One of the unexpected joys of “On Writing (and Writers),” a new compendium of C.S. Lewis’s assorted thoughts on literature, comes in the title’s parenthetical phrase: Lewis’s views on his fellow writers may be an afterthought in this book, but it turns out they were firmly held and sometimes deliciously spiteful.
He seems to have reserved particular contempt for T.S. Eliot. On “Prufrock”: “I don’t believe one person in a million, under any emotional stress, would see evening like that.” On “The Waste Land”: “I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading ‘The Waste Land,’ but that most men are by it infected with chaos. … The ‘Inferno’ is not infernal poetry: ‘The Waste Land' is.” And on Eliot as a critic: “How can a man who is neither a knave nor a fool write so like both?”
In an era when the literary discourse is almost too polite — even on social media, which is hardly known for its manners, people stop short of naming the books they dislike — Lewis’s cattiness is as refreshing as a slap.
Also recommended this week, new translations of short stories by Thomas Mann, a poetry collection by Adam Zagajewski, and novels by Walter Mosley, Rebecca Makkai and Thomas Mallon, among others. Happy reading.
—Gregory Cowles
EVERY MAN A KING
Walter Mosley
In the second novel in Mosley’s King Oliver series, a Black private detective in New York investigates whether the government framed a prominent white supremacist. The plot gets more intricate the more he digs, with prison contractors, alt-right militias and Russian oil traffickers all in play.
Credit...“Mosley is an avid consumer of both poetry and comic books. When it comes to questions of what’s mystery and what’s literature, what’s tired and what’s timeless, and what’s highbrow or low, he seems to possess all the detachment of a Taoist sage.”
From Daniel Nieh’s review
Mulholland | $28
ON WRITING (AND WRITERS):
A Miscellany of Advice and Opinions
C.S. Lewis
This compendium of wisdom about writing — and, by extension, life — reminds us of the value of true pros. Lewis’s advice is delightful, wise and easy to follow. For instance: “You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.”
Credit...“I remain convinced that the only way to actually improve your writing, particularly for fiction, is to read your betters. ... While writing about writing is often deadly, Lewis is as delightful as he is wise.”
From Judith Newman’s self-help column
HarperOne | $23.99
UP WITH THE SUN
Thomas Mallon
The author, who specializes in fiction about historical figures, including U.S. presidents, turns to the life of a comparative unknown: a Broadway second stringer named Dick Kallman, whose acting career came to a lurid end with his 1980 murder. The crime story is secondary to the delicious name-dropping.
Credit...“In Mallon’s well-researched imagining, Kallman is, if not a sociopath, a doomed cipher on whom ‘ambition stuck out like a cowlick.’ ... As a drive down the highway of old-style entertainment (theater, movies, books, music, TV) — with gossip columns on the shoulder — ‘Up With the Sun’ is an unqualified success.”
From Alexandra Jacobs’s review
Knopf | $28
TRUE LIFE
Adam Zagajewski
Throughout his career, the great Polish poet Zagajewski (who died in 2021) attained an epic scale with a voice that was intimate and nearly mild. Those seeming opposites — historical vision and personal tone — pervade the work in this collection, published in Poland before his death and now translated by Clare Cavanagh.
Credit...“This poetry has a blade of penetration that is less forgiving and more demanding than ordinary, rhetorical righteousness. ... The poems are at an extreme of truth-telling. They deploy understatement like a talisman.”
From Robert Pinsky’s review
Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $26
THOMAS MANN:
New Selected Stories
Thomas Mann
This selection of Mann’s work, newly translated by Damion Searls, includes classics like “Death in Venice” and an excerpt from “Buddenbrooks.” But the highlight is the story “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow,” which explores a father’s complicated feelings for his children in a time of social change.
Credit...“The power of the story comes from Mann confronting his own reticence, writing fiction whose frankness belonged to the world of his elder children as they did what they pleased in the chaotic Germany of the early 1920s.”
From Colm Toibin’s review
Liveright | $30
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SKIN
Lakiesha Carr
Carr’s powerful debut explores the lingering impact of pain on Black women’s bodies. The novel follows three women whose various traumas haunt them literally and metaphorically, as it explores what it means to be a Black woman in America today.
Credit...“Carr is interested in the expressive potency of the body, and the novel is meticulously structured to highlight its enduring cultural significance. At the same time, the book is less interested in explaining or rationalizing that significance than in dramatizing how it literally feels.”
From Ladee Hubbard’s review
Pantheon | $27
A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS
Ayòbámi Adébáyò
Set in contemporary Nigeria, Adébáyò’s pointed and timely novel centers on a working-class boy and a wealthy young woman whose lives converge. The book’s intricate structure feels both unexpected and inevitable, building to a devastating collision.
Credit...“The characters’ misjudgments and delusions are deeply and empathetically imagined, wholly alive.”
From Aamina Ahmad’s review
Knopf | $28
I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU
Rebecca Makkai
In Makkai’s engrossing, suspenseful novel, her first since “The Great Believers,” a podcast host returns to her alma mater to teach a class and get to the bottom of a mystery that’s plagued her for years.
Credit...“Makkai steers us from red herrings to courtrooms to proof hiding in plain sight. Her prose is lean yet lush, with short, incantatory chapters and sentences as taut as piano wire.”
From Hamilton Cain’s review
Viking | $28
EMPTY THEATRE
Jac Jemc
Jemc reimagines the lives of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and his cousin Empress Elisabeth of Austria, whose eccentricities, obsessions and deep loneliness propel this sharp satire on royalty and its absurdities.
Credit...“Modern and mythic, ‘Empty Theatre’ captures the outrageous taste of an era while measuring the steep costs of our dream worlds.”
From Katy Simpson Smith’s review
MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $28