My friend the bon vivant bookseller Michael Seidenberg of Brazenhead Books, which he ran out of his apartment in New York City, died in 2019. I’d known him since 1978, when as a teenager I apprenticed myself to his first shop. Michael loved pressing “lost” books and authors on me, and on anyone. A visit to one of his shops often concluded with taking home a novel one had not only not been seeking, but of which one had never heard. He would typically reduce the price of such a purchase, as a softening of the risk entailed in taking his word.
Michael was also an instinctive devil’s advocate. When I once spoke of my enthusiasm for trade paperback imprints dedicated specifically to reviving lost books, he surprised me. “Those are tombstones,” he told me (my quotation is a paraphrase from memory). “Being published by one of those presses that only publishes revivals, it’s the last heartbeat of a dying reputation. Presenting an author under the flag of rediscovery is the same thing as saying, ‘No one cared in the first place.’ After that, a book is officially dead forever.” He also pointed out how these imprints tended themselves to die out after just a handful of books.
With hindsight we can see what Michael missed in this particular contrarian flex. Not long before that conversation, Virago Books in the UK had launched the Virago Modern Classics. These displayed two strengths: the distinctive green spines that made one want to see whole shelves of them together, and a confidence, buoyed by their feminist imperatives, to keep rushing them out faster than one could read them, like a sea turtle laying a thousand eggs, knowing some will thrive but not knowing which ones. This created a map for success in future such enterprises, not that it could be guaranteed.1 Vintage Contemporaries followed in 1984, adopting the Virago strategies—attractive uniform editions, and a cornucopian blend of paperback originals and reissues that largely focused on living writers.
The next chapter in this story is best told by quoting the critic Elaine Blair. In a 2021 essay in these pages called “Averted Intimacies,” she speaks of the revival, spearheaded by the magazine A Public Space, of the nearly forgotten Bette Howland. This came, according to Blair,
amid a surge of interest in reissued titles. Cycles of obscurity and rediscovery may be a regular part of book publishing, but in recent years the number of reissues and—perhaps most significantly—the amount of review coverage they receive have been striking. In addition to the presses that specialize in reissues (NYRB Classics, the Feminist Press), other publishers have also revived out-of-print work (as Farrar, Straus and Giroux did with Lucia Berlin’s stories and New Directions with Fran Ross’s satirical novel Oreo).
I agree. We live in a continuing great era of rediscovered books. Starting in 1999, NYRB Classics doubled down on Virago’s and Vintage’s methods with its finer bindings and acid-free pages, creating a handfeel that made their series even more pleasing to read and collect, and by the quality of the curation and editing of the forewords, prefaces, introductions, translator’s notes, and afterwords surrounding each text. More recently, McNally Editions has met that standard, while other, somewhat less rapid-fire presses like Transit, Counterpoint, Pushkin, and Two Dollar Radio are also making terrific contributions.
Some presses will seem driven just to restore a given writer or two, like Steerforth did with Dawn Powell (triumphantly) and Isabel Bolton (less so). No doubt I’m missing some names. The libidinal energy of such rediscoveries parallels other “analog” revival booms, like that for vinyl records. Despite literature’s highbrow aura, the appetite for lost books echoes not only the world of used bookstores, but the present yearning for a less predigested, more incautious mode of cultural life that still lurks in living memory, or in our parents’ attics.
Not all the turtles’ eggs survive, either. If you believe in canons,2 then NYRB Classics may have boosted a few twentieth-century US contestants:3 John Williams’s Stoner (originally published 1965; reissued 2006) and Butcher’s Crossing (1960; 2007), Renata Adler’s Speedboat (1976; 2013), Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling (1966; 2009), surely others.4 But this isn’t the Modern Library or Library of America, let alone Norton Critical Editions; the vibe is less proclamatory, more personal and intimate, the realm of a reader’s private pleasure. Perhaps you latched on to Lisa Tuttle’s My Death (2004; 2023), or Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools (1976; 2015). Me, I’m obsessed with Raymond Kennedy’s Ride a Cockhorse (1991; 2012) but can’t convince others that it’s a perfect allegory of the codependency of Trump’s inner circle, or really even get anyone to read it. And that’s OK. In this sense, Michael’s prophecy may be true: the present vogue for republication makes a nice last moment for some books destined to join the slew of forgotten others always receding behind us.
Michael, incidentally, became a great collector and purveyor of the Vintage Contemporaries and the NYRB Classics, which he loved both to read and to see lining up in delicious uniformity on his shelves. He was always lovably willing to contradict himself.
