Revived Writers
Fairly often a well-deserving writer is rediscovered by readers, publishers, or reviewers/critics. The neglected books are brought back into print, retrospective appreciations are written (Dawn Powell) or a sudden rush of affection overwhelms the writer late in life (Barbara Pym). Sometimes the writer’s works are whacked with the magic wand of Hollywood, and the writer becomes much more famous and widely read than in his or her mortality (Philip K. Dick).
Recently I was struck by the handsome editions that a British publisher, Hodder Books, brought out for Pamela Hansford Johnson’s novels. Johnson (1912-1981, CBE, FRSL) was a prolific and multi-talented writer who was the guest of many universities in the US and celebrated in her day. Her second husband, C.P. Snow, had an even higher profile as a writer bridging the sciences and the humanities and wrote successfully and abundantly, including an epic 11-volume series, Strangers and Brothers. Johnson is now back in print. Snow is out of print entirely in the US. Publishers — and booksellers — are mysterious in their giving and taking away. It pays to stay alert to what is revived.
On this page, beginning in the pandemic days of Spring 2020, we will hunt around for revived fiction and its writers. We begin with Johnson. I look forward to listing other authors I carry: Nancy Mitford, Georgette Heyer, Eugenia Price, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and others. (Why are all the names I am thinking of women writers? No idea.)
Enjoy! Experiment! And come back to check on new listings.
Sodom and Gomorrah (volume 4 of In Search of Lost Time)
Sodom and Gomorrah (volume 4 of In Search of Lost Time)
The fourth volume of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century
John Sturrock’s acclaimed new translation of Sodom and Gomorrah will introduce a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Proust. The fourth volume in this superb edition of In Search of Lost Time—the first completely new translation of Proust’s masterpiece since the 1920s—brings us a more comic and lucid prose than English readers have previously been able to enjoy.
Sodom and Gomorrah takes up the theme of homosexual love, male and female, and dwells on how destructive sexual jealousy can be for those who suffer it. Proust’s novel is also an unforgiving analysis of both the decadent high society of Paris and the rise of a philistine bourgeoisie that is on the way to supplanting it. Characters who had lesser roles in earlier volumes now reappear in a different light and take center stage, notably Albertine, with whom the narrator believes he is in love, and the insanely haughty Baron de Charlus.