Latest news with #MelvilleHouse
New York Times
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Thrilling, Lush New Historical Fiction
Fagin the Thief You might be surprised to learn that Oliver Twist has nothing more than a walk-on part in FAGIN THE THIEF (Doubleday, 321 pp., $28). And even more surprised to learn that Dickens's notorious villain emerges from this reimagining of his origins as somewhat less villainous — still a sinister master criminal, but indelibly shaped by the prejudices of 19th-century London, where even as a boy he suffers 'the natural consequence of being visibly Jewish and visibly poor.' The narrative begins with a nod to Dickens's novel, introducing us to a coldblooded middle-aged Fagin as he directs his gang of child pickpockets. Then, in flashbacks that intersect with some of what we remember from Dickens, we're shown how Fagin got that way: his own youthful apprenticeship to a flamboyant thief, the terrible illness that killed his widowed mother, his professional partnering with warmhearted Nan Reed and her ill-fated attraction to his former pupil Bill Sikes, whose bond with Fagin has morphed into a 'creeping cancer he called a friendship.' In an author's note, Epstein considers the most common ways that modern adaptations of Dickens have dealt with the antisemitic 'Fagin problem,' remarking that 'both of these options — sanitizing Fagin or disowning him — feel like a loss to me.' Instead she has created a deeply nuanced character, understandable if not wildly sympathetic, a loner who has learned a tragic lesson: 'Iron hearts can't break.' The Delicate Beast 'The bliss and the brutality' of a childhood in early-1960s Haiti are portrayed with dreamlike, then nightmarish, eloquence in Celestin's autobiographical first novel, THE DELICATE BEAST (Bellevue Literary Press, 431 pp., paperback, $18.99). There's a mythic feel to the larger context — the setting is known only as the Tropical Republic and Papa Doc Duvalier as the Mortician — which makes the precise detail of this depiction of a young boy's privileged yet fragile life in a large upper-class family even more effective. As the Mortician consolidates power, the routines of the family's days 'seem infinite even as they are coming to an end' in an onslaught of violence that will send the boy's parents into hiding, then impoverished exile. After he and his brother join them in New York, the novel opens out into a more conventional consideration of rootlessness and alienation. The previously unnamed boy grows into a man, Robert Carpentier, but as he travels through Europe, establishes a career in academia and separates from his family he never entirely succeeds in walling off the past. 'There was no second chance,' he ruefully concludes when the hoped-for shelter of his marriage crumbles, 'no possibility of a life empty of damage.' A Fool's Kabbalah In A FOOL'S KABBALAH (Melville House, 287 pp., paperback, $19.99), Stern sets the post-World War II activities of the real-life scholar Gershom Scholem, famed for his study of Jewish mysticism, against the wartime antics of a fictional 'shtetl scapegrace' named Menke Klepfisch, whose remote village on the Polish border succumbs to the occupying forces of the Reich. Scholem has been tasked by the Treasures of Diaspora Archive in Jerusalem with procuring whatever books and artifacts have survived the carnage in Europe. Menke is an inveterate clown whose life — and death — challenge conventional attempts to confront the horror of the Holocaust. Both alternating narratives are steeped in a poignant form of gallows humor. While Scholem struggles with bureaucrats and kleptocrats and conspires to smuggle a shipload of books across the Mediterranean, Menke engages in increasingly futile high jinks, attempting to distract the Nazis from their depredations. But when he and the village's other Jews face imminent destruction, they retreat into a bizarre kind of magical thinking. How will the terror-filled superstitions of their last days align with the academic theories advanced by Scholem, who could pass as 'a religious anarchist,' possessed of an 'orthodox nihilism'? Moral Treatment The vacant grounds of the Northern Michigan Asylum in Traverse City were a frequent childhood haunt of Carpenter, whose first novel, MORAL TREATMENT (Central Michigan University Press, 367 pp., paperback, $19.95), vividly recreates one late-19th-century year of its existence as a public institution for the mentally ill. The tensions that ripple through its cluster of buildings are revealed from the perspectives of two characters on opposite sides of the doors to the locked wards: a teenage girl with a penchant for self-harm and the elderly hospital superintendent, whose theories are being challenged by younger, more interventionist physicians. The dynamic between the staff members and their patients is particularly complex and convincing. This is a place where humane 'moral treatment' is emphasized, where a predictable routine, healthy food, satisfying work and regular exercise are believed to be the best route to a cure. But the superintendent is forced to acknowledge the challenge posed by certain hardened residents, who may lead their more vulnerable companions astray. These friendships could easily be more harmful than helpful — especially when the opposite sex is involved.
