Every Man Dies Alone
by Hans Fallada
The Week
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The rediscovery of this 1947 “masterpiece” has been one of independent publishing’s great recent stories, said Katherine A. Powers in The Boston Globe. The tale of a Berlin couple who quietly resist Nazi totalitarianism, it is now a paperback hit. Hans Fallada’s final novel “has a Dickensian scope.” The author found “bleak comedy” in the spinelessness of many of his contemporaries, but it’s hard to imagine a book that could “better convey” the desperation of that place and time.
The Hour
by Bernard DeVoto
(Tin House, $17)
Bernard DeVoto’s 1948 paean to the cocktail hour never was and never will be “an important book,” said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. It “reads very much as a period piece,” directed at men and “arguing fiercely” that a man should never consider ordering anything but straight whiskey or a martini. Yet DeVoto’s pleas for contemplative companionship and his attempts at prose poetry prove “at once soothing and refreshing.” Perhaps “that’s all we require from a book.”
Wigs on the Green
by Nancy Mitford
(Vintage, $15)
When Nancy Mitford denied all requests to reprint this 1935 satire, she said it was because joking about Nazis and their British sympathizers had come to seem tasteless, said Nicholas Lezard in the London Guardian. Reading it now, you wish Mitford had done more to bring out the darkest impulses of her story’s fascists, but her jibes still “raise loud, unforced laughter” after all these years. Besides, Wigs on the Green isn’t purely political. “It’s a satire on marriage, and a clear-eyed one at that.”
The Long Ships
by Frans G. Bengtsson
(New York Review Books, $18)
Written in the 1940s, this forgotten Viking saga “stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure” to every reader on earth, said Michael Chabon in TheParisReview.org. Set in the year 1000, it boasts “the herculean narrative drive” of an Alexandre Dumas novel, and a playfulness “that feels at once ancient and postmodern.” Frans Bengtsson’s Vikings engage in the most brutal acts without ever bruising their sense of their own virtue.
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