Reviewing the Mail: Week of May 3, 2025

My eye doctor used to be really convenient. (I promise this is relevant.) I started seeing her about twenty years ago, when I worked at Bookspan. One quick subway ride downtown - really easy. Then we moved to Madison Square, and it was even easier: just a walk. From Wiley's Hoboken offices, just a hop on the PATH - the office was down the street from the 14th Street stop.

Thomson Reuters brought me back into the city, and the subway ride was a bit longer, but still pretty straightforward. Then I was back in Hoboken briefly, and the PATH hadn't moved.

But then I was declared full-time work-from-home - my office was closed, which was OK, since I was only there a few days a month anyway - and suddenly my eye doctor is at the other end of a long train or bus ride.

So my annual checkup now needs to take up its own day, basically, and I try to take at least a little advantage of being back in the city on that day. This time, I hit the Strand - a bookstore you may have heard of - which is right in that neighborhood. And here's what I found:

Transcription - a 2018 standalone novel by Kate Atkinson. I've been reading her "Jackson Brodie" mystery series - well, they're not exactly mysteries, and it's not a traditional series, but you know what I mean - and I recently decided I really need to read all of her books. (And started that project with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a few months ago.) I'm actually reading another Brodie novel right now. But this book is a historical novel, about spies during WWII - or, I think, about one young woman who gets a low-level job at MI5 - and the years soon after.

The Keep is the novel Jennifer Egan wrote just before her big breakout award winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I think is still the only book of hers I've read. And that was ten-plus years ago. So I stopped at the shelf with her books on it, poked through them a bit, and picked out this one, which is about two cousins trying to renovate a medieval castle and which may have odd elements (thriller or supernatural or both or neither) in it.

Nightmare Alley is a1946 noir novel by William Lindsay Gresham that I thought I might already have in one format in the house, but I bought it anyway. Reader: I do have this novel about carnies and freaks in a Library of America omnibus, but I guess the good news is that now I have double the chance to read it.

The Midnight Examiner is a 1989 novel by William Kotzwinkle about tabloid journalism that I think I've had on my "look-for-it" list since then. (I may have had a copy of the paperback before my flood, but I'm pretty sure I never read it.) Kotzwinkle is an odd, quirky writer who was genre-adjacent for a lot of his career - he won a World Fantasy Award; he was a bestseller with two books based on the E.T. movie - and this has always sounded like my find of thing.

In the Walled City is a collection of stories by Stewart O'Nan, whose novels I've been reading more slowly than they deserve. In the traditional manner of literary writers, it was his first book - before the novels - and I don't think he's written short fiction since.

Cluny Brown is a novel by Margery Sharp from 1944; I only know Sharp from the "Rescuers" books for children, which I read as a child. But I saw some appreciation or other of her adult novels a few years back - maybe when this and a clutch of others were republished; the cover design is very familiar. This one was, I think, one of her most popular: the story of a parlor-maid just before the war.

Thurber: Writings & Drawings is a big Library of America collection of, yes, the writings and drawings of James Thurber. I would have preferred a big Thurber omnibus that had complete books, rather than the excerpts this mostly traffics in, but it's what was available, and a great big wodge of Thurber is a great big wodge of Thurber.

Last is Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. I just read a travel book by Waugh, which reminded me I read his novels back in the '90s (except Decline and Fall) and maybe it's time to hit a few of them. This one, you might know, is about a journalist, and seems to be based on much of the material that he also wrote that travel book about - so I hope to get to it soon enough to compare them.