Old Directions | The Editors

If the past few years of American literary publishing have had a zeitgeist, it has been more like a series of geists from zeits past.There have been notable rewritings, novels that self-consciously lift techniques and plotlines from Perec or Bernhard, from Huckleberry Finn or David Copperfield, or—in the odd case of Jenny Jackson’s The Shampoo Effect ,  a beach-read best seller published this summer — from that scene in Couples where somebody hurts his pinkie playing basketball. There have been big novels published this year about becoming old-world by breaking your phone (Transcription), or becoming old-world by waking up in 1855 (Yesteryear), or sitting out the passage of time altogether (On the Calculation of Volume). And there have been, as ever, plenty of full-dress period pieces  about Greek codices and the tribulations of G. W. Pabst. (All but one of this decade’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novels are works of historical fiction .)More conspicuous than the new novels that feel old, however, have been the old novels that feel somehow new. The 2010s and this first half of the 2020s have featured a seasonal rotation of the dead and the aging: Babitz bubbles, Renata revivals, Hardwick hurricanes, a trail of Cookie Mueller crumbs luring us back to the punky mise-en-scène of ’80s New York. A few summers ago you could go to the beach and spot multiple copies of Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus scattered among the towels — impressive 21st-century saturation for a novel published in 1980. Helen Garner, another Australian prolific in that decade, has swept through book clubs stateside like a low-pressure front bringing brisk winds and brisker sentences from down under. This spring delivered the Nancy Lemannaissance, a multipublisher reissue spree celebrated in a New York Times profile nearly as long as one of the septuagenarian’s novellas. Postwar English women seem to attract a special fervor: Barbara Comyns, Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Taylor, Leonora Carrington, Sylvia Townsend Warner — a full-on British Invasion of psychological horror and class system neurosis.Old-book reading cycles are, so to speak, nothing new. Certain novelists, like Norman Rush or Charles Portis or Dawn Powell, seem to exist in a perennial state of mid-recuperation. But the old writers most of interest lately share a particular flavor: unknown legends in their time, recently rediscovered. They wrote something great, or at least very good, sometime in the previous century, but for reasons of sexism, or ahead-of-its-time-ism, their work got left behind. Maybe the old-new writer’s career looked something like that of the fictional novelist in Lisa Tuttle’s My Death, published in 2004 and reissued in 2023:Helen Ralston was hardly a household name, now or ever. Her fame, such as it was, rested entirely on one book. In Troy had been published by a small press in the 1930s and developed a kind of underground reputation, read by few but admired by those discerning readers who made the effort . In the 1960s it was published again — in America for the first time — and there was even a mass-market paperback, which is what I’d read in college. It was revived from obscurity once again by Virago in the 1980s, but, from the results of my bookstore visit before lunch, I was pretty sure it was out of print again.But now she’s out of print no longer. Now she’s been reissued! And this time the bookstores will welcome her with open shelves.In 2008, an editorial in this magazine, “The Spirit of Revival,” took stock of the publisher that would eventually reissue My Death and many other mislaid gems by old-new writers, New York Review Books Classics, calling it “the characteristic publishing project of the decade” — a canon for a postcanon age. Launched at the tail end of the 1990s, NYRB Classics made its name by resurrecting chiefly Anglophone works that had lapsed into obscurity, or been born into it: lesser Trilling, lighter Wilson, any Steegmuller, many British guys with initials for first names. NYRB Classics’ list was modest next to a behemoth like Penguin Classics, but over the course of the 2000s the publisher built a sound model: Dig up an out-of-print minorpiece, buy the rights for cheap from a dead writer’s nephew, and package it handsomely, with an introduction by somebody important. Nothing, of course, embodies the spirit of revival more than revisiting the pieces one’s magazine published during the Bush Administration. But reissue publishing has transformed since we last checked in, with the NYRB Classics template taken up and refined by a thicket of upstarts eager to recover their own Helen Ralstons. McNally Editions ,  an outgrowth of the New York bookstore–stationery–reading group empire ,  has struck a high-end note, publishing French-flapped versions of under-remembered postwar office novels and westerns, alongside, naturally, more British ladies. Following its acquisition by Deep Vellum, Dalkey Archive has been repolishing the