Category: Time

news & notes, late May & early June

news & notes

the view from the hammock

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— Michael Swanwick. Basil, Pepper, Salt, and Garlic Greens : A Year in a Witch’s Kitchen. Dragonstairs Press, 2026. Edition of 80.
A cheery mediaeval fantasy of “Auld Agnes” (twice a widow and not yet thirty) and celebration of the seasonal bounty of the land,  a novel in miniature that swiftly turns very dark.
——. Twenty-Three Reasons to Attend ICFA. Dragonstairs Press, 2026. Edition of 40.
A brief history of the convivial gathering that is the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, issued to mark the 47th iteration.

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IX XI. A documentary by Sean Wilsey.

I caught one of the screenings of IX XI in its premiere at the Tribeca film festival. I was impressed by the collage of small moments to tell a big story ; the events of 11 September 2001 in New York City are one of the defining events in my lifetime. The film is built upon interviews with a dozen people “from all walks of life”, including some fabulous cameos, and good archival moments. I especially dug the footage of skateboarding the plaza, and the art on the beach segments from earliest days of the World Trade Center. Director Sean Wilsey is a good listener. Roz Chast is every bit as compelling in her tales of parental anxiety as in her cartoons. The TV cameraman communicated his impulse to get right down there and interview people on the spot : the dread and the excitement are equally palpable. And his memory of waking the next day with concrete tears in the corners of his eyes was moving. There were even some laughs. In the Q&A after the film, Wilsey noted that his own account of his experiences on the day was the first to be cut. The interviews are recorded (without any prompts or questions) in a set that alludes to Yamazaki’s soaring façades and to rippling waters of memory and memorial pools. The film is limited to the days before and the day itself, no politics or exploration of aftermaths, an intention, and a choice, I can respect.

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current reading :

— M. John Harrison. Climbers [1989]. W&N Essentials, [2022, 7th printing].
Somehow I had never read this wonderful book. If one of the characters appears to suffer from “a kind of nostalgia, but for a place you’ve never been”, Harrison’s tricky prose reads like a memoir of events that never happened and it is no less true for that.

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— R. B. Russell. The Sanctuary and Other Strange Stories. Tartarus Press, [2026]. Pictorial boards, dust jacket, from a painting by the author.
Collection of 28 stories, written over a period of some two decades.
Am really looking forward to reading this.

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recent reading :

‘an inventory of silent nothings’
— (LAWRENCE, T. E.) Colin Sackett. The      . A Concordance. Uniformbooks, 2026. [Gift of MV].
Bibliographical concordance to the expurgations in the published edition of The Mint, A day-book of the R.A.F. Depot between August and December 1922 with later notes by 352087 A/c Ross (1955). T. E. Lawrence wrote an account of his time in the R.AF. and in March 1928 “he sent a clean copy of the revised text to Edward Garnett [who] had copies typed which were circulated to a small circle, among them Air Marshal Trenchard. Trenchard’s concerned response led Lawrenceto guarantee that it would not be published at least until 1950.” When Lawrence died following a motorcycle crash, his brother made arrangements with Doubleday, Doran, American publishers of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, to produce 50 copies of a copyright edition of The Mint in 1936 (O’Brien A166), ten copies of which were nominally for sale at the prohibitive price of $500,000 per copy. When The Mint was published in 1955, the censored content (“all objectionable words”) was not “conventionally redacted — by substituting asterisks, or emphatic black overprinting — but rather, made absent” :  as blank spaces. The vocabulary is rather limited and predictable : in his editorial note, Sackett helpfully provides an inventory. (In 1973 a definitive edition, edited with a preface by J. M. Wilson, and including the objectionable words and names as they appeared in the manuscript, was published by Cape).

