In the House in the Dark of the Woods
Laird Hunt
Pushkin Press, £12.99, pp224
A woman stands in the chill of a winter’s night, blowing towards the house in which her husband and young son lie sleeping. Hotter and hotter her breath grows, melting the snow on its roof and finally setting the place ablaze. It’s just one of many indelible moments in a novel that melds myth and magic, telling a suspenseful, threat-filled story of witchcraft in colonial America. Having strayed into the woods one day while gathering berries, its heroine soon finds herself lost in a dense narrative in which everything can become its opposite. She swims down a well, flies through the air, and lets her fingernails grow black with ink. Yes, fairytales have long been reclaimed for adult readers, but Hunt’s eerie, sensual sentences are nothing short of incantatory.
Letters from Tove
Tove Jansson, edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson (trans Sarah Death)
Sort of Books, £20, pp496
Readers of Moomin books know the importance of Snufkin’s spring letters, but the epistolary act was just as vital to their creator. Even after success left her with mammoth sacks of fan mail to deal with, Jansson still made time to write to confidantes, lovers and family, often adding pictures to her words. Spanning the years from 1932 to 1988, the letters gathered here are grouped by addressee and chart her life’s artistic and emotional landscape, covering war, fame and her first infatuation with another woman. There are treasures aplenty – cultural history gems as well as biographical revelations, all related in a voice that’s funny, gracious, intimate. As she told theatre director Vivica Bandler: “While I am writing, I have you here.”
Joe Gould’s Secret
Joseph Mitchell
Penguin, £9.99, pp112
Joe Gould knew Greenwich Village when it was still crawling with bohemians. A broke New England blueblood, he lived for decades off handouts from friends while working on his epic Oral History of the city. In 1942, legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell decided to profile the “bummy-looking little red-eyed wreck of a barfly”. The more Mitchell learned of his subject’s opus, the more suspicious he became. His exposé is a masterclass in journalistic, and creative, integrity, brisk and ruminative, and full of evocative belters. As he notes, Gould could be shy when sober, “like one of those men who are too shy to talk to strangers but not too shy to hold up a bank”. In a striking twist, though Mitchell continued showing up for work for another 30 years, this was the last piece he ever submitted.
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