dusty fun-house mirror of American experimental fiction, bringing core oddities like Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor back into circulation. Big Five publishers are juicing their reissue efforts (one of last year’s most interesting reissues was Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales, brought back into hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux after being acquired by Toni Morrison for Random House in the early ’80s) and, in the case of Doubleday’s Outsider Editions, launched earlier this year, creating new imprints to lead the charge. Smaller outfits with narrower niches, like Hagfish (focused on spiky and offbeat novels by women) or Mandylion Press (spiky and offbeat novels by women — from the 19th century!), periodically crop up, joining the rush into the past.These books are old, but not classics; to read them is illuminating, but not credentialing. TweetBut NYRB Classics continues to tower. The press has sprawled and evolved, now putting out titles at a Stakhanovite clip rivaling that of a major house. These days midcentury women are catching up to midcentury men; the bench is deep enough for NYRB Classics to run increasingly specific sales on dozens of books from dozens of eras: 20 percent off literature of World War II, 30 percent off literature of the interwar years, 40 percent off literature of the Years of Lead. Although Soviets take up a lot of airtime, as they tend to, more titles come from more countries, translated from more languages. For every handful of Life and Fates there is a The Lord, Soraya Antonius’s 1986 novel about Mandatory Palestine.1The demographic broadening could be broader. Of the roughly one hundred and fifty authors NYRB Classics has published since 2020, about a tenth have been writers of color. Elsewhere, some of the most exciting rediscoveries have been works by Black writers: Fran Ross’s Oreo, from New Directions; William Demby’s The Catacombs, from Vintage; Vincent O. Carter’s The Bern Book, from Dalkey; Kathleen Collins’s Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, from Ecco. These publications belatedly and partially acknowledge mainstream publishing’s neglect of Black authors of the 20th century. It’s striking, amid this landscape, that NYRB Classics has reissued only one novel by a Black American this decade, William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face.At the same time, NYRB Classics has edged closer to the canon of syllabus standbys it initially stood athwart (or at least stood to the side of, affably waving). The esoterica quotient remains high, but NYRB Classics can no longer be said to champion only “the truly minor, overlooked, or forgotten book,” as we wrote in 2008. While it always dabbled in marginal works by major authors — licking clean the golden bowl of neglected Henry James novels — lately the press has traded the hors d’oeuvre for chefs d’oeuvre: a new edition of Mrs. Dalloway, a new translation of Fathers and Children, an Australian translation of Swann’s Way.Major and minor, Anglophone and not, dour experiments and clockwork whodunits: The reissuers seem in no danger of running out of books to unearth. “The past is a foreign country,” goes the opening line of an early NYRB Classics title, L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, and the reissue reader can feel like a cruising literary tourist, docking in disparate pasts at whim. Yet the number and success of these publishing projects — so unalike in genre, form, sensibility, obscurity, and era — suggest a deeper, more durable readerly desire is at work. What is it?Different literatures invite different modes of reading. There are books one approaches in a directed way (perhaps for a class) or with a dutiful attitude (for a class one doesn’t like); whole literatures are read furtively, or as proxies for alternative states of mind.The orientation invited by the old-new novels is a liberated, fun, highly optional noncomprehensiveness. These books are old, but not classics; to read them is illuminating, but not credentialing. They arrive unfreighted with the baggage of the (alas, decreasingly) school-taught major canon, but the odds are still high that they’re pretty good. Higher, really, than the odds that any given contemporary novel is good, since these have been vetted twice over: most recently by a reissue outfit, and before that, by some other publisher in some other time. Readers who first encountered a reissue back when it was just an issue get to experience the satisfaction of watching it finally meet its moment, along with the slightly possessive pride one feels anytime a private affinity goes public.Above all there’s an implicit pleasure in the reissue’s blend of vintage and contemporary, its transmission from a past whose edges haven’t yet been dulled by repetition. Displayed in a bookstore alongside the new stuff, endorsed and introduced by authors who might have written some of that new stuff, an older novel can feel awfully current — certainly no less current than the historical