What We’re Reading This Summer - The New Yorker

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“War and Peace,” by Leo Tolstoy

You don’t need me to tell you that reading “War and Peace” at some point in life is a good idea. But I can tell you that current conditions may be ideal for the undertaking. This is a novel that rewards deep drafts of reading over a sustained period of time. Sure, you could gallop through it in a couple of weeks, but wouldn’t you rather spend a leisurely three months or so with Pierre, Natasha, and (my own improbable favorite) Andrei? I began reading the novel in March, feeling smugly heroic—much as Nikolai Rostov does before the Battle of Austerlitz—as I took the brick of a book down from my shelf, where it has lived, undisturbed, since I bought it, four or five years ago. (I have the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation.) Immediately, though, I became daunted. Luckily, the magazine A Public Space had just chosen the novel for a virtual book club, led by the writer Yiyun Li: fifteen pages a day, which put us on track to finish by the second week of June. I haven’t kept that pace, exactly—there have been days of reading other things, or nothing at all, and days of greedily gulping down sixty or seventy pages at a time. But experiencing this book over such a stretch is like decanting it; it begins to breathe, to take on new color and flavor, and to perfume everything with its own essence. It’s hard to think of another novel as simple, on the level of language—the workaday metaphors, the evident similes, the wonderfully brusque chapter endings—and as grandly, humanely complex. Incidentally, just before this I read Gustave Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education,” an astounding novel published in 1869, the same year as “War and Peace,” and which, like “War and Peace,” is concerned with private life at a time of public upheaval; it has proved instructive to read about people trapped, as we all are, by history, and who still, as we all must, try to fulfill their duties to their own lives. “Only unconscious activity bears fruit,” Tolstoy writes, “and a man who plays a role in a historical event never understands its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness.” It will take time for us to fully grasp all that we’re in the midst of living. In the meantime, I turn to Tolstoy and the year 1812. —Alexandra Schwartz

“Pop. 1280,” by Jim Thompson

The other week, I pulled out my never-read copy of “War and Peace” from the bookshelf. If not in self-quarantine, then when?, I thought, filled with a sudden ambition to better myself. Then I placed the book on my nightstand, where it has since remained, largely unopened. While Tolstoy’s magnificent saga has been too much for my jumpy mind to delve into in these jumpy times, what the moment has proved more fitting for, at least for me, are the books of the hardboiled American crime writer Jim Thompson, who in the fifties and sixties wrote novels that still make for short, sharp, and filthy reads, and whose nihilistic sense of the world seems to dovetail with our current reality. In one of Thompson’s best books, “Pop. 1280,” from 1964, he brings us the character of Nick Corey, the small-town sheriff who will stop at nothing to maintain his position of authority in Potts County, Texas. In “The Killer Inside Me,” an earlier blood-chilling Thompson novel, from 1952, the sheriff protagonist is a psychopathic serial killer who hides what he calls his “sickness” under a good-natured exterior; in Nick’s case, his lackadaisical manner—and his reluctance to lay down the law—don’t conceal his immoral perspective so much as exist alongside it. Nick would rather fix things to his own advantage than tell apart good from evil, right from wrong. Can he help the sorry state of the world, full as it is of liars, fornicators, and murderers? And can he help that he is one of them? His role, he’s decided, is “to punish the heck out of people for bein’ people.” He is a corrupt man for a corrupt time, and the role he plays in society, he believes, is as inevitable as God’s word. “Do you excuse a post for fittin’ a hole?,” he rhetorically asks. “Maybe there’s a nest of rabbits down in that hole, and the post will crush ’em. But is that the post’s fault, for fillin’ a gap it was made to fit?” —Naomi Fry

“Der Klang Der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall,” by Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen, translated by Jenna Krumminga