Wilfrid Sheed was born in London in 1930. The son of the Catholic publishers Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, he grew up shuttling between England and the US. Though educated at Oxford before his aspirational leap to New York City and the beginning of his literary career, by his own account as a boy he’d fallen in love with baseball, not cricket or rugby, as well as with certain aspects of American popular culture like jazz and Broadway musicals. He survived childhood polio, the account of which finds its way into several of his fictions and his memoir of illness and recovery, In Love with Daylight (1995). His prodigious and versatile literary career encompassed nine works of fiction, three collections of critical essays, the memoir, and books on subjects as diverse as his fondnesses: baseball, jazz, Muhammad Ali, Clare Boothe Luce, and his parents. As a busy and prominent critic, he appears to have managed to walk a knife’s edge between fraternizing widely in Manhattan and on Key West, and being seen as a hit man in the Anatole Broyard, rip-the-jugular vein. Being a killer reviewer could be a bad fate socially, and also if one hoped to be critically embraced as a novelist. Which Sheed was. Though never drawing a wide readership, he was nominated for the National Book Award three times, and reviewed—says I, who’s been weighing the tangible results against the critical record—(spoiler alert) generously.
The key to that knife’s-edge walk and to the admiration and fellowship Sheed enjoyed among his contemporaries is likely the same: his tone, always urbane, ironic, lucid, and at times truly funny. This pertains especially when he’s strongly on-target (concerning, typically, great white males like Mailer, Waugh, Hemingway, Vidal); less so when he’s badly off (ahem, James Baldwin, ahem, feminism). Though Sheed regularly self-inoculates by dubbing himself a minor novelist, he enters readily into imaginative sympathy with these monsters of ambition, leaving intact their implicit importance at the center of our literary culture, no matter that the book or books at hand—sometimes several decades’ worth—have been declared inadequate.
On Hemingway, in these pages: “Fame settled in to stay and clamped his style into place, where it grew warped and gnarled like a tree in a cave.” Mailer:
It is no accident that Mailer wrote the first big war novel, subsequently managed to hook himself onto both the Beat Generation and the French Existentialists, jumped off in time to catch the Negro express, elbowed briefly to the front of the Peace Movement, worked Vietnam into a novel title (an almost infallible sign of charlatanry)…. And who is the first writer to tell us about the moon?
Sheed’s sentences are fizzy with asides, nudges, and flattery to the informed reader. They remind me of the Raymond Chandler one encounters in Chandler’s letters—another writer who cross-pollinated the archness and delicacy of an English education with a thrilled appetite for the funk of US vernacular. And both Chandler and Sheed seem to use that wit to manage a scathing disenchantment, though Sheed disguises his better than does Chandler.
Sheed died in 2011, and in 2024 McNally Editions republished his best novel, Office Politics (1966), with a foreword by Gerald Howard, to another round of mostly warm reviews; Electric Literature, following the author’s lead in self-depreciation, called it a “minor masterpiece.”
The novel depicts the eerily banal daily life of an influential small weekly magazine called The Outsider, a publication that could be mistaken for any number of real models like Dissent, The Nation, or even a teensy-tiny New Yorker. (Sheed, who was a critic and editor at Commonweal for several years, claims in an author’s note that The Outsider “resembles no magazine living or dead.”) The editor presiding over this “broken-down opinion machine” is an English expatriate named Gilbert Twining, who soaks up all available oxygen for miles around. His invitations to lunch are a form of alcoholic passive aggression. Nevertheless, the standard Twining establishes and the order he keeps are irreplaceable. When he goes on leave after a heart attack it sets in motion a low-key succession crisis among the staff: imagine Game of Thrones populated by versions of Bartleby the Scrivener. The small-stakes office comedy is rendered with delirious precision as the characters assassinate one another’s pretenses with the blunt instruments of the arched eyebrow and the declined copyedit. They might as well be attacking each other with empty staplers:
“Brian, where did you find this—this thing?”
“What thing?”
“This gold thing.”
“You mean Culpeper’s article on the gold standard? You know who Culpeper is, don’t you?”
“He’s no writer that I know.”
“Look, we’re lucky to have him, he’s one of Canada’s leading economists.”
“A commentary, a sad commentary.”
“I’ve been trying to get something out of him for years.”
“You’ve been wasting your time, is all I can say.”
By default, at least at first, we root for George Wren, a younger, half-endearing American editor with an actual home life and a bunch of secret poems stashed in his desk. Yet Sheed deploys Wren’s comparatively unspoiled viewpoint mainly to illustrate how little the younger man grasps about the balance of purely symbolic power and painfully nonsymbolic disappointment that Twining has devised to keep the magazine functioning even in his absence. The book seems ultimately designed to function as an expectations-humbling machine. No one here rates anything but the mildest sympathy, which is precisely what their creator has granted them, after cutting off their legs.
Still, the pleasures of Sheed’s wriggly sentences carry the day, earning the comparisons to Kingsley Amis and to Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007). Knowing I could score some first-edition Sheeds cheaply—I’d passed them by in used bookstores for years—I launched a further investigation into his fiction.
