Post Books

I almost gave up on Outside the Gates. Having liked Gloss's Wild Life quite a bit, I decided to read her first novel (also recently republished by Saga Press) but at first thought its allegorical styl... (Tom)

Nearly every discussion of Chesnutt's 1901 novel, only recently acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of its time, focuses, understandably, on the real event it was inspired by: the white riot in Wi... (Tom)

This wonderful and strange book may have launched the sub-genre known awkwardly as the "swimoir," but there is much more swimming than memoir here. You hardly learn more about the author than you do f... (Tom)

When I sat down to write the little introductory card I include in our Phinney by Post selections for what I had planned would be this month's choice—Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place (see below)—I real... (Tom)

You'll rarely find a novel so straightforward: a single cyclist, a single race; 137 kilometers in 148 pages. Like the racers themselves, it's stripped down for speed, every gram weighed against necess... (Tom)

Detectives and detective fiction arose together in the 19th century, and Summerscale, with relish, uses the style of the murder mystery to unravel an infamous true-life crime that helped birth the gen... (Tom)

This book never goes where you expect it to. Is it a satire of '80s SoCal self-empowerment? Is it a post-nuclear-war story of human apocalypse and survival? Both? Neither? The real story, for me, is i... (Tom)

This is a young man's book, written at a particular time (the late '80s) about a subject that, in our own time, is almost impossible not to see in a different way. Before Bass moved to remote Montana... (Tom)

My favorite book I've read so far this year came out in 1985 and takes place in the late '50s. You may know Segal (I did, at least) from her fantastic kid's book, Tell Me a Mitzi, but boy, she is quit... (Tom)

The story (a Caldecott Honor winner from 1976 just now brought back into print) is as simple as its endearingly simple pen-and-ink illustrations. A grandmother wakes up early, has breakfast, cleans up... (Tom)

I really think of this as two books. There's the novel itself, a beautiful, thoughtful channeling of the great late-Roman emperor that is graced by an elegant, regal reticence and one of the rare powe... (Tom)

The Living Mountain It's hard to imagine that a book this powerful sat unread in its author's drawer for thirty years. Written in the '40s and finally brought out a few years before Shepherd's death,... (Tom)

Old Book of the Week by Rosamond Lehmann Does it sound patronizing if I call this a "young person's book"? I don't mean it to—realizing what it is (a book that finds it impossible to imagine what it's... (Tom)

The Black Jacobins (Tom)

by Roy Andries de Groot by Roy Andries de Groot The "Auberge" of the title is a small inn and restaurant, tucked away in a valley in the Alps and largely undiscovered, until de Groot's 1973 book, whic... (Tom)

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick Hardwick called this book a novel, and it may look to some like a memoir (the life of the "Elizabeth" in it matches of the outline of Hardwick's), but to my mind... (Tom)

I read this book twice last year, at the beginning of the year and the end, and my awe and delight at its beauty only increased. The story is simple—a new girl comes to a small Norwegian town, and mak... (Tom)

When Bill Barich decided, "with the same hapless illogic that governed all my actions then," to spend the spring of 1978 at a second-rate racetrack in Northern California, he might have been looking f... (Tom)

Like Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, Kelley's novel (his debut, published in 1962 when he was 24) straps itself into the straitjacket of American racial history but leaves just enough roo... (Tom)

One of our favorite novels to recommend in recent years has been Happiness, Forna's story of two people meeting in London: Jean, an American woman in her 40s, and Attila, a wonderfully appealing Ghana... (Tom)

I had always wanted to choose a book of poetry for Phinney by Post, and I knew, when we did, it would be one in which the poems truly made a book, something Dove leaves no doubt about at the beginning... (Tom)

A review quoted on the back of The Names calls it "a Native American version of Roots," an obvious comparison at the time (both books came out in 1976, and Roots was an immediate blockbuster) for an A... (Tom)

One thing that's especially hard to do in a small town is change your life. Everyone knows who you are, and sometimes they don't like it when you try not to be who you're supposed to be. Joe Walsh is... (Tom)

Jarre was always an outsider: raised speaking German in Latvia, where her Jewish father was killed by the Nazis in 1941, she learned Italian after she moved to her mother's country but spoke French at... (Tom)

The story of this lovely novel is simple: will the Stevenses, a lower-middle-class family of five from the outskirts of London, enjoy their holidays? It's no small matter: their two weeks at the seasi... (Tom)

When she was six, in 1913, Babb's father brought their family from their Oklahoma town to an isolated homestead in eastern Colorado, a sod house dug out of a dry land, with the nearest water two miles... (Tom)

Here’s the pitch: a soap opera about local government with hints of Middlemarch and Peyton Place. Well. You’d forgive a publisher for taking a pass, but this 1937 novel was an instant bestseller, adap... (Liz)

Even during their own lives, the women, men, and children entangled in the Salem witch trials were caught between reality and the imagination, and as their lives have been further mythologized since,... (Tom)

There's a reason that Act One, a massive bestseller when it came out in 1959, is still beloved by theater kids everywhere as the great Broadway memoir. Hart himself was as stage-struck as they come, a... (Tom)

I might express the strangeness of this novel by saying that the extensive footnotes about a misguided thinker named de Selby, who believed, among other things, that night is caused by "accumulations... (Tom)

Why is this novel so absurdly entertaining? Shum, who was a casino dealer in Lake Stevens before getting his English PhD, loosely bases his story on an old gambling tale by Pushkin, but it has a seemi... (Tom)

For a book with a premise (and a cover!) as darkly chilling as this one's—a dystopian England in which art, and those who make it, are destroyed by roving mobs and vague official authorities—They is c... (Tom)

This travelogue of three months Levine, a Canadian expat who had migrated semi-permanently to England, spent tramping across his native land in 1956 proved so unpopular in Canada it took two decades t... (Tom)

Satarchayan, the narrator of this autobiographical novel first published in India in the late '30s, is not your usual hero: he reminds me of the naive Captain Delano through whose wide, half-seeing ey... (Tom)

Murray's life story is a remarkable one, as an often behind-the-scenes influence on the Civil Rights Movement, a co-founder of the National Organization for Women, and one of the first women ordained... (Tom)

If you've ever seen the 1950 Kirk Douglas movie based on this book, please forget that you did: the book is so much better. It's the story of a rootless, almost anonymous boy who finds himself in musi... (Tom)

What is there to say about a story as simple as this one? "This is the story of a man who took part in a dance contest," its first line declares, and that's what it is: a short portrait, told in the p... (Tom)

Warner, an administrator at the Smithsonian Institution, was nearly sixty when he published this book, his first. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977, and has never been out of print since. It's a grace... (Tom)

I think of Love's Work like the small hunk of tungsten I once held, so dense that it immediately sank my hand to the desktop beneath. It's a short book, with few words on each page, but it carries wei... (Tom)

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (Tom)

Phinney Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago Mayors, even the most powerful, recede in our historical memory almost as quickly as newspaper columnists do, and this compact biography of Chicago's most fam... (Tom)

This is one of my very favorite books, but it took me a hundred months to get up the gumption to send it out to our Phinney by Post subscribers. Why? For one thing, it's a book-length poem. For anothe... (Tom)

A memoir looking back on the author's escape from a fundamentalist childhood was as familiar in Gosse's time (1907) as it is in ours (e.g. Tara Westover's Educated), but the two things that continue t... (Tom)

I first read this elegant memoir by a Bay Area software developer when it came out a quarter century ago, at a moment of technological optimism that seems far away now. But the book itself hardly feel... (Tom)

Perhaps you know Julien Temple's mostly terrible '80s movie-musical adaptation, or perhaps you know the Jam's wonderful 1981 hit single by the same name. If you grew up in the UK at a certain time, yo... (Tom)

To title this superb oral history, collected in the early '70s and published in 1980, Gwaltney chose a word that means "ordinary," but that also, unlike many terms in black English, has never quite cr... (Tom)

This is a first: the first time we've chosen an author twice for our Phinney by Post subscription service. Babb's memoir of her childhood on an unfertile Colorado farm, An Owl on Every Post, has been... (Tom)

I've been waiting for years to make Athill's 1963 memoir a Phinney by Post selection, so as soon as NYRB Classics brought it back into print, I pounced. Athill was a prominent British book editor, and... (Tom)

Kent doesn't explain why he set out in a sailboat for Greenland in the summer of 1929, with two much younger men he didn’t know. He leapt at the idea, and even when they steered into catastrophe he ne... (Tom)