B-Side Books recaptures the moment when someone leans across a dinner table or an aisle or any of those spaces that exist to be crossed to tell you about a book. Some leaners use the word love; others just want to convey the thrill of discovering a writer for the first time. There may be facts and figures or a few lines imperfectly quoted. Often it is their tone rather than the words: this matters. And every so often a detail they cite will strike you so deeply that, thinking back on the book years later, it is that moment you remember. A B-Side moment.
Some of these pieces recount sudden epiphanies; others recount a slow burn, admiration forged over years or decades or sanctified by rereading. Beneath all that cogitation lurks affection, affiliation, and well concealed passion. My editorial role—recruiting authors, whittling down a dream list, helping them redraft so that their pieces both revealed what they knew and conveyed what they felt—amounted to unlocking a barn door and standing back while the horses bolted out to pasture.
These are essays about getting drawn in, and about why it could happen to you, too. Looking back, it makes perfect sense that my own B-Side was about sudden death by water. When books have a real hold on you, a seemingly placid flow suddenly turns furious. Nothing in what follows is as peaceful as it seems.
Some writers (Zorach, Saint-Amour, Lofton) begin with a book read in childhood then returned to in maturity. But that overt gap between childish and mature reading is only the outward and visible sign of a more general process every B-Side writer undergoes. All of these pieces rediscover an earlier feeling (what a book!) and get to work turning that reading into writing. You might even say they try to write reading.
The idea of loving your subject matter may raise eyebrows in some circles: do biologists love fruit flies? (Based on my own summer lab job, I’m going to say, yes, sometimes they do.) This book invites that kind of overinvestment. Every letter to a prospective contributor started with the request to think of “a book unjustly kicked to history’s curb, either an outlier from a great writer or an unexpected gem from somebody thoroughly forgotten.” Then it urged writers to think about how their own love might be turned into something transmissible to others.
In her preface, Sharon Marcus highlights the significance of naming these pieces after the obscure songs on the flipside of old records. These books are forgotten cousins to the canon, and they elicit proprietary passion. What these writers have unearthed made them want to stop, to ponder, to draw out their discovery in enough detail that you could see it as well.
Looking back over the B-Sides I have edited for Public Books, I was struck by how many aim to reveal not so much a completed thought as the process of thinking. My daughter Daria once pointed out that on the storytelling show The Moth, stories almost always pivot on the phrase: “in that moment, I realized.” B-Sides too often unfold around just such situational realizations. Ursula K. Le Guin senses John Galt writing against violence by writing a nonviolent world into being. Vanessa Smith feels readerly attunement with Marion Milner’s joy in the unconscious expertise of ping-pong, when the player’s hand seems to move toward the ball of its own accord.
The pieces are grouped in sections to suit readerly moods: on days when you have a yen to fantasize, you might turn to “Other Worlds”—on another day, nostalgia might send you toward “Home Fires.” However, there are as many ways in as there are readers—you might even pick a name on impulse. Or tumble the book over and let fate choose.
Treat B-Side Books as an atlas that redirects readerly traffic from broad avenues to winding byways. In that guise, it defies easy summary. In one sense these pieces are profoundly connected by the passion that runs through them. But in another sense that is what divides them. Because these writers were urged to embrace an idiosyncratic attachment, no two objects are alike. Theo Davis cottons on to a Japanese Buddhist nun’s search for enlightenment while Maud Ellman loves Lady Into Fox (the title says it all). Meanwhile, Toril Moi takes late-night London rambles with Helen De Witt’s The Last Samurai and Margaret Cohen thinks about the operation of actual sand in The Riddle of the Sands. These are pieces pursued with what Theodor Adorno called Sabbath-day contemplation—the sort of attention you go on giving even when the working week has ended.
These B-Sides embody the companionship we find in words and ideas beyond the classroom and library and book group. Every book is its own desert island: we read, as we live, alone. Yet inside the cocoon created by the favorite chair or the nighttime ritual, readers want both privacy and communion. Solitude sometimes loves company. May you find it here.