I’m excited to announced that my friend Proustitue and I have embarked on a grand year-long adventure: reading all nine of Henry Green’s novels! My own excitement is hardly containable since I’ve been hearing great things about Green for years and we in the state are finally getting a solid series of his books thanks to NYRB Classics, who will be publishing eight of them in the near future. My excitement grew even more when Proustitute wrote about Henry Green on his site (here; you really should read this):
For fans of British literature from the interwar period; for lovers of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the more working-class fiction by interwar writers like novelist Elizabeth Taylor; for readers who wonder which literary stylists helped to carry the torch of modernism into mid-twentieth-century Britain; and for those who enjoy equal parts realism with psychological exploration, equal parts pathos with deep, resounding joy — this is indeed a true literary event of the highest order.
Discussions will not take place here (though I’ll be reviewing the books here as I read them); rather, we have set up a nice Goodreads page called “The Year of Reading Henry Green.” Find it here, where a few people have already started congregating.
The first two NYRB Greens — Back and Loving — showed up at my house a couple of days ago, and they are set to be published on October 18.
The third NYRB Classics release in the series, Caught, was originally scheduled to hit shelves with the first two, but something happened and it’s been delayed until late November.
This group read begins in November (though discussion threads are open now for any interested in coming to lay down some preliminary thoughts).
The first book? Henry Green’s 1946 novel Back.
So get excited! I’ve dipped my toes in to the books, and they hold so much promise — and I’ve been assured it’s not an illusion of promise. I hope you’ll join in and read as much Henry Green as you can with us!
I’ll join in Trevor having done henry green week years ago on the blog I still a number of his books to read myself
Excellent! Looking forward to it, Stu!
I signed up on Goodreads weeks ago. The way my reading is going I am relieved to see the pushed back date. This is a writer I’ve wanted to read for some time.This is not an era of lit I know well so I’m bound to benefit from the experience and insights of others.
Nice project Trevor. I read my first Green (Loving) last year and it was good – peculiar, but good. I’d like to read more.
I am extremely bad at keeping up with projects / readalongs but I’ll watch with interest.
In my initial post I said we were starting this with Caught in December, but we’ve decided to move forward in November with Back. That’s just one month away, folks! Looking forward to reading the books and discussing them with you at Goodreads!
I read Henry Green with Stu when he hosted his event a few years ago, as he said, and loved it. So glad for the invitation to read more!
[…] – Virginia Woolf in January, Jean Giono’s Hill in May and Jean Rhys in September. When Mookse and Gripes suggested Henry Green’s Back for November it seemed another chance to experience a writer whom I […]