Bøger udgivet af McNally Editions

“A masterpiece . . . One of the few genuinely comic novels since Lucky Jim.” —Elaine DundyEver since college, George Wren has dreamed of working at The Outsider, the prestigious weekly edited by his hero, the suave English expat Gilbert Twining. So when George sees a listing for a junior editor, he trades in his job at CBS for half the salary—and a ringside seat in the unexpectedly cutthroat arena of a small-circulation, highbrow little magazine. To George’s surprise and dismay, The Outsider is seething with malcontents and mutineers, at least according to Twining, who keeps cornering George for after-work martinis, pouring out his anxieties, professional and otherwise, while George’s wife, Matilda, and baby son wait for him back in Queens. Is Twining paranoid? Is he insane? Or are George’s new office-mates truly plotting an insurrection? And if so, what’s all of it got to do with George? An indelible satire of 1960s intellectual New York, Office Politics is also a celebration of that endangered species, the office, at its pettiest and most idealistic, as the proving ground where so much of grownup life takes place.

The best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-brief career, edited and introduced by Merve Emre.Djuna Barnes is rightly remembered for Nightwood, her breakthrough and final novel: a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most brilliant novels of love between women to be published in the twentieth century. Barnes’s career began long before Nightwood, however, with journalism, essays, drama, and satire of extraordinary wit and courage. Long into her later life, after World War II, when she published nothing more, it was her short fiction above all that she prized and would continue to revise. Here are all the stories Barnes sought to preserve, in the versions she preferred, as well as a smattering of rarities as selected by critic and New Yorker contributor Merve Emre. These are tales of women “‘tragique’ and ‘triste’ and ‘tremendous’ all at once,” of sons and daughters being initiated into the ugly comedy of life, monuments all to a worldview singular and scathing. As Emre writes in her foreword, “[Barnes’s] themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts . . . her characters may be alien to life, but they are alive—spectacularly, grotesquely alive.”

A wicked stepmother finds her ideal prey in Carlone Blackwood's “quite brilliant” (The Times) debut.A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation. J is a lonely woman without even the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, but he’s left J not only with their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but with the sulky cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage. The presence of a pert au pair, Monique, serves only to make J feel more isolated and self-conscious. What she’d like is someone to blame. Writing letters in her head to imaginary friends, J delights in dwelling on the hapless Renata, who “invites a kind of cruelty.” This is an invitation J fully intends to take up—and like so many stepmothers before her, she will find that wickedness, once indulged, is a difficult habit to kick. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood’s first novel stands as proof positive of her eternal mastery—and mockery—of the darkest depths of human feeling.

On a Victorian pleasure cruise, a chance encounter opens the floodgates to regret, desire, and possibility in this “little period gem of feeling and clarity” (The Guardian).It is 1851, only three years since Europe was convulsed by workers’ revolutions, but already English tourists are returning to the Continent, taking the waters at Baden Baden, then traveling by paddle steamer down the Rhine valley, celebrated for its romantic vistas. Among the sightseers are the pious Reverend Charles Morrison, his wife and daughter, and his maiden sister, Charlotte, a seemingly meek middle-aged woman who’s spent her life attending to the needs of others. Like the river upon which they’re traveling, however, Charlotte contains hidden depths. A chance encounter with a fellow passenger in Coblenz sparks a Damascene moment, unleashing in her a sudden and violent awakening of memory, fear, and sexual desire. As the travelers are swept onward to Cologne, Charlotte wrestles with what Lauren Groff in her foreword to this new edition describes as “a subtle and total derangement of understanding,” eventually surging toward a moment of crisis. Rhine Journey is “a patient and cunning representation of the intimacies of a repressed and wasted life” (London Review of Books) by a novelist “incapable of writing a bad or inelegant sentence” (Hudson Review).

"A perfectly told tale of defeat and glory--and a paean to gallantry in the face of the absurd--inspired by a real-life secret mission during World War II. Orphaned in the first months of World War One, when his father is killed in action, Willie Maryington dreams only of joining the same cavalry regiment and going to the front. The Armistice dashes seventeen-year-old Willie's plans, but not his dreams of glory, and he makes the regiment the center of his adult existence. Yet, as the years go by, Willie falls increasingly out of step, not only with civilian life, but with the modern military, where horse charges are a thing of the past, and where a gulf yawns between those who saw action and those who did not. When hostilities break out again between Germany and England, Willie has become a relic. No one could guess that he will be chosen for a mission whose outcome might well decide the course of the Second World War. Inspired by a real-life triumph of British counterintelligence (codenamed "Operation Mincemeat"), and based on classified sources, Operation Heartbreak was suppressed by the British government until 1950"--

"In a rustic, idyllic English village, on a summer's day, in the midst of a carefree tennis party, a fragile, needy child, left too much on her own, vanishes from her family's front garden. Years pass and the mystery persists: an enduring torment for the teenage Christine Gray, the last person to see Vivian alive. Perhaps if she'd shown the girl a little kindness, and seen her safely home, Vivan might still be with them? Yet when someone claiming to be a grown-up Vivian returns to the land of the living, the enigma only deepens, threatening to consume the wicked and innocent alike."--Page 2 of cover.