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Stand up for what's right': Melville House co-founder on publishing Jack Smith and Tulsa reports
A US publishing house has decided to publish official reports into sensitive matters in US politics and history against the backdrop of a new Donald Trump administration committed to a radical rightwing agenda of reshaping American government and fiercely aggressive against its opponents, especially in the media. The publisher, Melville House, will on Tuesday release The Jack Smith Report, a print and ebook edition of the special counsel's summation of his investigation of Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Later in February, the company will then publish another report the Department of Justice issued shortly before Trump returned to power, concerning the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Dennis Johnson, co-founder of Melville House with his wife, Valerie Merians, said The Jack Smith Report would be published with no frills: 'It is just a report, and we're just reprinting it. We're not doing anything to it. We're not adding anything in the front or back. We're not getting star introductions or anything. We just wanted it to speak for itself.' But he also described an urgent need to put out physical copies, in light of Trump's push to revenge himself on prosecutors who worked for Smith and FBI agents who investigated the January 6 attack on Congress. Johnson said the same for the Tulsa report, amid a drive to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion policies which has resulted in the disappearances of official online resources related to the history of racism and civil rights. Johnson has published federal reports before, achieving notable sales for the CIA Torture Report (2014) and the Mueller Report (2019), the latter concerning Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. Melville House has always been 'mission-driven', Johnson said, describing a company 'founded as a minor but sincere attempt to stand up to the [election] of George Bush'. Nonetheless, after Trump's victory over Kamala Harris in November, Johnson and his staff found themselves 'just stumped. We had no ideas … we just felt totally defeated … and then there was this murmuring about the Jack Smith report coming. And when we heard that, after two or three months of being in a bunk and a daze, we just immediately thought we should do that.' Smith was appointed in November 2022, under the Biden administration. He investigated 'whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election', as well as Trump's retention of classified documents after leaving power. Ultimately, Smith filed four criminal charges relating to election subversion and 40 concerning retention of classified records. Trump pleaded not guilty but his lawyers and a compliant Florida judge secured delays, meaning neither case reached trial before November. After Trump's election win, Smith closed his cases. Before Trump returned to power, the Department of Justice released part one of Smith's report, covering his work on Trump's election subversion. Part two, on Trump's retention of classified information, remains under wraps. Melville House has moved fast. Johnson said such 'crash publishing' required hard work and help from printers, retailers and more. But the Jack Smith Report, he said, would 'launch into a very different book culture than the last time we were in this predicament, in 2016. People are very afraid. 'We did the Mueller Report and there were two other significant publications. There was Simon and Schuster, they're one of the biggest publishers in the world, and there was Skyhorse, which is independent but much bigger than us … and yet we got our book on the bestseller list. 'We knew that wasn't going to happen this time, because the big houses, we're guessing, are intimidated – don't want any hard feelings with the White House. Trump has already informed Penguin he's going to sue them about a critical biography they published last year [Lucky Loser, by Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.] And the publisher with Skyhorse [Tony Lyons] actually worked on the presidential campaign of Robert F Kennedy Jr [now Trump's nominee for health secretary] so we knew he wasn't going to put [the Smith report] out. So we'd have the field to ourselves, which is good.' Sign up to First Thing Our US morning briefing breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion 'I think there's a world of independent booksellers who are eager to be supporting something that speaks to the moment, that somehow stands up for what's right.' It took the Department of Justice more than 100 years to stand up a proper investigation of the Tulsa Race Massacre – one of the most unjustly obscure episodes in US history, in which hundreds were killed when Greenwood, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black neighborhood, was destroyed by a white mob. No charges were brought. Under Joe Biden, a new investigation was carried out by a cold case unit of the justice department civil rights division named for Emmett Till, a Black teen murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955. The Tulsa report was released on 10 January. Ten days later, Trump returned to power – and announced sweeping changes at the civil rights division. Calling the new Tulsa report 'nauseating and gripping', Johnson said: 'We went to the Library of Congress and found a lot of the photos which might have been part of the initial report when the massacre happened, that the predecessor of the FBI did, the investigation this report criticizes. They supplement the information but it only takes a few pictures to make the point. They're just aerial shots of devastation. It's like Munich in world war two. Hiroshima. Total devastation.' Johnson hopes his editions of the Jack Smith and Tulsa reports will find places in 'libraries and classrooms' as well as homes. When he was a boy, he said, adults he knew 'had the Pentagon Papers paperback in their home, they might have had the Warren Commission and later the Starr Report. I want people to feel these reports are part of the American historic record.' The Jack Smith Report is published in the US on Tuesday