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— Richard K. Morgan. No Man’s Land. Del Rey,  [2026].
Violent collision of notions of Faerie with the dislocations in the aftermath of the first world war : memories of trench warfare, sexy witchcraft, and the Forest resurgent and threatening, in a hard-boiled detective mode, with mockery of the political and intelligence establishment (and the Order of the Golden Dawn). Relations between humans and “the Huldu” are largely gladiatorial in nature and the encounters are deftly choreographed. While Dunsany is named from the first page, and one of the book’s sectional epigrams cites Raymond Chandler (“It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in.”), the narrative tone is much more Mike Hammer or Carroll John Daly than Hammett or Chandler. An intense book.

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— Charles E. Gould, J, Jnr. The Toad at Harrow. P. G. Wodehouse in Perspective. London: [Printed by the John Roberts Press for James H. Heineman], 1982.

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— An Englishman in New York. A Selection from the Library of Stephen C. Massey. Illustrated. 112 pp. (220 items). Peter Harrington, 2026.
An interesting and wide-ranging catalogue with numerous dedication copies and interesting rarities, such as Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) in rose muslin over boards (right at the dawn of modern cloth bookbinding), and a beautiful pair of Norwich textile sample books from the same period. As an auctioneer with Christie’s Mr. Massey sold a Gutenberg Bible in 1978 and the Codex Hammer of Leonardo da Vinci in 1994 (now known as the Codex Leicester).

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— Madly Singing in the Mountains. An Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley. Edited with a preface by Ivan Morris. George Allen & Unwin, [1970]. Recollections of the great translator and poet Arthur Waley, whose A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918) is one of the great texts of English modernist poetry ; he also translated Japanese poetry, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, The Tale of Genji, The Poetry and Career of Li Po, and Monkey. With a miscellany of extracts from his other works.

If there is but a seed
On the face of the rock
A pine will grow ;
And shall not love worth calling love
Find always a way to meet ?

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— John Blackburn. The Blue Octavo. Jonathan Cape, [1963].

— Colin Dexter. The Way through the Woods. Crown Publishers, [1992].

— Bernard J. Farmer. Death of a Bookseller [1956]. Poisoned Pen [in association with the British Library, 2023].

— Henry Wade. The Hanging Captain. Constable, [1932].

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news & notes : mid-May

on Hampstead Heath, May 2026

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This sign, suggestive of Arthur Machen, seen in the Museum Tavern.

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Blue plaque for Robert Aickman in Gower Street.
/ seen along the way but not shown : John Galsworthy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ottoline Mortell, D. H. Lawrence, Leigh Hunt, Constable, and others

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on Hampstead Heath, May 2026

In London for the Firsts antiquarian book fair at the Saatchi Gallery (14-17 May). Come say hello (Cummins booth A10).
https://www.firstslondon.com/

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bronze plaque for Andrew Marvell (1621-78), on a wall in Highgate

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current reading :

— Jean-Paul Sartre. Les Mots [1964]. Gallimard / Folio, [January 2026].

After the young Jean-Paul’s mother falls asleep while reading to him :

. . . c’était le livre qui parlait. Des phrases en sortaient qui me faisaient peur : c’étaient de vrais mille-pattes, elles grouillaient de syllabes et de lettres, étiraient leurs diphtongues, faisaient vibrer les doubles consonnes ; chantantes, nasales, coupées de pauses et de soupirs, riches en mots inconnus, elles s’enchan-taient d’elles-mêmes et de leurs méandres sans se soucier de moi : quelquefois elles disparaissaient avant que j’eusse pu les comprendre, d’autres fois j’avais compris d’avance et elles continuaient de rouler noblement vers leur fin sans me faire grâce d’une virgule.

/ file under : boys and their mothers

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— Camille de Toledo. L’internationale des rivières. Un recit de l’avenir. Verdier, [février 2026].

 

 

current reading : late march / early april

 

BOOKBINDING & POLITICS
On the afternoon of Thursday 9 April I will be giving a talk at Oberlin College in connection with a program and workshop on bookbinding and politics at the library, We hold these Truths . . . to be Binding! Austin binder Jace Graf will be leading the workshop.  Information on the event can be found here :  https://oberlin.libcal.com/event/16363787
My talk is open to the public and is entitled Reading the Structure of the World : Bookbinding, Artificial Intelligence, and Life
I am looking forward to this, and to the idea of a bookbinding project that is not an all-consuming thrust to meet the deadline for an edition binding.
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recent reading :

— Larry McMurtry. Lonesome Dove. A Novel [1985]. Foreword by Taylor Sheridan. [2], 858 pp. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, [2025].

