Good evening!
I hope you’ve all been enjoying the slightly nicer weather, although it has taken a turn now here. This is very boring, sorry.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I finished Dorothy Parker’s Complete Stories, which were really great. I do have to admit that there are some sketches included at the end that I didn’t read because I was all Parker-ed out -- the stories take up 350 very dense pages and a lot of them feel very claustrophobic. I’m sure I’ll go back to them at some point.
Even though Parker’s stories seem like they’d be a bit fluffy as she writes about society a lot -- especially in New York and the Deep South -- but they very often centre on one person and their inner thoughts, or the relationship between two people. As an example,the story ‘Bolt From the Blue’, about a woman who visits her rich friend, and it’s about how they actually think of one another. The poor woman seems as though she is in awe of the other woman, who has all the clothes and home decor you could dream of. The rich woman seems as though she finds the other woman slightly repulsive and cheap, taking pity on her because she doesn’t have a lot of things and lives in a small flat. The majority of the story takes place in the rich woman’s living room, as they spend a pretty banal evening together. When they leave each other, they both -- like a bolt from the blue -- realise that the rich woman doesn’t really have anything of worth, whereas the poor woman has a close friend and isn’t excessive.
Even though this sounds a bit sentimental, it really isn’t as it leans into the cattiness of their feelings towards each other. (Parker does cattiness very well). It feels very much like a play, and you can see that, by this point, Parker had written A Star is Born and spent her ill-fated time in Hollywood. Another story called ‘The Game’ was like this, set during a game night between a man, his second wife, and his old set of friends. It becomes evident that one of the women in the party holds resentment for the new wife, and through the game they play it all starts coming out. I think it feels like a play -- as well as ‘Bolt from the Blue’ -- because it is largely set in two rooms, and you can imagine them moving between them. This is why a lot of the stories feel claustrophobic, because so much of these people’s lives come out in this small space.
I’d encourage you to look up Parker’s life, which is fascinating. She made almost an entire career writing short stories and poetry for magazines, something that is unheard of now. Her work was compiled into The Portable Dorothy Parker and sent overseas to American troops during the second world war. Because it was so well-loved. I mentioned last week that she was blacklisted from Hollywood because she was noted as a communist due to her left-wing politics. She supported civil rights, and served as a chair for the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee’s fundraising arm, and was a co-found of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. There are a couple of stories in the collection that have Black characters in them, some from their perspective, some as characters, and even though these aren’t paragons of anti-racism by today’s standard, they most definitely are progressive for the time.
I’m about halfway through Alison Rumfitt’s Brainwyrms, which is out from Cipher Press in October -- will update you next week!
Books on my radar
I’ve been sent some great proofs recently, namely My Men by Victoria Kielland, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls (published 6th July), 19 Claws and a Blackbird by Agustina Bazterrica, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses (published 4th May) and This is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (published 10th May). A lot of crime and horror from around the world!