The Occasional 13

James Baldwin, Wendy Erskine, Rory Carroll, Molly Twomey, Henry James, Audrey Molloy, Robert Caro, Michael Frayn, Stephen Grosz, William Trevor, Katriona O'Sullivan, Deborah Levy, James Lever & more.

For paid subscribers, another Occasional, this time with a few ideas for summer reading, including some books that have appeared here since September, as well as new recommendations, and old favourites.

The final Fortnightly of this academic year will be along this time next week.

---

---

James Baldwin

never disappoints. Just on a sentence to sentence level his writing is gorgeous. On a recent sunny holiday I caught up with If Beale Street Could Talk for the first time, and it hit the spot. Here again is Baldwin’s lovely easy empathetic style, and his tenderness for the characters. It’s a love story, in which pregnant 19 year-old Tash has to deal with her lover Fonny’s imprisonment on a rape charge.

One moment that struck me, and I will use in another project. Tash’s thoughts on what is ahead of them as parents:

I didn’t know either of us very well. What would both of us be like?

---

Wendy Erksine

is an author I’ll be writing about next week in Fortnightly 207. Her first novel, The Benefactors, which I finished this week, is a treat.

Meanwhile, there are more (shorter) treats in her earlier short stories. Dance Move is just right for the holidays: a story a day will slip down very nicely alongside a summer drink. The stories are varied, sharp, funny.

---

Killing Thatcher

is by Rory Carroll, whose latest book A Rebel and a Traitor: a fugitive, a manhunt and the birth of the IRA, on the last years of Roger Casement, I reviewed for the Irish Times - €.

Carroll’s previous book, on the Brighton bombing of 1984 in which Mrs Thatcher nearly died (and five people did), shares the pacy treatment of historical events, though in this case he was able to interview many of the participants, including the bomber Patrick Magee.

---

Chic to be Sad

is Molly Twomey’s second collection of poems. I always like to make my way slowly through collections in the holidays (good for working time, too), and here’s a fine series of works by a young Irish writer. I also recommend her first, Raised Among Vultures; it seems to me that this new book builds on that.

Fallen

is Audrey Molloy’s third collection, cohering around a transgressive relationship. Molloy considers the events in an often cool, distanced way that paradoxically heightens their disruptive explosiveness. Another series of pleasures to be taken in slowly over the holiday.