"Summer, 1947. A bizarre catastrophe rocks a seaside village in Cornwall when a cliff tumbles down on the Pendizack Manor Hotel. The hotel is obliterated, and seven guests are killed in the disaster. Everyone else makes a narrow escape. As the survivors tell their stories, the events of the previous week are revealed, and a parade of sins exposed. Gluttony, Lecherousness, Sloth, Pride, Covetousness, Envy and Wrath: all are in residence at Pendizack Manor, and as the day of the disaster creeps closer, it becomes clear that who's spared and who's lost might not be as arbitrary as first assumed."--

An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife is the story of a divorce and its aftermath that scandalized the Jazz Age—and still resonates today.It's 1924, and Peter and Patricia have what looks to be a very modern marriage. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work, Patricia as a head copywriter at a major department store. When it comes to sex with other people, both believe in “the honesty policy.” Until they don‘t. Or, at least, until Peter doesn‘t—and a shell-shocked, lovesick Patricia finds herself starting out all over again, but this time around as a different kind of single woman: the ex-wife. An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife captures the speakeasies, night clubs, and parties that defined Jazz Age New York—alongside the morning-after aspirin and calisthenics, the lunch-hour visits to the gym, the girl-talk, and the freedoms and anguish of solitude. It also casts a cool eye on the bedrooms and the doctor’s offices where, despite rising hemlines, the men still call the shots. The result is a unique view of what its author Ursula Parrott called “the era of the one-night stand”: an era very much like our own.

"In the foment of Weimar-era Berlin, the Oppermann brothers represent tradition and stability. One brother oversees the furniture chain founded by their grandfather, one is an eminent surgeon, one a respected critic. They are rich, cultured, liberal, and public spirited, proud inheritors of the German enlightenment. They don't see Hitler as a threat. Then, to their horror, the Nazis come to power, and the Oppermanns and their children are faced with the terrible decision of whether to adapt - if they can - flee, or try to fight. Written in 1933, nearly in real time, The Oppermanns captures the day-to-day vertigo of watching a liberal democracy fall apart. As Joshua Cohen writes in his introduction to this new edition, it is "one of the last masterpieces of German-Jewish culture." Prescient and chilling, it has lost none of its power today."--

"Originally published in 1962 in one volume with 'Cast but one shadow' by Jonathan Cape, Ltd., London."

"Raw, fearless, ironic, the stories in Lover Man (1958) promised the birth of a new sensibility in American fiction. Inspired by the bebop he loved, and the philosophy he studied at the Sorbonne, Alston Anderson looked back at the North Carolina of his youth to capture the hidden lives of Black boys and men in the early 1940s. Fascinated by loners and outsiders--tricksters, addicts, jazzmen, drifters, "queers"--and by the spiritual cost exacted by the myths of white supremacy, Anderson assembled an original kind of story collection, whose themes troubled and bewildered many of his early readers. Although later championed by Langston Hughes and Henry Louis Gates. Jr., among others, this--his only collection--has remained out of print since the '50s. In his afterword to this new edition, the literary historian Kinohi Nishikawa investigates Anderson's brief but brilliant career, the controversy his work provoked, and the light it sheds on his era."--Provided by publisher.

"What would it be like to have Emily Dickinson as your babysitter? In this astonishing memoir, out of print for almost a century, Martha 'Matty' Dickinson describes the childhood she spent next door to--and often in the care of--her Aunt Emily. We see Matty as a little girl, hiding from the other grownups in Emily's upstairs rooms, helping Emily in the kitchen, venturing with her into the cellar for the gingerbread she wasn't supposed to have. As Matty becomes a teenager, she finds a confidante in her aunt, who is fascinated by the latest youth fads, school gossip, and the recurring question of what to wear to a party ('her "vote" was for my highest-heeled red slippers')--not to mention the music, novels, and poems she and Matty both love. From an early age, Emily teaches Matty the joys of solitude and independence: 'No one,' Emily said, 'could ever punish a Dickinson by shutting her up alone.' First published in 1932, this is the most intimate record we have of Emily Dickinson, whose death sparked a long family struggle over her work and her image. In a foreword to this new edition, the poet and critic Anthony Madrid provides a biographical frame for Matty's recollections, and explains how such a remarkable document could spend so long out of sight." -- Amazo

Translation of: Traicion de Rita Hayworth.

"Originally published in the United Kingdom in 1958 by Michael Joseph Ltd., London and in the United States in 1959 as Cave of Ice by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York."--Title page verso.

Reprint. Originally published: London: Allison & Busby, 1978.