A spectacular book, every sentence and every chapter, from the Rio Grande up to the northern reaches of Montana. Engaging, devastating, even horrifying, and compelling at every level. This is a work of fiction so richly imagined that the reader walks, rides, listens, all the way. I cite a very few passages of interest :

“I ain’t a natural bachelor,” Augustus said. “There’s days when a little bit of talk with a female is worth any price. I figure the reason you don’t have much to say is that you probably never met a man who liked to hear a woman talk. Listening to women ain’t the fashion in this part of the country. But I expect you got a life story like everybody else. If you’d like to tell it, I’m the one that’d like to hear it.”

“The Earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight,” he added.

“Jake just mostly drifts. Any wind can blow him.”

“Ride with an outlaw, die with him.”

I though that slavery was the Matter of America, but McMurtry makes a pretty good case for the cattle drive and shoot-out and massacre as the vernacular Odyssey at the heart of the heart of the country.

(I read Lonesome Dove because David Streitfeld’s book Western Star sparked my curiosity.)

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— John Masefield. ODTAA. A novel. William Heinemann, 1926. One of 275 copies signed by the author.
Picaresque account of a revolution in a tinpot Latin American dictatorship.  Prequel, of sorts, to Sard Harker (1924).
For an essay that will appear on Wormwoodiana.

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Michael Swanwick has published a brief, funny, and opinionated account of the New Wave in science fiction, The New Wave Explained

He followed with A Box Full of Controversy, a look at the origins of his 1986 essay A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns, Including the Battle for the Future, Unbridled Ambition, the Fate of the Children in the Starship, the Cyberpunk-Humanist Wars, Blood under the Banquet Tables, Metaphors Run Amok, and the Destruction of Atlantis !

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the Story Prize 2026

the winner of the 22nd annual Story Prize award is André Alexis, author of Other Worlds. Stories (FSG Originals. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025).

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current reading :

— Marcel Proust. A la recherche du temps perdu. I. [Du côté de chez Swann. À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs]. NRF Gallimard, [2019]. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
/ I am back into it.

— The Supernatural Omnibus. Being a collection of Stories of Appraitions, Witchcraft, Werewolves, Diabolism, Necromancy, Satanism, Divination, Sorcery, Poetry. Voodoo, Possession, Occult Doom and Destiny. Edited, with an Introduction, by Montague Summers. Gollancz, 1931.

Metaphrasis

 

— William S. Wilson. Why I Don’t Write Like Franz Kafka. New York : The Ecco Press, [1977].

— —. Γιατι Δεν Γραφω Σαν Τον Φραντς Καφκα. Athens : Ekdoseis Apopeira, 1994. Translated by Sonia Salimpha, Stratos Kakadellēs. OCLC: 610587751 (Johns Hopkins).

William S. Wilson (1932–2016) was a friend for more than twenty-five years. I esteem his collection of stories and included it in my Grolier Club show for the beauty and clarity of his prose : and because several of the stories push at the boundaries of what we understand as science fiction in the same way that some of the work of Borges does.  “Desire” is a (quietly) spectacular example of what the short story can accomplish.

Bill was not a prolific writer. He published one novel, Birthplace, and a long stream of essays on art, literature, and philosophical topics. He was an exacting writer whose work demands of the reader the same rigor and sheer energy of attention with which he wrote and thought. And because of where and he lived in Chelsea, he knew everyone in the New York art scene of the Sixties and Seventies, not as a celebrity hanger-on but as an intelligent observer. There is a fascinating transcript of Jonathan D. Katz’s 2012 interviews with Bill at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

One sparkling memory from 1994 stands out among all our exchanges. I dropped in to visit him on 25th street and he said, I too have been published in Athens. He showed me a copy of his story collection, and all the history of philosophy was contained in his smile.