I’ve been watering a friend’s plants since March, when she went to her parents’ house with no plans to return. She’s a d.j., and one day I took this oral history of Berlin techno off her bookshelf and started reading and couldn’t stop. If you can’t go to any parties, you can, at the very least, read about some of the best parties that ever happened. The book begins in the divided, government-subsidized Berlin of the nineteen-eighties, with the post-punk music scene of West Berlin strung out on heroin, and East Berliners sourcing hip-hop cassettes from relatives in the West. Radio is the great unifier, emitting clues to the young people looking for something new. The book takes us through reunification, as the scene rejects the celebration of capitalism and finds a kind of religion in electronic music, pharmaceutical-grade Ecstasy, and parties that go on for days. I learned about the origins of the Love Parade, the street procession of sound trucks and dancing that marked Berlin’s summer of love, in 1991; of Tresor, the techno club that started in a basement bank vault; and of Planet, the party in a former soap factory that had to be set up and removed every weekend because the promoters had no lease. There is a party in a disused bunker and a party in the control room of a former power plant. The d.j.s and promoters who party from Wednesday to Monday also manage to be very methodical as they build out vacant spaces, secure permits, deal with endless plumbing issues, and import records from abroad. Especially fascinating is the collaboration that grows between Berlin and Detroit, where four-track techno made by experimental African-American producers like the anti-corporate, drug-averse collective Underground Resistance finds a mass audience in Europe. By the mid-nineties, the Berlin scene is devastated by the AIDS epidemic, commercialization, and too much cocaine, but the music lives on—including in plenty of online playlists based around the recollections in this book. —Emily Witt

“The Time of the Doves,” by Mercè Rodoreda

“It was hard for me to say no if someone asked me to do something,” Natalia, the narrator, says in the opening paragraph of “The Time of the Doves,” Mercè Rodoreda’s 1962 novel about the Spanish Civil War—a book that feels as fresh and pure and unsettling as a wind blowing your front door open and whipping through your house. Natalia is tired from selling pastries all day, but her friend Julieta has appeared at the bakery and convinced her to go to a party in the town square. “I was dressed in white, my dress and petticoats starched, my shoes like two drops of milk, my earrings white enamel, three hoop bracelets that matched the earrings, and a white purse Julieta said was made of vinyl with a snap shaped like a gold shellfish.” It’s there, at the Plaça del Diamant, that Natalia meets Quimet, a young man with eyes like a monkey, who calls her Colometa (“little dove”) and tells her that she’ll be his wife by the end of the year. The nickname is apt—Natalia is helpless, dignified, tragic—and so is Quimet’s prediction: soon, they’re married, with two small children. As Natalia’s world shrinks to her apartment and her new job cleaning the house of a rich family, the world obliquely begins to change. There is no more milk, no more gas; conflict breaks out in the streets, and Quimet joins the People’s Republican Army. Natalia is left alone in Barcelona, with her starving children and the half-wild flock of birds that Quimet was trying to raise on the roof. Rodoreda, who attended school for only three years and married her mother’s brother when she was twenty, began publishing fiction in the nineteen-thirties, in the lead-up to the conflict she depicts in this novel: she always wrote in Catalan, a language that was banned when Franco came to power, in 1939. She wrote “The Time of the Doves” in exile, in Switzerland, and it has slowly gained recognition both as a canonical work of Catalonian literature—Rodoreda is often called the most influential Catalan writer of the last century—as well as a vital, vivid, existential novel about war. The un-self-conscious beauty and the phantasmagoric pain in her work add up to a kind of sharp, transportive pleasure. I was transfixed when I read it for the first time, recently. I felt like Natalia: naïve, permeable, and keenly alive. —Jia Tolentino

“Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy,” by Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman

Pandemics did not make the list when Mettler, a professor of government at Cornell, and Lieberman, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, charted what they believe to be the four persistent threats to American democracy: political polarization, economic inequality, marginalization of vulnerable groups, and unchecked Presidential power. But the emergence of the coronavirus has exacerbated all four of those issues. They are not, as the authors take pains to point out, new problems, which makes their reëmergence as frustrating as it is predictable. The United States has, in the past five years, been downgraded on several indexes of democracy and press freedom. And yet, for the gravity of its subject matter, “Four Threats,” which is out in August, is a lively read about the cracks in the system. What’s more, it offers some good ideas for how we might go about fixing them. —Jelani Cobb

