stories gathered dust for years until a friend of hers discovered the manuscript and suggested she try to publish them. Several ran in the magazine Lilliput and later became her first book, Sisters by a River (1947). In her review of the book, the critic Elizabeth Bowen wrote, "Pray form your own opinion about this unique work."  Comyns wrote her second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, around the same time Sisters by a River was published. As in the former book, the plot of Our Spoons hews closely to that of Comyns's own life. The main character, Sophia, is an artist unhappily married to a fellow artist. She embarks on a messy love affair with an art critic (likely based on Comyns's own affair with art critic Rupert Lee, with whom she had a child). Despite the book's obviously autobiographical origins, Comyns included a disclaimer that states, "The only things that are true in this story are the wedding, chapters 10, 11 and 12, and the poverty." The aforementioned chapters include incredibly visceral scenes of childbirth, described by some critics as "horrific." Still, it is ultimately a life-affirming book with a happy ending. NYRB staff often joke that it stands out as one of the few truly "happy" books in the NYRB Classics series.  First UK edition of Our Spoons Came from Woolworths NYRB Classics edition of Our Spoons Came from Woolworths First UK edition of The Vet's Daughter While on her honeymoon with her second husband, Comyns "dreamt the idea" for her fourth novel, The Vet's Daughter. In a departure from Our Spoons, The Vet's Daughter was not clearly autobiographical, or even wholly a work of realism. It is also a much darker story. The protagonist, Alice, loses her long-ailing mother, who has possibly been "put down" by her veterinary father; she is then subjected to all kinds of emotional abuse by her father and his new mistress. Early in the novel, the mistress preys upon Alice's naiveté, even grooming her to be sexually assaulted by a co-worker. But then, just as things couldn't look bleaker for Alice, something extraordinary happens.  The night after being assaulted, Alice wakes in the middle of the night to discover herself floating above her bed. She falls back to sleep and wakes in the morning believing it must have been a dream. However, the phenomenon occurs again and again until Alice is certain it is really happening. After leaving her father's house to become a caretaker to an aging woman in the country, she practices controlling her new power, hovering around her employer's house and in the woods. When she asks her charge, Mrs. Peebles, if she has ever heard of people with the ability to float in midair, the woman replies that she has—naming a number of legends and folk tales—but says, "One doesn't hear about that kind of thing now." Realizing that her newfound ability is rather peculiar, Alice attempts to keep her levitation a secret. When her father discovers her gift, the result is disastrous, though Alice does achieve a kind of freedom in the end.  The writer and critic Alina Ştefǎnescu has argued that Comyns must have been at least partially inspired by the story of the 17th-century monk Saint Joseph of Cupertino. (Mrs. Peebles mentions Saint Joseph in her list of famous levitators.) The Saint, known as "The Flying Friar," was said to levitate when caught up in particularly fervent prayer or worship. For Alice, however, levitation happens when she most needs an escape from the horrors of her daily life. Some read the fantastical elements of the novel as a commentary on trauma, while others simply think of the turn as classic Comyns weirdness—the type of weirdness that made Comyns a polarizing figure throughout her entire career.  A painting depicting Saint Joseph of Cupertino, a possible inspiration for The Vet's Daughter Barbara Comyns, 1985 In her review of Avril Horner's biography Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence, Jessie Thompson writes of the contemporary reception of Comyns's books: "Many critics were captivated, some were confused, and some were both at the same time... Although Comyns has been compared to Nancy Mitford, Angela Carter and Jean Rhys, and called 'Beryl Bainbridge on acid,' she remains impossible to categorize." Perhaps it is this very quality that has won Comyns such a passionate, if modest, fan base—the strangeness of her stories makes them unclassifiable. A kind of cross between Stephen King and Flannery O'Connor, The Vet's Daughter is certainly one of her most unclassifiable books, and remains a favorite entry point for those new to Comyns's work. As Thompson also writes, "Comyns has been discovered, lost, rediscovered and lost again, repeatedly." We hope she continues to be discovered and rediscovered for a very long time.  For the next few days, The Vet's Daughter will be 25% off on our website.  BUY THE BOOK Other books by Barbara Comyns... OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS THE JUNIPER TREE WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS DEAD   Two NYR Comics launches! We have a couple of launch events coming up this month for the latest NYR Comics titles. Join Alexa Frank on Thursday, August 21, at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn for a launch celebration and discussion of her translation of Miss Ruki—Fumiko Takano's classic Japanese manga, a warm portrait of the lives of two young women in Tokyo during Japan’s 1980s bubble economy. More information here.  