what I’ve been reading lately:
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Tipping the Velvet by Sarah WatersVirago Press, 2003 (originally 1998)
Engrossing from the first sentence, a story to get lost in. London theatres, London streets, love and cruelty. Music halls and girls in suits, rent boys turning tricks in parks and alleyways, all of it a delight to read.
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Rebecca Letters by Laynie BrowneKelsey St. Press, 1997
Time and seasons and light and ritual: boiling water, bundling warm against the cold. “Armlet” seems like “amulet”: little protections, memories.
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The London Scene: Five Essays by Virginia WoolfFrank Hallman, 1975
An elegant little book of essays (an edition of 750 was printed by The Stinehour Press): the physical object, well-designed text on expensive paper, and, of course, Woolf’s prose. The essays were written in the early 1930s for Good Housekeeping, and they’re about modernity, democracy, Englishness, the present of London and the ever-present past, but…
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Zap by Paul FleischmanCandlewick Press, 2005
A play written for high-schoolers that seems like it’d be loads of fun to put on, especially for theatre-kids who are familiar with the conventions of the stage, who’ve acted in a Chekov play or a murder mystery, who had to read something by Tennessee Williams for English class, who’ve maybe read some Beckett or…
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Are We There Yet? by David LevithanKnopf, 2005
David Levithan’s books always delight me so much: I love the sense of play that both he and his characters have: the word play (two kids driving down I-95 and “speaking Connecticut” to one another, “What’s Groton into you?” etc), the quirks, the charm. In this book, two brothers travel in Italy together, and learn…
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In Search of London by H.V. MortonDa Capo Press, 2002 (originally Methuen, 1951)
Quirky and fascinating and sweet London essays from the post-WWII years. Morton captures the span & glory of history, from Roman London onward: monarchs & intrigue & so many old buildings. Though his tone can be sentimental or overly nostalgic or a little stuffy (referring to bebop as “the latest disharmony”), it’s mostly just wonderfully…
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Not All Tarts Are Apple by Pip GrangerPenguin, 2003 (originally Bantam, 2002)
Soho (London) in the 1950s, rhyming slang (“she’s probably too Brahms to give a monkey’s”) and all the pimps and their girls, the mobsters, and seven-year-old Rosie at the center of it all. Fun and charming, though sometimes precious or sentimental: sentences like “Now I like the telly as much as the next person, but…
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Marcovaldo or The seasons in the city by Italo CalvinoTranslated by William WeaverHarcourt Brace, 1983 (originally Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1963)
Every chapter of this book (the chapters rotate through the seasons, starting with spring and ending in winter) made me smile: each one was just as lovely as the last. Italy in the early ’50s, Italy in the mid ’60s: factory work, a polluted river, kids who ask their father, “Are cows like trams?” Marcovaldo…
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Acts of Levitation by Laynie BrowneSpuyten Duyvil, 2002
Beautiful and obscure, flights of fancy, flights of language. A photographer and a writer: light, images, reflections, mirror-images. Constructions: creating the self, creating images, creating reflections. A clothing-optional tearoom, water everywhere, birds and plants and city streets, visions and dreams: no idea what’s past or present, what’s real or not (but in books, do such…
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Begin Again: Collected Poems by Grace PaleyFarrar Straus Giroux, 2000
I already knew I loved Grace Paley’s short stories, and it turns out that I love her poems, too. I love her city-poems, about streets I recognize, like “An Arboreal Mystery” (which begins with the lines “On Jane Street in October/I saw three gingko trees”) and “20th Street Spring” (about the seminary way out on…