“What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life,” by Mark Doty

For a half-second, some of us thought the coronavirus was “the great equalizer.” As we learned more about the disproportionate impact the pandemic is having on low-income communities, women, and people of color, that notion was (correctly) dismissed as naïve. The fantasy of an unbounded, universal self would have to wait. So it’s an odd and complicated time to read “What Is the Grass,” an intimate exploration of Walt Whitman’s life and work by the poet Mark Doty. Doty’s quest for Whitman (known for his limitless, plural “I”) is hard to separate from Doty’s own longings as an artist and as a gay man. Describing his doomed marriage to an older woman, Doty matches the hand-on-your-shoulder forthrightness of the “Song of Myself” narrator: “This hour I tell things in confidence,/ I might not tell everybody but I will tell you.” Close readings bleed into autobiographical memories, which dissolve into historical context. Here is Bronson (the father of Louisa May) Alcott’s depiction of Walt at home, in the house he shared with his mother and developmentally disabled brother: “Eyes gray, unimaginative, cautious yet melting. When talking will recline upon the couch at length, pillowing his head upon his bended arm, and informing you naively how lazy he is, and slow.” As a literary figure, Whitman stands for a kind of transcendent identification of all with all—“every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” his most famous poem declares—and yet I loved the specificity of Alcott’s portrait, and of the images and self-images that Doty constructs. Doty argues that “the fountaining outpouring of Leaves of Grass was fed by five sources”: spirituality, homosexual desire, the changing American city, colloquial language, and the knowledge of death. For a book so interested in synthesis, itemizations of this sort abound, many of them traceable to Whitman’s own rolling, accumulative lines. And maybe you find yourself, just now, jealous of particulars, and struggling to convert abstract grief into a sense of singular losses. For that, too, there is Whitman, writing about the grass: “It seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” —Katy Waldman

“Sleepovers,” by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

It’s possible that the South has been conjured and mythologized—by its native visionaries, by interlopers—more than any other chunk of American soil. In “Sleepovers,” Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’s elegant and mesmerizing début story collection, she writes about pockets of life that aren’t so commonly chronicled—the people who live and die alongside Super Walmarts and water towers, surrounded by “fields and fields, and woods for two hours until you got to a place with a mall or movie theater.” Phillips was born and brought up in the small rural town of Woodland, North Carolina, and her stories are brimming with dark and romantic details, the sorts of things that only a vigilant witness would note: a locket concealing a wisp of horse hair, a cocktail of “Crown and Mountain Dew from his special shrimp cup,” a beam of light hitting a woman’s hair “like beach sunshine in the movies.” The lives of Phillips’s characters transform with startling quickness, and a kind of presumed violence is omnipresent—yet everyone here is still trying to do their best. The music of her literary predecessors (Larry Brown, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor) is present in Phillips’s sentences, but what’s most remarkable about her writing is its generosity. Even when they’re fucking up or making bad decisions or metabolizing deep grief, these characters are full and rich and gloriously recognizable. I found them to be welcome company through a long and disorienting spring. —Amanda Petrusich

“The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives,” by Diane Johnson

I don’t know if anyone outside of the academy reads the work of the Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith anymore—I confess that I certainly don’t—but a familiarity with his work is hardly a requirement for taking immense pleasure in Diane Johnson’s “The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives.” This surprisingly unconventional biography was first published in 1972, and is about to be reissued, with an introduction by Vivian Gornick, by NYRB Classics. The lesser life in question is that of Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, whose father was Thomas Love Peacock, the Romantic writer, and who married Meredith in 1849. Nine years later, she ran off scandalously with the artist Henry Wallis and shortly gave birth to his son. By 1861 she was dead. Johnson deftly spins the little that is definitively known about the life of Mary Ellen into a refractive portrait of a spirited, restless individual. But—like Phyllis Rose’s better-known multiple Victorian biography, “Parallel Lives,” with which Johnson’s book shares a feminist sensibility and a bracingly subjective point of view—the book’s subject is also a consideration of the very project of biography, often elaborated in elegantly argued footnotes. (“Like the critic, the biographer should have in him something of the psychologist and the historian, and he should have something of the novelist in him, too, which seems on the face of it to be a heretical remark, for everyone knows that the biographer cannot make anything up.”) From its outset, the book offers an explicit argument in favor of empathy for those whose lives are not typically placed at the center of things. The first Mrs. Meredith, in this sense, is not just an overlooked individual finally getting her due but a stand-in for most of us. “A lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one. His life is very real to him; he is not a minor figure in it,” Johnson writes. “All the days of his life we do not know about but he was doing something anyway—something happy or bitter or merely dull. And he is our real brother.” —Rebecca Mead

“Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act,” by Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker’s “Baseless” is about two months in Maine, in the spring of 2019, when Baker welcomed a pair of rescue dachshunds and, while tucking them into their cozy new home, contemplated whether the United States had dropped “bombs packed with fleas and mosquitoes and diseased dusted feathers, for instance” on sites in China and Korea in the nineteen-fifties. Baker is a great historian of American secrecy: a patient and reasonable middle-aged citizen, almost comically moderate in his daily habits, nevertheless he wants to know the worst, most lurid, and most violent things done by his government in his name. “Baseless” is a sequel of sorts to “Double Fold,” Baker’s book about why libraries, in the nineties, were throwing books away. The genesis of the project is Baker’s discovery, in that era, of a memo written by the C.I.A. official Frank Wisner, declassified and released by Janet Reno’s Justice Department, which lists more than thirty types of “BW, CW, and RW” (Biological, Chemical, and Radiological War) being devised by the C.I.A.—all of them under heavy redaction. The instrument for prying this information out of the government is the Freedom of Information Act, but FOIA requests are treated, notoriously, with “deliberate Pleistocenian ponderousness.” “Baseless,” titled after the Orwellian name of the secret program, is partly about how reasonable, moderate men of an earlier time, with popular wives and effervescent social lives—men like Wisner—ended up involved in ghoulish projects like the production of flour mixed with explosives to create “toxic” muffins. There is considerable sympathy for “this poor manic man” despite what “he had in mind to do” to his fellow-humans—“before he had a breakdown and electroshock treatments and eventually killed himself with his son’s shotgun.” Throughout Baker’s great book, I was thinking of the truest opening lines in American poetry, from William Carlos Williams’s “To Elsie”: “The pure products of America/ go crazy.” —Dan Chiasson

“The Mezzanine,” by Nicholson Baker

“The Mezzanine,” published in 1986, is Baker’s first novel, and a dense, luminous delight. Nearly all of its hundred and thirty-five pages follow its narrator, Howie, over the course of a single escalator ride. Howie is an office drone in his early twenties, an entry-level employee who obsesses over awkward encounters with his superiors at the urinal; marvels at the erotics of CVS; and fools himself into thinking he’ll spend the lunch break reading Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations.” He is self-conscious, searching, and a bit libidinous. Mostly, he is attentive. The novel is gentle—the central conflict, if there is one, is a broken shoelace—but deeply funny, and somehow also wise. Interiority is the thing: as Howie ascends to his office after a lunch break, his appreciation of the escalator handrail unfurls into meditations on consumer advertising, plastic straws, masculinity, pornographic magazines, cream cheese and sliced olives, shame, memory, the evolution of the ice-cube tray, and the fixity of the self. The result is a catalogue of gratitude for the mundane, with a particular affection for mechanical objects: staplers, rubber stamps, cigarette machines. An office novel of sorts, it includes some of the finest dissections of corporate rituals, performances, and intimacies I’ve encountered: the sheaves of unused business cards, the patterns of colleagues’ footfalls, the decadence of paper-memo distribution, the socioeconomic implications of wafting perfume. The effect of this microscopy is like attending Take Your Child to Work Day on an edible. It is also surprisingly moving. When a colleague informs Howie that he will find shoelaces at CVS, he reflects on the satisfaction of the exchange: “It made us both feel we were moving ahead in our lives: at random, on errands of her own, she had learned something that other people apparently didn’t know, and she was now passing the knowledge on to me.” Like so many others, I've had a hard time focussing lately; I've struggled to stay on the page. With its sliding associations and reveries—memories that cycle out into other memories, drop down into footnotes, get lost in themselves—“The Mezzanine” is a perfect book for a preoccupied mind. —Anna Wiener

“Everything Is Personal: Notes on the Now,” by Laurie Stone

I started reading Laurie Stone’s “Everything Is Personal,” which began as a series of Facebook posts, a couple of weeks before the lockdown. I had been reading on my weekly bus ride back to New York City from Amherst, where I was teaching, and it was perfect. Then I stopped commuting to Amherst, but all of life took on the quality of a bus ride in the night: you are in a capsule, alone even if with others, and the darkness outside could be anywhere. Stone’s writing is perfect for this state, in which thinking is, on the one hand, self-referential and labored, and on the other hand, a lifeline. A former art critic for the Village Voice, she writes as though she were taking closeups: of her garden, her sister as she died, her thoughts about the world. There is little descriptive context, and the reader gets to be immersed in Stone’s remarkable mind. When she thinks through the different cases and arguments of the #MeToo movement, for example, the penalties of which she reframes as a question of circulation—who gets to stay in circulation, who gets taken out and for how long—the reader experiences the exhilaration of events coming into focus. The title of the book references one of the central arguments of nineteen-sixties feminism, from which Stone hails intellectually: “The personal is political.” It also describes our current predicament—everything that is not personal has vanished—and suggests a way of thinking sharply, imaginatively, beautifully, from right here. —Masha Gessen

