This Week in Books: “Name the anti-government authors in the catalogue”!

Dear Reader, 

We’re so back. A little hiccup, nothing to worry about, I only got a new job. I’m not dying. I mean, I’m pretty sure those two things don’t feel the same. (One is certainly harder.)

A succulent six, this week, for the free subscribers; for my finsubs, I’m just gonna put the payment thing on pause for a month to make up for lost time. (Time never to be regained, in all the grand lineage of the universe’s incomprehensible unfolding!!)

The list is a little outdated. I’ve been working on this intermittently. But we’re gonna be on track from now, I can feel it, I can taste it. (But I’m not having a seizure! Not dying, don’t forget.)

Just a bunch of New Directions books this week. James Laughlin is smiling down on me. 

Here’s the start of a new job poem I like a lot by Du Fu:

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Oh good, I don’t have to be
police commissioner at Hexi!
it would have been backbreaking
supervising all those beatings
I’m an old man, I can’t
rush around, bustle, and strut
but the job they’ve given me now
at Palace Guard headquarters
won’t take too much time
it will pay for my wine

—Dana

Jennifer Wilson reviews Emma Cline’s The Guest (Random House). 

…It’s August, and summer is almost over. By now, everyone has been dehydrated for months. Surely they won’t be sharp enough to notice a homeless sex worker with only a few hundred dollars to her name in their midst. Yet the consequences if they do are dire enough to keep the reader feeling tense. In The Guest, Cline has written a thriller about trying to get by, a summer read for the precariat.

Greg Afinogenov reviews Christopher Ely’s Russian Populism: A History (Bloomsbury Academic) and a new edition of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (Penguin Classics).

In Summer 1876, Peter Kropotkin was given a pocket watch by a visiting relative. He was 33 years old, bore one of the Russian Empire’s oldest princely titles and had been a page de chambre to Tsar Alexander II. He was already famous in Russia for his scientific work on zoology and glaciation. Two years earlier, however, he had been arrested and imprisoned as a member of a revolutionary secret society. The watch was delivered to him in a prison hospital, to which he had been transferred after his health declined in the dungeons of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Concealed in the watch was a coded message detailing his role in an elaborate escape plan involving some two dozen comrades, many operating in disguise. The plan went off without a hitch; minutes after climbing into the waiting carriage, Kropotkin had changed his prison clothes for those of an aristocrat, blending in perfectly with the crowd on Nevsky Prospekt. While the imperial secret police fruitlessly combed the area, Kropotkin went out to dinner at a fashionable restaurant. 

Dustin Illingworth reviews two novellas by Peter Weiss recently reissued by New Directions: The Shadow of the Coachman's Body (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop) and Conversation of the Three Wayfarers (translated by E.B. Garside).

Neither desire, nor ambition, nor envy drive him forward. He is largely unrecognizable in terms of human capacities. He exists only to perceive and thereby recall the splinters of a cramped and puzzling life. When he sits in the outhouse among stacks of old newspapers, he writes of their curious lure: ‘one gets absorbed in small, mixed-up fragments of time, in events without beginning or end’. 

see all this week's books

…[A]uthorities detained Moret, citing Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, based on his alleged involvement in either past or future French protests… [T]he publisher was grilled about everything from his opinion on the proposed increase in the French retirement age to his thoughts about Macron and the Covid-19 pandemic… According to a joint statement from Éditions la Fabrique and the British-American publisher Verso Books, whose senior editor Sebastian Budgen had invited Moret and Magliani-Belkacem to stay in his London home, Moret was also asked to “name the ‘anti-government’ authors in the catalogue of the publishing house La Fabrique.”

On March 24, the Internet Archive lost the copyright lawsuit that had been brought against it by four major publishers. The group—which comprised Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House—had sued early in the pandemic, shortly after the Internet Archive opened the National Emergency Library… Containing more than 1.4 million books, the Internet Archive’s catalogue involved taking a single physical copy of a title, digitizing it, and making it available for mass download—without authorization by the publisher and author. Prior to the pandemic, many of these books had wait lists and download limits; the NEL was a temporary suspension of those limits.

…[T]he Internet Archive decision… may also affect libraries’ rights to lend single scanned copies of books that they have already purchased.

M.A.Orthofer reviews Steven Moore’s Dalkey Days (Zerogram). 

…It is a welcome history of some of the early days of this remarkable publishing house that also offers a behind-the-scenes look at how incredibly dysfunctional the running of it was under its founder, John O'Brien… [F]rom his descriptions (and from what many, many others familiar with conditions at Dalkey Archive recount), it was a… challenging place to work, in no small part because of the difficult and controlling man who ran the fiefdom.

…Choice titbits include that it was Felipe Alfau's Locos that: "proved to be a turning point in Dalkey's fortunes, and may have even saved it" -- and that: "Alfau's novels proved to be a goldmine." (Who would have thought?)