Luxury Baby Furniture
for people who like wallpaper and name their baby Xanthippie (“Tippy”)
Small presses to pay attention to
Ex Paris Review editor-in-chief Lorin Stein emailed me today to see if I’ve read the books of Dinah Brooke. I was annoyed to admit I have not! Dinah—“Panky” to her friends—“wrote four novels in the ‘70s, then went off to join the Rajneesh.” She abandoned her children, and spent six years at the ashram. “She never wrote again.” Dinah is in her 80s now and lives in London. Here's a profile of her in The Telegraph. (Terry Southern, with whom she had a “pivotal affair,” helped her publish her first short story in The New Yorker called “The Letter.”) McNally Editions reissued her novel Lord Jim at Home (1973) last year, with an introduction by Ottessa Moshfegh. On publication in England “it was described as squalid and startling, nastily horrific, and a monstrous parody of upper-middle class English life.” It was not published in the United States. Later this year, McNally is reissuing Dinah Brooke’s first novel, Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady (intro by Emma Cline forthcoming!). So look out for that!!
Publicist Janique Vigier says Granta is starting a new imprint this spring!! Granta Magazine Editions will focus on literary fiction in translation originally published in extract form in the magazine. The second title in the imprint is Allegro Pastel (May 8, 2025) by Leif Randt, who is a founder of Tegel Media, a grown-up K-Hole. (An excerpt from Allegro Pastel was published in Granta issue Deutschland.) It’s Jean Rhys for ketamine addicts. And a major bestseller in German.
Brianna Porter wrote in and recommended the book Good Gossip (1992) by Jacqueline Carey. “A collection of stories populated with mainstream people leading marginal lives.” It’s a Manhattan novel. (A quote: “To try to make my predicament more interesting, I told everyone what it was, but even that didn't help.”) If you want to get a taste for it, read a New Yorker story Carey published in 1986 called “Another Party.” Here’s the summary:
The narrator designs book jackets, but now she's between jobs, so she met Dee Kilmartin at the Met. Dee's been lonely since she moved uptown(because of an editorial job at a fine-arts press up on Riverside Drive, and a deal on a coop nearby). In the museum, the women run into Fredericka Ackerly, who Dee calls "the mask woman," because she always told Dee she was "wearing a mask." Fredericka is with her 17-year-old son, Frederick. Narrator gets a strange impression of them, but later, finds out that Frederick is going to stay in Dee's apartment for a week while she's out of town. Then Dee hires him to assist her. Narrator thinks Dee is having an affair with this teenager. On night, Dee has a party, and Frederick breaks the mirror in the hallway. He punches it with his fist. Dee runs out of the apartment after him. Most people leave the party. Dee returns. Narrator hears her make a phone call, to Fredericka, to see if her son is safe. After she hangs up, she's furious. When asked why, she explains that Fredericka thinks she wanted Frederick to spend the night with her... It's unbelievable. She's totally wrong... Narrator suddenly sees Dee the way she's always known her, the way she is. Dee says, "Why the Mask Woman gets to have a kid, I'll never know... It's as if you have to be completely horrifying before you can become a parent. "Narrator tells Dee, "Look, even I can tell you how to get a kid." Dee replies, "No. no. Please. There are so many ways to do things wrong and so few ways to do things right."
The Best Baby Furniture I Have Ever Seen In My Whole Life
Let’s say you want to bring your newborn baby to a picnic. Why do you want to do this? I don’t know, but it seems like something people do. Let’s assume no one has met the baby yet, but you want to figure out how to display it in a “no touch” kind of way. (Why are you trying to stop people from picking up your baby? I have no idea.) There’s only one chic solution: a Moses Basket.
