Fine print

Books from small publishers stand tall this season

By Adam Kirsch

As the big publishers consolidate and downsize, more and more of the best books are to be found on the lists of small publishers and university presses. Concerned with literary and scholarly values as well as the bottom line, these publishing houses are increasingly essential to the vitality of our culture. A look at some of the titles published this spring shows why.

Natalia Ginzburg, who lived from 1916 to 1991, was one of the premier women writers of 20th-century Italy, but her work as a novelist and essayist is not widely known in the US. A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays (Seven Stories Press, $24), a new collection of her nonfiction edited by the novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz, will help change that. The focus of the collection is autobiographical, recounting Ginzburg’s experiences as a writer, wife, and mother under Mussolini’s regime and after: her Jewish family was actively anti-Fascist, and her first husband was executed just months before the liberation. Her modest but uncompromising voice tells her story with power.

Mary McCarthy, a very different kind of writer, was equally eminent in 20th-century American letters. She earned notoriety for her sexually explicit novels — the episode in The Group where a woman goes to be fitted for a diaphragm caused a sensation — but she was also a masterful and controversial essayist. A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays (New York Review Books, $24.95), edited by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, offers a generous selection from five decades of her nonfiction, on topics ranging from the Vietnam War to women’s magazines to the depredations of the other McCarthy, Senator Joseph.

The late German novelist Gert Hofmann is perhaps best known in America as the father of poet and translator Michael Hofmann. Now the son translates the father’s novel Luck (New Directions, $23.95), a child’s-eye account of a family breaking apart. Over the course of a single morning in 1960, a young boy watches as his mother waits for the lover who will take her away, and his father, a failed writer, passively pretends that nothing is wrong. But Hofmann allows the boy to hope that something will save his family at the last minute, creating a mixture of suspense and pathos in this sharply observed novel.

Dalkey Archive Press has become well known as the home of radically experimental fiction, which makes it the perfect publisher to reissue Avalovara (Dalkey Archive, $15.95), by the Brazilian novelist Osman Lins. The book’s “rigorous, puzzle-like” structure, patterned after the motifs of a spiral and a sphere, encloses the story of Abel, a man in love with three different women: the sophisticated Roos, the hermaphrodite Cecilia, and a third woman identified only by an ideogram.

Like fiction in translation, contemporary American poetry now appears primarily on the lists of small presses. Steal Away: Selected and New Poems by C.D. Wright (Copper Canyon, $25) includes decades of work by the Arkansas-born writer, whose strange and erotic verse has become a major influence on younger poets. Radiance (Zoo Press, $14.95) is the first full-length collection by former Boston University professor Joe Osterhaus. The eminent Irish poet Eamon Grennan returns with Still Life with Waterfall (Graywolf, $14). And a new volume of the Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams (New Directions, $29.95) brings together the verse that the playwright, who always saw himself as a poet at heart, wrote throughout his life.

New England, more than any other region of America, has been home to a distinctive poetic tradition, from Emerson to Frost to Robert Lowell. A new anthology of Contemporary Poetry of New England (University Press of New England, $40 cloth, $19.95 paper), edited by Middlebury College poets Robert Pack and Jay Parini, shows how that tradition continues, in the work of Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Peter Davison, Mary Jo Salter, Rosanna Warren, and dozens more.

When Herman Melville died in 1891, impoverished and obscure, he could not have guessed — though he might have hoped — that one day he would be famous enough to earn a biography as titanic in scope and painstaking in detail as Hershel Parker’s. The first volume of Parker’s book, published in 1997, was hailed as “awesome,” “monumental,” and “definitive”; now comes the concluding volume, Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume Two: 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins University Press, $45). This installment covers the painful second half of Melville’s life, when the failure of his masterpiece Moby-Dick began the eclipse of his writing career. Working at a thankless job in the New York Customs House and enduring the tragic deaths of two of his children, Melville nevertheless managed to write some of his major works during this period, including Billy Budd and the long poem Clarel.

John Gross, a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is one of the most eminent English men of letters — a breed about which he wrote a classic book. Unlike his predecessors, however, he is also Jewish, and the resulting tensions form the subject of his memoir, A Double Thread: Growing Up English and Jewish in London (Ivan R. Dee, $23.50). Gross writes about the culture of Jewish London from the 1930s to the 1950s; how he was educated within his two religious and literary heritages; and how he was affected by anti-Semitism at home and the Holocaust across the Channel.

One of the greatest Jewish scholars of the 20th century was Gershom Scholem, who practically invented the serious study of Jewish mysticism. He is perhaps equally well known as a friend of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and other intellectuals, with whom he corresponded voluminously from his home in Jerusalem after emigrating from Germany in the 1920s. In Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters (Harvard University Press, $35), we witness the epic of Scholem’s life firsthand, as terrible historical events intersect with his family, his friends, and his work.

Dozens of books will be published this season trying to explain and memorialize the events of September 11; some of the most scholarly and insightful come from university presses. Unholy War (Oxford University Press, $25), by John Esposito, one of the world’s leading authorities on political Islam, analyzes the religious roots of jihad and how the concept has channeled widespread anti-Western and anti-American feeling in Muslim and Arab societies. Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (Columbia University Press, $22.95), by Roha Gunaratna, is based on years of research into the history and tactics of the group, including interviews with members; it shows how Al Qaeda originated in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and spread to battlegrounds and immigrant communities around the world.

One of the most volatile of those battlegrounds is the valley of Kashmir, once so peaceful and flourishing that it was known to India’s Mogul emperors as “Paradise on Earth.” In The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir (Beacon Press, $24), Sudha Koul tells the story of her native region as a combination of family history and memoir. For four generations, the women of her Hindu family enjoyed the uniquely tolerant culture where Muslims and Hindus lived together; Koul herself was raised, educated, and married in Kashmir. But the 1947 partition introduced religious hatred that has led to constant warfare. Koul’s book is an elegy for the culture of this “lost Eden.”

The controversial election of 2000 now seems to belong to a different age, but the legal and political questions it raised remain crucial for the future. In Bush v. Gore: The Question of Legitimacy (Yale University Press, $26.95), constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman brings together a range of legal analysts from across the political spectrum — including Laurence Tribe, Charles Fried, and Guido Calabresi — to debate the Supreme Court’s decision.

As any reader of Andrew Sullivan, Norah Vincent, and Camille Paglia knows, gay politics has been changing in recent years, with the rise of articulate conservative and libertarian voices opposed to traditional gay liberalism. The Village Voice’s executive editor Richard Goldstein launches a blistering attack on these “gayocons” in The Attack Queers: Liberal Media and the Gay Right (Verso, $22). Goldstein casts a cold eye on the eager reception the gay right has received in the mainstream media and argues for the revival of a left-wing tradition of “queer humanism.”

The story of the Manhattan Project is usually told from the point of view of the scientists, like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman, who worked there. Racing for the Bomb (Steerforth, $40), by Robert S. Norris, approaches the subject from a new angle: it is the story of General Leslie Groves, the Army Corps of Engineers officer who was charged with running the project. In a little more than 1000 days, Groves built from scratch a massive military, industrial, and scientific operation, and was instrumental in deciding how the bomb would be used. In this comprehensive history, drawing on new archival materials, nuclear-weapons expert Norris shows how the Manhattan Project really worked, and how it became the blueprint for the postwar national-security state.

Adam Kirsch can be reached at abkirsch@aol.com.