I remembered this some months ago, and now I have a copy of the book, thanks to a friend who set a family member on a quest through all the bookshops of Athens. It is locally scarce in the U.S., too. I don’t read Greek (ancient or modern) beyond the alphabet, but I am gratified to have this additional reminder of my friend Bill Wilson.

And this just on my desk : the 1528 Vier Bücher, Dürer’s four books on proportions of the human form.

commonplace book : late february & early march

current reading

— David Streitfeld. Western Star. The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry. Mariner Books, [forthcoming March 2026].

Even the worst events in America, such as the slaughter of Native Americans, are soon repackaged as entertainment. [27]

There were, he calculated with the help of a detective he hired, at least five Larry McMurtrys operating throughout the Southwest and Mexico. [282]

Larry took the opposite approach. He never complained about any of those who appropriated the Lonesome Dove name for their ranch or saloon, much less sued them. He would tell interviewers that the story was an American version of the Arthurian legends. It overflowed single ownership and had been set loose in the national psyche. [295]

Western Star is an engaging book about an American writer — who once had a sweatshirt reading Minor Regional Novelist — and a fascinating study of obsession, book collecting, and the old ecosystems of the used and rare book trade.

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a title is not a book

— Michael Swanwick. The Universe Box. Tachyon, [2026].
This is another fabulous Swanwick collection ! “Starlight Express” and “Ghost Ships” are subtle ghost stories ; and “The Star-Bear” is a very tricky story to read in the centenary year of Lud-in-the-Mist and The Book of the Bear.
Swanwick must just light up with glee when he decides to take up a literary challenge : what chutzpah to write an interplanetary science fiction story with the title “The Warm Equations” ! And to pull off the critique unspoken but ever-present ! And that is barely scratching the surface of this box of delights.

In the first month of the Endless Bookshelf, a chance comment by a reader prompted me to observe that “a title is not a book” ; and this newest collection  from Tachyon prompts me to note (with glee) the occasional significance of the definite article ; and I can talk the talk, for I am one of the few to have a Universe Box and The Universe Box upon my shelf :

Wait. The cigar box you were carrying around contains the universe ?

The 2016 edition of Universe Box was issued by Dragonstairs Press in an edition of 13, in a cigar box containing the printed book, a shredded printout, celestial map, taxidermy eye, calling cards, and other secret treasures.

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The Library at Melmerby

https://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2026/03/a-telephone-box-library-guest-post-by.html

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Friends of the Library Sale

by Ernest Hilbert

‘The world still new, the journey not begun’

https://thesonneteer.substack.com/p/friends-of-the-library-sale

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a picture and short essay here at the weekly Shelfies edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin

https://shelfies.beehiiv.com/p/shelfies-78-henry-wessells

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[February]

not the first book fair

in San Francisco for the 57th California International Antiquarian Book Fair, 27 February through 1 March at the Cruise Terminal building, pier 27 on the Embarcadero. I will be in booth 117 (Cummins).
It would have been 1997, I think, that I first came to the book fair at the Brannan Center (long gone). Come say hello if you are here, and write if you would like a pass.

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California poppies

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meanwhile, back at the ranch

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recent reading

— Anthony Powell. The Military Philosophers [1968]. Fontana Books, [1971].
My favorite of the ‘Dance’ novels, a pleasure to re-read.

— Fletcher Pratt. The Blue Star [1953]. Introduction by Lin Carter. Ballantine Books, [1969].

 

re-reading in winter

commonplace book :

From Tatlin !  Six stories by Guy Davenport (1974) :

Our sense of the old is always modern. Starlight is hundreds of years old. We live in the phoenix time of antiquity.
[from “1830”]

Perhaps only in the awful light of the extraordinary was there real calm in human action. Nothing he might do was superfluous to the moment.
[from “The Airplanes at Brescia”]

an everlasting fire, dying and flaring up again
[from “Herakleitos”]

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recent reading :

— Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison. Super Normal. Sensations of the Ordinary [2007]. Lars Müller Publishers, [2024].
Fascinating exhibition of objects from daily life, Tokyo and London 2006 ; Trienniale di Milano 2007.

