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.
Israel Joshua Singer volume 2 Novels 1938-1944
Israel Joshua Singer volume 2 Novels 1938-1944
s one of the most well-known Yiddish writers of the twentieth century, Israel Joshua Singer produced an impressive opus - presented in three volumes in Collected Works - in which he tackles religious, social, and political challenges facing the Jewish people. Unabashedly critical, he does not offer substitutes for what he views as failed ideologies, instead seeing the writer's role in the honest expression of and engagement with this inescapable predicament. In this volume, Singer's two last novels, East of Eden (1938) and The Family Carnovsky (1940-1941), are followed by his memoir, Of A World That is No More (1944). As in his first novel, East of Eden is a scathing rebuke of prevalent ideologies, not sparing the Jewish spiritual practices of Poland or the catastrophic Soviet implementation of socialist ideas, graphically illustrated by the relationships among the characters. But in his last novel, The Family Carnovsky, a family saga spanning 50 years that appeared at the height of Nazi power, Singer suggests that, despite the hopes that accompanied the Haskala, Jews could not escape their fate and traditions by seeking to assimilate with those who continued to reject them. Finally, Of A World That Is No More appeared as a serialized memoir of Singer's childhood in Poland until the age of 14. The critique of Jewish life that permeates his fiction is also evident in this memoir but is tempered by his mourning for the world that has been destroyed.