“Robinson Crusoe,” by Daniel Defoe

“Dear Mr. Crusoe, Please stay home.” So begins Jamaica Kincaid’s epistolary introduction to “Robinson Crusoe.” I have been thinking about shipwrecks lately—partly for my own research but chiefly because all of our lives have felt more and more island-like these last few weeks—and I wanted to return to Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century classic. Rather than pick up the same paperback edition I’ve read since college, though, I ordered the three-hundredth-anniversary edition from Restless Books. It’s a triumph. Kincaid, at the start, writes that she herself is a Friday in all but name,” giving the main character, his creator, and the empire that birthed them what-for; the Mexican artist Eko contributes gorgeous and striking illustrations throughout the text. This is a wonderfully published book, right down to the “blurbs,” which come waltzing through history from Ms. Woolf, Mr. Coetzee, Mr. Fuentes, Mr. Dickens, and Mr. Samuel Johnson, who rightly asks, “Was there ever anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers?” —Casey Cep

“The Undocumented Americans,” by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Immigration stories are usually about arrivals and departures, or some dizzying pattern of legal and cultural flux. But this spring I read a book that scrambled the familiar plot lines. “The Undocumented Americans,” by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, burrows into the homegrown question of what being American actually means. She’s asking on behalf of millions of people across the country who lack legal status. Her parents are undocumented New Yorkers from Ecuador; Cornejo Villavicencio was born abroad, and grew up in Queens. (During the Obama years, she qualified for DACA.) She’s an essayist, memoirist, and Ph.D. candidate at Yale. One thing she’s not, she insists, is a journalist. “Journalists, to the best of my knowledge, do not try to change the outcome of their stories as crudely as I do. I send water. I fight with immigration lawyers. I raise money. I make arrangements with supernatural spirits to stop deportations,” she writes. “I should be patented and mass-produced and distributed to undocumented immigrants at Walmarts. I am a professional immigrant’s daughter.” But the book also features reporting of the highest order. Cornejo Villavicencio embeds with a day laborers’ collective in Staten Island; meets with house cleaners in Miami; and travels to Flint, Michigan, to document how the city’s infamous water crisis played out among residents who didn’t speak English and were scared to interact with federal authorities. Often, she takes stories that were already in the news—a father of four who was deported after living in the U.S. for sixteen years, for instance—and reports them out, going deeper and getting us closer to the people involved. She finds entry points that wouldn’t occur to even the most skilled journalists. And she elevates her reportage into a genuinely original blend of essay, memoir, and analysis that allows us to see things we otherwise wouldn’t. I found it all both dazzling and intensely sobering. —Jonathan Blitzer

“A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families,” by Michael Holroyd

Sometime around the fifth week of the lockdown in New York City, I realized that I had forgotten how to read a book. I knew how to obsessively refresh a newsfeed, and how to fall asleep with my phone pressed against my face, but I hadn’t been able to consume anything longer than an article in weeks. And then, walking past my bookshelf one day, I spotted an old library copy of Michael Holroyd’s biography “A Strange Eventful History,” from 2008, which I had picked up a few years ago, at a stoop sale. The book is about Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, two of Britain’s most successful stage actors during the Victorian era. I do not know what drew me to it other than its cover, which is dark indigo and sprinkled with stars, like a planetarium ceiling. But, to my surprise and delight, the book is an absolute surprise and delight. Holroyd is my favorite kind of biographer, one who pauses regularly from the main story to devote a few pages to decadent, bitchy asides about tertiary characters we will never hear of again. The core duo, Ellen Terry (the most talented daughter of travelling troubadour parents) and Henry Irving (who was born John Brodribb and rose from humble beginnings to become the leading Shakespearean actor in London and the manager of the Lyceum Theatre) are a wild match in their own right, but I was truly absorbed by Holroyd’s sentences about the hundreds of minor players who waltz in and out of the book. Of one man that Terry knew in her youth, Holroyd writes, “he was a man of unexampled wickedness” who “slowly drank himself to death on ‘top-hole champagne.’ ” Of Terry’s second husband, he writes, “he was a romantic, living off his nerves.” Holroyd has a flair for detail and a sense of pacing that makes his sentences feel almost effervescent. I found myself slurping down the book like it was sugary cola—and before I knew it, I had an appetite for books again. —Rachel Syme

