Second Read
New insights from old books.
A Brilliant Neglected Novel About the Search for a Lost Older Lover
“Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” by Edmund White, stands outside current fashions, with its refined pleasures and its nuanced accounts of gay lives.
By Garth Greenwell
The Forgotten Poet at the Center of San Francisco’s Longest Obscenity Trial
Amid Reagan’s late-sixties crackdown on the California counterculture, a jury was tasked with deciding whether Lenore Kandel’s psychedelic sex poems had “redeeming social importance.”
By Joy Lanzendorfer
The Woman Who Reimagined the Dystopian Novel
In Karin Boye’s “Kallocain,” the inner lives of women illustrate both the power and the vulnerability of the authoritarian state.
By Talya Zax
The Invention of “the Male Gaze”
In 1973, the film theorist Laura Mulvey used concepts from psychoanalysis to forge a feminist polemic and a lasting shorthand for gender dynamics onscreen.
By Lauren Michele Jackson
Ágota Kristóf and the Uses of Illiteracy
The Hungarian novelist deployed her estrangement from language as a form of protection, both for herself and for her readers.
By Jennifer Krasinski
A Jewish Immigrant Novelist’s Radical Vision for Working Women
The fiction of Anzia Yezierska captures the perennial tension between personal ambition and the obligations of care.
By Maia Silber
The Divorce Novel That Captured the Mores of Jazz Age New York
Ursula Parrott’s “Ex-Wife” caused a sensation when it was published in 1929. But it wasn’t the racy, frothy endorsement of sexual liberation readers were primed to expect.
By Jessica Winter
“Manchild in the Promised Land” Still Depicts Our America
Claude Brown’s autobiographical novel became a best-seller in 1965. Its enduring resonance is a testament to the book’s vision, and to our failures.
By Nicholas Dawidoff
Secretaries and the City
Reading Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything” sixty-five years later.
By Rachel Syme
A Love Story of the Black Arts Movement
Alison Mills Newman’s “Francisco,” long out of print, is an experiment in liberation through sex and self-immolation.
By Saidiya Hartman