Re/discoveries

The Editors

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Time: The Present. Selected Stories by Tess Slesinger

Ian Afflerbach

In 1932, Tess Slesinger published her most famous story, “Missis Flinders,” a bracingly candid look into the mind of a woman in New York City returning home from her abortion. Slesinger’s story—inspired by her own decision to terminate her...

The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays by D. H. Lawrence

Ria Banerjee

The bad side of books, Lawrence says, is “the beastly marketable chunk of published volume,” the “miserable tome” as an object, “the actual paper and rag volume of any of my works,” “a bone which every dog presumes to pick with me” that “delivers...

HERmione (1981) by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

Hannah Voss

H.D.’s HERmione opens with a meditation on the past, courtesy of her daughter, Perdita Schaffner. In H.D.-like prose, Schaffner reprimands herself: “Don’t delve and dredge. Cut down on nostalgia, that too can be insidious.”

The Afterlives of Alice Mitchell

Benjamin Kahan

Alice Mitchell’s 1892 murder of her lover Freda Ward rocked their well-to-do Memphis community and scandalized the nation. The masculine Mitchell slashed Ward’s throat in broad daylight when Ward decided not to marry Mitchell. Lisa Duggan has...

Harry Crosby: Selected Poems. Edited by Ben Mazer

Lisa Tyler

In 1927, a disapproving Edith Wharton presciently pronounced Harry Crosby “a sort of half-crazy cad.” Ernest Hemingway, who spent the summer of 1927 in Pamplona with Crosby, once told Archibald MacLeish, “Harry has a great, great gift. He has a...

The Call (1924) by Edith Ayrton Zangwill: Two Recent Editions

Carey Snyder

For many interwar writers, the women’s suffrage movement was a force as powerful as the war itself in shaping modernity. In her undeservedly forgotten novel The Call (1924) , Edith Ayrton Zangwill takes up the history of both...

Ann Veronica (1909) by H. G. Wells. Edited by Carey J. Snyder

Elizabeth F. Evans

H. G. Wells may be most famous in modernist studies for Virginia Woolf’s suggestion that he doesn’t belong among the “moderns.” Yet Wells was vitally engaged with the features, futures, and controversies of early twentieth-century life, as his...

Olivia (1949) by Dorothy Strachey. With introduction by André Aciman

Chris Roulston

In 2020, Penguin Classics reissued Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia (1949), which tells the story of a sixteen-year-old girl from London sent to a French boarding school on the outskirts of Paris, Les Avons, where she falls passionately in love...

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark

Amanda Golden

When it comes to writers’ lives, what remains is fragmentary and incomplete. In her 1963 novel The Bell Jar , Sylvia Plath’s protagonist Esther Greenwood refers to such remnants as “the tatty wreckage of my life.” The image of Plath in...

Manhattan Transfer (1925). John Dos Passos. Edited by Donald Pizer

Sarah Cornish

Spoiler alert. Just before Stan Emery, the tragic embodiment of youthful excess in John Dos Passos’ glittering Manhattan Transfer , dies in an apartment fire, he looks out onto the cityscape of Manhattan and says, “Kerist I wish I was a...

Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics by Peter Kalliney

Ian Whittington

If “expansion” has been the watchword of the past two decades of modernist studies, as Rebecca Walkowitz and Douglas Mao have it, we could be excused for identifying Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the...

Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald

Maggie Gordon Froehlich

Save Me the Waltz . Zelda Fitzgerald. Introduction by Erin E. Templeton. Bath: Handheld Press, 2019. Pp. xxviii + 268. £12.99 (paper).

Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz has gone in and out of print since it was first...

The Face of the Buddha by William Empson

Stuart Christie

The Face of the Buddha . William Empson. Edited by Rupert Arrowsmith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 208 pp. + lxiii. $49.95 (cloth).

However much we may agree or disagree with the modernist English literary critic, William...

Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes by Gabriele Brandstetter

Michelle Clayton

Finally appearing in English translation twenty years after its first appearance in German, Gabriele Brandstetter’s Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes retains its groundbreaking force.

Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum by Daniel Cavicchi

Josh Epstein

Is listening the constitutive act of modernity? It seems so. Thanks to a flood of scholarship on aural culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity (2002) , Jonathan...

Feb 9, 2016 By: The Editors

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A forum for short reviews of republished modernist literature, works in translation, and more.