In fact, I went into a long Sheed-trance. This was an unforced error. My old zeal for deep dives—I once spent a year reading every book by Stanisław Lem—resulted in what an analyst calls transference. Because Sheed’s rueful demolitions recalled scoundrelish writers I’d grown up reading—e.g., J.P. Donleavy, Terry Southern, or early Joseph Heller—I was ready for him to reveal some iconoclastic force, to uncork his secret rage against the machine. Or else he might turn on himself and convert his deep injuries—the dislocations and illness of his childhood—into pain the reader took into his own body, as one does reading William Maxwell when he rehearses the early death of his mother.
Neither happened. Sheed does write about himself, in a kind of deflected or mock-puzzled way. His novels portray writers and editors, but critics especially: Max Jamison (1970) is about a poisonous theater critic; Transatlantic Blues (1978) depicts the hectic, vainglorious life of a celebrated cultural critic (half Mailer, half David Frost); and The Boys of Winter (1987) is narrated by a publisher turned novelist who is wrangling the work of several other novelists in an enclave in the Hamptons. These form a collective self-portrait of a middle-aged man so entombed in his younger self’s eagerness to rise within the status quo that all he can possibly do is generate endless cutting remarks from within it.
What’s barely glimpsed is the outside of life. The healthy alienation from received institutional structures that might have resulted from Sheed’s parents—who were famous for their fervent Catholicism but also clearly somewhat embarrassing to their son—or from his involuntarily international childhood and his polio years is shrugged away in favor of burrowing into cranky conformity, despite his mock protests. And he only allows us to infer his rejection of Catholic belief. Hearing his mother in a debate on the radio, he identifies with her interlocutor: “Here was a bright, possibly even sane woman showing him a world as bizarre as Dante’s.” Listening to his father’s eulogy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, he says, “That day, at least, I believed every word of it.”
Sheed may have never met a difference he didn’t wish to split. In creating fictional self-surrogates bursting with rude intolerance, he appears to be running a compensatory game, one meant to smuggle in opinions that might get him disinvited from certain parties. This maneuver recalls the worst of Saul Bellow, though in Sheed’s hands it is fleeter and funnier. As in a book like Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) the unspoken script might read, “If you think I (the author behind the curtain) am a reactionary, just look at how bad things could get if I took the gloves off.” Politics aside, Sheed’s fiction too much takes its lead from his criticism. His narrative voice and his characters display a bottomless obsession with triangulation, mimicry, counterfeiting, imposture.
This passion for exposing fakery serves Sheed best in the only other fiction of his I can really recommend, The Blacking Factory (1968), a coming-of-age novella. Here, a boy named Jim Bannister, whirled between England and the US, tabulates the growth of his prosecutorial sensibility as he considers his father’s new girlfriend, and his father, and himself:
Lorraine talked in a Seven Sisters drawl that sounded suspect to Jim (although he knew this accent sounded fake even when it was done right), and this brought out a trace of latent North Boston in Mr. Bannister’s answers. It was like being able to look into people’s skin through a microscope. “Can’t you hear that she’s a phony?” he wanted to tell his father at one point, and then: “Can’t you hear that he’s a phony?” to Lorraine. Can’t you hear that we’re all phonies? When Jimmy chimed in himself, his own voice sounded just as silly as theirs, and the thought of having to listen to the three of them all summer became really quite depressing.
Even in this, Sheed’s punch is pulled with “really quite depressing”—as though the razor insight of Robert Musil had retreated into the stifled yawn of P.G. Wodehouse. Total skepticism isn’t necessarily a novelist’s enemy, but it finds a poor companion in consolation-seeking. Sheed’s skepticism is his fiddler crab’s gigantic claw; meanwhile his tiny claw, where he stores his sense of pain and loss, he can barely cinch open. Amazingly, this is even true in memoirs devoted to his parents and to his recovery from illness and addiction.
Something is being hidden, and though I’m no expert on Catholicism I think it may be Sheed’s reluctance to explain his retreat from belief. Perhaps he was too obedient to his legacy: the most Catholic of all great Catholic writers, G.K. Chesterton, was Sheed’s godfather. Instead, an unspecific God-that-failed haunts Sheed; each time he tries and fails to substitute Babe Ruth, jazz, or literature in that seat of authority he reenacts this primal disappointment. His prose, on the surface, is worthy of Chesterton’s, every sentence issued with a twist, every face peeled to show a new face underneath, a delight in paradox as a lens on all creation. Yet Chesterton’s paradoxes conceal—until they can’t—real belief, and a desire to persuade the reader of the existence of an absolute higher good. Sheed’s hint instead at a trauma or nostalgia that they simultaneously deny.
As Elaine Blair so mercilessly points out, there is a zero-sum effect at work when any book is published, or republished. The reading oxygen breathing in and out of individual brains to form the ecosphere supporting new writing—or other rediscoveries—is not limitless. Let me be merciless in turn: I don’t think we need more Sheed.