New York Times
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Historical Fiction Imbued With a Rich Sense of Place
What We Tried to Bury Grows Here 'In war, the full breadth of emotions persist, hiding among the horror — even joy.' For Mariana, whose fiery political writing is an inspiration to her fellow Basques, that joy comes from a brief encounter with a young soldier named Isidro, who has left his remote village to fight on the government side in the Spanish Civil War. In a conventional novel, they'd be the tragic lovers battling fascist oppression. But in Zabalbeascoa's daring first novel their stories serve a different purpose, attracting a host of other stories on both sides — as well as the sidelines — of the conflict. In WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE (Two Dollar Radio, 277 pp., $27), almost two dozen narrators vie to convey the danger and uncertainty of life in a country where 'tomorrow you never knew who would throw you against the wall for the actions of today.' We hear from priests and soldiers, mothers and children, prisoners and refugees. Amid the inevitable violence and horror, there are the equally inevitable heroes and villains, but for everyone the world has acquired 'an evil stink.' Mariana knows her compatriots have no choice but to fight on, yet she also knows that 'the war will make us unrecognizable to our former selves.' To Save the Man Radical transformation is central to the plot of TO SAVE THE MAN (Melville House, 322 pp., $29.99), which takes its title from a favorite saying of Richard Henry Pratt, a U.S. Army officer who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School: 'To save the man, we must kill the Indian.' Although the novel takes place in just a few months during the autumn and early winter of 1890, it covers a wide range of physical and emotional terrain. As a new class of students is ushered into Pratt's military-style campus in central Pennsylvania, the western reservations are being swept by a movement called the 'ghost dance,' which promises triumph over the white man's weapons and a return to the old ways of the frontier. Moving between the increasingly rebellious plains and this school dedicated to erasing its pupils' tribal loyalties, Sayles builds narrative tension as news of a possible uprising spreads through dormitories filled with vulnerable young men and women. It offers a different sort of challenge to the institution's only Indian instructor, a talented musician who's been presented to Carlisle's benefactors as a 'paragon of her endangered race.' Caught between two worlds, Miss Redbud often feels more like a traitor. The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter Sixty-one-year-old Judith Shakespeare insists that she favors neither side in the 17th-century battle between Britain's Puritan Roundheads and the Cavalier forces of Charles I. Nevertheless, the playwright's midwife daughter must flee her native Stratford when the fractious political atmosphere yields a charge of witchcraft against her. It's not necessary to read 'My Father Had a Daughter,' Tiffany's novel about the youthful Judith, to enjoy THE OWL WAS A BAKER'S DAUGHTER (Harper, 256 pp., $30), whose title is borrowed from a line Shakespeare gave to Ophelia that goes on to explain: 'We know what we are, but know not what we may be.' What Judith may be, when she reaches the questionable safety of London, is a co-conspirator with an old flame, a wolfish actor who's been reduced to clandestine performances in pubs now that the Parliamentarians have closed the city's theaters. The (wildly dangerous) performance of a lifetime awaits him in the besieged Royalist stronghold of Oxford, and he insists that only Judith can help him get there. Unfortunately, she's saddled with two cumbersome companions: a Bible-spouting Protestant zealot and an unpredictable little girl who may be as mad as Ophelia. Babylonia The literature that inspired BABYLONIA (Sourcebooks Landmark, 432 pp., $27.99) stretches as far back as the Greek historians Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, who wrote of a powerful woman they called Semiramis, ruler of a vast Middle Eastern empire in the ninth century B.C. Myths have surrounded her ever since, and she's been portrayed as a ruthless schemer, reveling in the violence and cruelty that were the hallmarks of the Assyrian monarchs who came before and after her. Casati doesn't shy away from the stark brutality that permeated the culture Semiramis was born into. At the same time, she invents a subtly persuasive portrait of an impoverished orphan whose cleverness and striking looks propel her from a wretched provincial settlement to the inner sanctum of the royal citadel via marriage to a taciturn warrior, the emperor's closest companion since childhood. The court and its intrigues are chillingly drawn, dominated by the emperor's mother ('every thought of hers, a dagger in the dark') and a eunuch spymaster ('the only weapons I trade in are secrets'). What enables Semiramis to prevail is her memory of what it was like to have nothing, to be nothing. On the rise, she is constantly alert to the bonds forming 'an endless rope, tied from person to person, that can be snapped in a moment.'