— Anthony Powell. At Lady Molly’s [1957] and The Kindly Ones [1962].
I picked up At Lady Molly’s and was drawn in, and then on to another . . . An earlier reader of the copy of The Kindly Ones has noted a few passages  : not always ones I might have marked, but I like these :

Moreland could never get used to the fact that most people — in this case, Templer — lead lives in which the arts play no part whatsoever. That is perhaps an exaggeration of Moreland’s attitude. All the same, he always found difficulty in accustoming himself to complete aesthetic indifference.

It was like trying to shake hands with Ophelia while she was strewing flowers.

One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

I have read the complete cycle, out of sequence, and several of the novels more than once or twice ; with the Dance I don’t think it matters whether or not one reads the books in any particular order, for Powell’s prose moves across time within each book and sometimes within a single paragraph, always with such clarity that there is  no doubt (indirection and obliqueness, yes : muddiness, no). Once one has the work as a whole in one’s head, the characters and incidents and phrases play out in memory and recreation. My favorite remains The Military Philosophers, with At Lady Molly’s close on its heels.
The most interesting parts of Hilary Spurling’s Invitation were the indices of literary or musical references and places, to tease out subtle allusions that slipped by unnoticed ;  the index of persons with biographical summaries and concordance of appearances gives a doleful feeling : a litany of all the facts with none of the pleasure of the text.

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nineteen years of the Endless Bookshelf

Friends,

today marks nineteen years of the Endless Bookshelf website. It was sunny and bitterly cold outside (the rhododendron leaves were tightly rolled) : a good day to be indoors with a book. I looked into Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (sixth ed., 1672), and dug around in the chapters on the basilisk, bears, mermaids, dolphins, wolves, the phoenix (some of these I can see as touchstones for Avram Davidson). A pleasure to taste again Browne’s leisurely examination of delusions and sloppy thinking.

I have never been what they call a numbers driven person, so I don’t know what sort of “traffic” the ’shelf attracts (the newsletter list hovers around six hundred, and some recipients anyway may read theirs). But I do see occasional remarks or notes from readers, and on this occasion I reprint one which arrived by post last week :

I saw your post “Very Few Letters” and figured that was a good prompt for me to write you this short note.
There is no other site or place on ye olde internet that has provided me with as much continued enjoyment as the Endless Bookshelf. I continually return to the archives to discover new books or authors, and to read your good words.
My TBR pile/list always grows and I always somehow feel better after a visit. Weird, I know, but thought that a letter expressing my thanks might be welcomed.

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Comments arrive at the Endless Bookshelf in many forms : a reader from California has just sent more than two dozen Seville oranges (pronounced in Shakespeare’s day as “civil as an orange” as Much Ado about Nothing reminds us). These will soon be transmuted into marmalade.

I will be in San Francisco at the end of February for the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, 27 February through 1 March at the Cruise Terminal building on the Embarcadero. I will be in booth 117 (Cummins). Say hello if you are there, and write if you would like a pass.

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‘Lolly Willowes’ at 100

I wrote a centenary celebration of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman for Wormwoodiana (published earlier this week) :

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2026/01/sylvia-townsend-warners-lolly-willowes.html

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recent reading

— Howard Waldrop. Masters of Science Fiction. Introduction by Paul Di Filippo. 1048 pp. Centipede Press, [2026]. Edition of 500 copies signed by Paul Di Filippo. Just began reading this giant compendium of stories from 1972 to 2005 : many familiar tales and some I haven’t seen before.

— [Charlotte Adams]. Jean Grolier [1884]. [Grolier Club, 2025]. Re-issue of an essay on collector Jean Grolier (1476-1565) from the earliest days of the club, designed by Jerry Kelly and the first use of his new Grolier typeface, based on the earliest roman and italic type cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldus Manutius. The colophon serves as a type specimen (though it does not show the tiny flourishes or extenders which also echo the early type forms).

