Series: McNally Editions

Dorothy Parker's complete weekly New Yorker column about books and people and the rigours of reviewing. When, in 1927, Dorothy Parker became a book critic for the New Yorker, she was already a legendary wit, a much-quoted member of the Algonquin Round Table, and an arbiter of literary taste. In the year that she spent as a weekly reviewer, under...

What would it be like to have Emily Dickinson as your babysitter? In this astonishing memoir, out of print for almost a century, Martha 'Matty' Dickinson describes the childhood she spent next door to and often in the care of her Aunt Emily. We see Matty as a little girl, hiding from the other grownups in Emily's upstairs rooms, helping...

The best of Djuna Barnes's dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-brief career, edited and introduced by Merve Emre. Djuna Barnes is rightly remembered for Nightwood, her breakthrough and final novel: a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most brilliant novels of love between women to be published in...

E. B. White's greatest stories, asides, essays, jokes, and tall tales about the city he arguably saw clearest, loved best, and skewered most mercilessly. Over more than fifty years at the New Yorker, E. B. White came to define a kind of ideal American prose: clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. He also did more than any writer to define his...

The letters of a seducer to the great love of his life, a sensual tour-de-force by 'the paterfamilias of queer literature' (New York Times). 'Can't sleep tonight. Was lying in bed reading the biography of a great man whose genius deserted him...The genius who deserted me was you.' In a series of late-night letters, gorgeous, funny, filled with memory, sensuality,...

Ever since college, George Wren has dreamed of working at The Outsider, the prestigious weekly edited by his hero, the suave English expat Gilbert Twining. So when George sees a listing for a junior editor, he trades in his job at CBS for half the salary and a ringside seat in the unexpectedly cutthroat arena of a small-circulation, high-power little...

The arch, witty, outspoken memoirs of the pioneering archaeologist and scholar Mary Beard has called 'my hero'. First published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1925, Jane Ellen Harrison's Reminiscences of a Student's Life are the irreverent memoirs of a student who declared Victorian education 'ingeniously useless', who blazed a trail for female scholars, and who changed the way we...

A wry, macabre tale of simple country living, brutal murder, and a reasonably happy couple, from our 'most startlingly offbeat suspense novelist' (Gore Vidal). In their lovely old Cotswolds village, Janet and Susan are known to all the other villagers as the girls—a fixture. Partners in love and work, co-proprietors of a picturesque shop specialising in the work of local...

A 'frank and wry, mad and graceful' (Slate) true story about getting dumped, and getting over it. When the phone rang on a cold November afternoon in 1990, Gregoire Bouillier had no way of knowing that the caller was the woman who had left him, without warning, five years before. And he couldn't have guessed why she was calling: not...

Who could have been so cruel as to do away with poor Vivian Lambert? And why oh why couldn't she just stay dead? In a rustic, idyllic English village, on a summer's day, in the midst of a carefree tennis party, a fragile, needy child, left too much on her own, vanishes from her family's front garden. Years pass and...