On the same day, August 21, Mass MoCA will host Diane DiMassa for a presentation of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. Hothead Paisan is an icon of the ’90s lesbian DIY comics scene, a patron saint of those who wonder if going off the deep end is the only sane response to life in modern America.  Tickets are required for the event with DiMassa. The cost of your ticket will be deducted from any book purchase made in The MASS MoCA R&D Store the night of the event.   Edwin Frank on the Political Novel: A Seminar Series Edwin Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books and author of Stranger Than Fiction: The Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel, will be teaching a series of online seminars on the political novel via NYR Seminars this fall. The three seminars will be devoted to different masters of the political novel: Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and Ursula K. Le Guin and H. G. Wells. In the Trollope series, participants will discuss the author's parliamentary (or Palliser) novels. For the Joseph Conrad seminar, Frank will explore three of Conrad's most prophetic works, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent. The last series will center on Le Guin's science fiction opus The Dispossessed and preceding works of speculative political fiction by Wells, namely The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau.  Take it from us, you couldn't ask for a better guide through any of these books. Visit the NYR Seminars page here for more information and links to register for each of the seminars.  Edwin Frank in the NYRB offices   August with Thoreau Our monthly foray into Henry David Thoreau's The Journal: 1837–1861. This month, we have an entry from August 1858. Thoreau was forty-one and mourning the loss of some local ducks.  Aug. 16. In my boating of late I have several times scared up a couple of summer ducks of this year, bred in our meadows. They allowed me to come quite near, and helped to people the river. I have not seen them for some days. Would you know the end of our intercourse? Goodwin shot them, and Mrs. ——, who never sailed on the river, ate them. Of course, she knows not what she did. What if I should eat her canary? Thus we share each other’s sins as well as burdens. The lady who watches admiringly the matador shares his deed. They belonged to me, as much as to any one, when they were alive, but it was considered of more importance that Mrs. —— should taste the flavor of them dead than that I should enjoy the beauty of them alive. Talked with Minott, who sits in his woodshed, having, as I notice, several seats there for visitors,—one a block on the sawhorse, another a patchwork mat on a wheelbarrow, etc., etc. His half-grown chickens which roost overhead, perch on his shoulder or knee. He tells me some of his hunting stories again. He always lays a good deal of stress on the kind of gun he used, as if he had bought a new one every year, when probably he never had more than two or three in his life. In this case it was a “half-stocked” one, a little “cocking-piece,” and whenever he finished his game he used the word “gavel,” I think in this way, “gave him gavel,” i.e. made him bite the dust, or settled him. He used to love to hear the goldfinches sing on the hemp which grew near his gate. Painting: William Bradley Lamond, Ducks on a River Bank.   August Books BOMARZO by Manuel Mujica Lainez PARADISO by Dante Alighieri THE FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENT by Roger Shattuck   The August selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club is Nadja by André Breton. If you join the NYRB Classics Book Club by Wednesday, August 13, Nadja will be your first selection.    In the Press "The Stone Door, written after Carrington’s arrival in Mexico, and recently reissued by NYRB, is sometimes called a puzzle box, which implies something tidy and symmetrical and quite unlike Carrington’s actual work. Instead, the novel is a cluttered bird’s nest, made up of various shiny bits of found material: fairy tale, Surrealist dream writing, occultist drivel, prophetic tome, bourgeois domestic novel." —Celia Bell, Literary Hub, on The Stone Door by Leonora Carrington  "But perhaps above all, The Accidental Garden is a work of ecological philosophy—albeit one that is free of the penchant for abstraction that often renders the discipline ethereal or impenetrable. Mabey’s philosophy is rooted (often literally) in the real, the material: in soil and fronds, in leaves and petals." —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post, on The Accidental Garden by Richard Mabey "You can see what Vaginov’s peers were so excited about here: not the arch, modernist self-consciousness, but the inventiveness when it comes to twisting the forms of fiction into shapes that will better fit the dilapidated lives of his characters." —Josh Billing, Los Angeles Review of Books, on Goat Song by Konstantin Vaginov   Image at top of newsletter: books from the NYRB Classics, NYRB Poets, NYR Comics, and New York Review Books series published this summer.   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