— Tom La Farge. The Crimson Bears. Part One. A Hundred Doors. Part Two. Tough Poets Press, [2025]. I pulled the new edition from the shelf, started reading, and just kept going on from there. (I re-read the original edition last summer.) What a playful, sophisticated book.

— Ngaio Marsh. Artists in Crime [1938]. Penguin Books, [1957].

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Thank you to all the readers. As always, send me your news or tell me about books I have overlooked.

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A singular interview with Gregory Feeley

Gregory Feeley is author of The Oxygen Barons (1990), Kentauros (2010), and many novellas and short stories published in magazines or anthologies, including “Aweary of the Sun” (1994) ; “The Weighing of Ayre” in Starlight 1 (1996) ; “Fancy Bread” (2005) ; and “The Unpastured Sea” (2023). His work often engages incidents of cultural and technological change. We have known each other for many years through our shared interest in the writings of Avram Davidson. In 2005 I published his short novel of coffee and ideas in early seventeenth-century Venice, Arabian Wine. A recent work,  Th’Erratic Stars (2022) is an extract from his novel « Hamlet the Magician ».

Henry Wessells : Allusions to Shakespeare and his writings run deep throughout your work, including several novellas and your novel Hamlet the Magician. Can you point to a specific line or passage in the Plays and say, “It all started here” ?

Gregory Feeley : I think it must have been sometime around the age of 10 or 11, when I first saw a production of Macbeth and heard Macbeth declare that “Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, / While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.” I recognized “Night’s Black Agents” as the title of a collection by Fritz Leiber (I was at that time much better read in science fiction than in Shakespeare) and immediately Got It : you could take an especially good phrase from Shakespeare — or anyone else — and appropriate it for a story title ! This seemed such a wonderful thing that when I began reading what Terry Southern called Quality Lit a few years later and noticed how common the practice was, I knew that I could do this myself if I liked.
Macbeth has been heavily picked over, and I suspect I got the last good one. But I notice that Hamlet still has (at least) one left, and am surprised that no one has nabbed “A Crafty Madness”. It’s available for whoever wants it.

 

very few letters

Very Few Letters

— [T. E. Lawrence]. To tell you that in future I shall write very few letters. T. E. S. Printed card, [February 1935], sent by Lawrence to his correspondents in early 1935. O’Brien A161. An uncommon piece of ephemera.

/ from the archives

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Bibliography Week 2026

the A.B.A.A. Bib Week showcase will be held 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Wednesday 21 January at the Alliance Française on east 60th street. Open to the public, come say hello if you are in the neighborhood. I’ll be there (Cummins table).

https://bibliographyweek.org/2026/calendar

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If you ever wondered how science fiction writers live on after their death

/ thank you, Bruce Sterling, for this excellent headline

https://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/796103278446493696/if-you-ever-wondered-how-science-fiction-writers

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current reading

— Tom La Farge. The Crimson Bears. Part One.  A Hundred Doors. Part Two. [Introduction by Wendy Walker]. Tough Poets Press,  [2025].

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Wreckage by Peter Straub : the Endless Bookshelf book of the year 2025

— Peter Straub. Wreckage [Introduction by Susan, Benjamin, and Emma Straub]. What Happens in Hello Jack [Introduction : Linkages, by Gary K. Wolfe]. 447 ; 141 pages. 2 vols., Subterranean Press, 2025. Edition of 500 numbered copies. [Dust jackets after photographs by Jenny Calivas].

