Danger to the minds of young girlsAdam Morgan (Atria). At the center of this powerful story is editor Margaret K. Anderson, a radical lesbian who is perhaps best known for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses in serial form in the literary magazine she edited. In 1921, Anderson was prosecuted by the US government – the affair was deemed “obscene” – and although Morgan focuses much of his attention on her trial, he also recalls her childhood in Indianapolis; her years in Chicago, New York and Paris; and her interactions with prominent figures of her time such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and anarchist Emma Goldman. In his research, it becomes clear that, in the end, Anderson's desire to forge a new path was accompanied only by her disappointment in where it led.
PropertyCynthia Zarin (Fort, Strauss and Giroux). The text of this slim, condensed novel is a letter written by Caroline—a New Yorker familiar to readers from Zarine's 2024 novel Inverno—to her male lover who is also dating two other women. Caroline's letter, a wry interpretation of a lovestruck lover's monologue, is a tangle of free-associative thoughts—about her children, about her estranged husband, about whatever comes to mind. It's all an elliptical, subtle service to Caroline's ambition: to understand “how I became a person who could write such a letter and behave in a way whose behavior I deeply disapproved of.”