“Save Twilight,” by Julio Cortázar

Like many people, I've found myself reading more poetry than usual in the past months, and I got a huge amount of pleasure from “Save Twilight,” a selection of poems by Julio Cortázar which City Lights brought out in an expanded edition a few years ago. Cortázar, an Argentine writer who worked mostly across the postwar years, is best known as a novelist. (People usually start with his unorthodox novel “Hopscotch.”) But his mind was, in certain ways, most purely a poet’s, and this collection, beautifully translated by Stephen Kessler, shows the range of his talent. The edition—small and irresistible, the kind you want to pocket and read out on the grass somewhere—is bilingual, with Spanish on the left page and English on the right, and Kessler does us the favor of retaining some of Cortázar’s weird, wandering little essays, including “For Listening Through Headphones,” his oblique study of poetic intimacy. In lyric, Cortázar works best in the second person; some of my favorite pieces are love poems. “Everything I’d want from you / is finally so little / because finally it’s everything,” he writes. “Let the pleasure we invent together / be one more sign of freedom.” Good lines for a strange summer, in a stranger time. —Nathan Heller

“History of the American Film Industry: From Its Beginnings to 1931,” by Benjamin B. Hampton

I do most of my reading on the subway—including for fun, on weekends, when I ride the train to nowhere and get lost in a book—and that joy has been lost since I began working from home. But one book that I’m in the middle of reading with exhilaration is Benjamin B. Hampton’s “History of the American Film Industry,” published in 1931 (originally titled “A History of the Movies”). Hampton is a fascinating figure—a publisher, editor, and businessperson who, soon after the turn of the century, sensed that the new medium of movies would be a big deal and, while working for a tobacco company, wangled himself an executive position in it. His book follows the decision-making of both businesspeople and artists—the bold actions that brought movies from storefront sensations to global enterprises—with passionate and meticulous attention. He charts the rise of such companies as Paramount and its bold president, Adolph Zukor; the hard-driving negotiations of the actress Mary Pickford and her mother, Charlotte; the daring and discerning gambits of Cecil B. DeMille; the visionary dealmaking of B. P. Schulberg; and a host of other enterprising strivers looking to get in on the Hollywood gold rush. (He also discusses his own role in the establishment of the Hays Code, which placed stringent limits on what behavior could be shown onscreen.) Above all, he traces changes in the industry and the art, and observes the development of such fundamental concepts as feature films, movie stars, screenplays, and first-run releases, in a mode of discovery that fulfills my prime pleasure in a work of history: to show that modern institutions and practices that seem eternal, unshakable, and automatic in fact emerged as a result of conflicting interests and historical accidents, contingencies and exploits—and embody the vast tumble of humanity that forged them. —Richard Brody

“The Bloomsbury Cookbook: Recipes for Life, Love and Art,” by Jans Ondaatje Rolls

In these days of endless meal prep, cooking, dishes, and more dishes, it’s a relief to spend some time in someone else’s kitchen. All the better when the hosts are spectacularly brilliant writers and artists with interesting, sometimes scandalous, love lives. “The Bloomsbury Cookbook),” by Jans Ondaatje Rolls, is a delightful collection of more than a hundred and seventy original Bloomsbury recipes, painstakingly gathered from the diaries, memoirs, and descendants of eminent Bloomsburyans, such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Vanessa’s lover Duncan Grant, Grant’s lover David Garnett, and many others—and the cooks who served them. Interspersed between the recipes are surprising anecdotes about how these complicated individuals lived and, more importantly, ate. Who knew, for instance, that Lytton Strachey consumed rice pudding nearly every day of his life? Or that Virginia Woolf once baked her wedding ring into a suet pudding? Dora Carrington was a wizard with jam, and Garnett, who later married his lover’s daughter, kept bees. There are photographs and reproductions of paintings as well, including one by Grant, circa 1918, of a strikingly beautiful coffee pot. More than a collection of recipes, the book reads like an intimate biography of the whole rambling group, from its stuffy Victorian beginnings (“Mushrooms with Anchovy Cream”), through the rationing of the war years (“Economical Fish Dish”), to the height of the group’s powers in the nineteen-twenties, when John Maynard Keynes threw elaborate costume parties, to its eventual decline. You feel the sense of commotion and joy they brought to the table, and to one other. You might not want to eat everything in here—“Cowslip Wine” and “Rock Cakes” seem, to the novice, dubious—but it’s a satisfying, juicy read. —Anna Russell

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