‘party to some larger, less explicable understanding’

WRECKAGE, the unfinished final novel of Peter Straub, is the best book I have read this year. “It was to be a near perfect interweaving of Jack the Ripper and Henry James, two of Peter’s abiding interests : a timeless unsolved murderous mystery with the ultimate stylist and artist” (from the introduction by his family). The book is in two parts : the long sustained narrative of Wreckage is as fine and subtle and tricky (and funny) as anything Straub ever wrote, and What Happens in Hello Jack is a succinct, complete linear outline and summary of Straub’s plans for the novel (prepared in 2103), with extensively detailed and even polished vignettes. Why wouldn’t a modern master of horror grapple with the conceits and sources of The Turn of the Screw, that masterpiece of American imaginative prose ?

incidents in the life of Henry James

Wreckage is nineteen chapters (most with multiple episodes) chronicling events in the life of Tilly Hayward, whose activities as a serial killer in Milwaukee are masked by the deep and undetectable cover of his life in Columbus, and his sister Margot Mountjoy, whose married life in one of the richer suburbs of Minneapolis was one hell of an American Dream, the anatomy of which is charted as she begins her new life as a wealthy widow. These two lines are deeply rooted evocations of midwestern America in the late 1950s, even as they are connected to The Gathered Clan, a painting stolen from the ancestral home, Blane, by an English great grandfather as he fled to America, and to other events of seventy years before, when Henry James accepted an invitation to a country house weekend and encountered uncertainty. The “interlude” early in the novel, a vignette of Henry James in Monte Carlo (published last year in Conjunctions) makes explicit one of the transtemporal narrative threads. The Archbishop’s Tale, recounted in slightly different form in The Process, takes on new implications in Wreckage when a sinister group of three persons, that “larger, less explicable understanding”, recurs in odd variations throughout the novel (in the 1950s as well as the 1880s). The settings and minor characters are as accomplished as anything Straub has written. And the conversation between Tilly Hayward and one of his victims after her death, and more precisely, how and where the narrative runs with this, where the ghost of Lori Terry leads Tilly — “Ridiculous, he knew, yet . . .” — are quite simply spectacular, and a key to understanding the psychogeography and chronology of the narrative. Wreckage is, of course, a gripping headlong race to the cliff of incompletion, but the reader, this reader, goes willingly.

What Happens in Hello Jack offers pleasures of a different order. It dates to 2013 and Straub continued to work on the book for a decade beyond that fixed moment in time, so that the two volumes are sometimes usefully at odds with each other. I have no issue with fragmentary or even contradictory narratives, and the summary carries the several arcs through to the end. The prose is accomplished even as the terrain remains inherently unstable : “as James watches, Ayling seems briefly to vibrate in and out of sight [. . .]. James thinks he may have tricked himself into seeing this, but Ayling appears to waver in front of his canvas”. And then, in the space of a few pages, Straub thrusts Henry James into primal territory and a scene unlike any other in any fictional account of Henry James. Following this encounter, Straub has James draft two letters unknown to scholars, along with the explanation of how what we have just read is not preserved. The insightful and provocative Henry James set pieces are inseparable from the entangling narratives, and both volumes resonate with elements from A Dark Matter and The Skylark and The Process (a short novella which I loved), and offer variant riffs on earlier, teasing pieces presented at Readercon and in accounts of the artistic movement Das Beben. All of this amplifies the stories nested within Wreckage.

WRECKAGE is facinating in so many ways, chief among them the way in which the main narrative Wreckage demonstrates how Straub repeatedly altered and reworked the lines laid down in the Hello Jack summary. It is a gripping tale. The matter of Jack the Ripper is addressed and is made new. The playfulness of the novelist, is found everywhere, too, with stray shots at a country house partridge shoot (in equal measure homage to Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party and riff on an incident in the life of Dick Cheney, I think) ; the imaginary books, especially “that dreary children’s book”, The Distant Land, and what ripples out from it ; the episodes in the life of painter Hugo Ayling gleaned from a fourth volume of the Autobiography of Francis Frith ; and in the cameo appearances by Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, and “Little Alex C.”, a depraved juvenile Aleister Crowley ready to embark upon mischief and worse.

When, deep in the labyrinth of story, when Henry James tells Tilly Hayward : ‘It is in the nature of this place, which is not real except in the mind’, it is Peter Straub who has led the reader there.

The Endless Bookshelf book of the year.