McNally Jackson Books

The wildly vivid, rare, and revealing journals of a sixteenth-century medical student. In 1552, sixteen-year-old Felix Platter left Basel, Switzerland, and journeyed 370 miles to Montpelier, France to study medicine. His journals chronicle five astonishing years of youth in a time of plague, war, and awakening. A Protestant in a Catholic kingdom, Felix witnessed blood-chilling executions and engaged in secret religious discussions with his landlord, a Marrano Jew. He learned to play the lute, tasted olive oil for the first time, and swam in the sea. He flirted (unsuccessfully) and danced (disastrously), fled from highway robbers, saw John Calvin preach, survived an outbreak of the bubonic plague, joined in a massive, orange-throwing food fight, acquired a dog, and spent one Christmas Eve alone and afraid of the dark. Most astonishing of all, he wrote it down. As Stephen Greenblatt writes in his introduction to this new edition, “Keeping diaries and writing autobiographies did not become a widespread practice until the mid-seventeenth century”—but Felix created an astonishing document: an intimate, sometimes hilarious chronicle of Renaissance adolescence from the inside, whose “vividness, intimacy, candor, and charm” lend it an “altogether rare and revealing character.”

From Marginalian Editions comes a gorgeous reissue of celebrated poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman’s debut: a soaring ode to our solar system, planet to planet, blending science and imagination, astronomy and cosmology, as well as fantasy, satire, myth, and reflection. First published in 1973, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral introduced not only a splendid new poet but a whole new adventure in poetry. With bravura style, unbridled imagination, and a connoisseur's eye for precise scientific detail, Diane Ackerman’s debut brought us an unforgettable ode to each planet in our solar system, not to mention the moon, the comet Kohoutek, and the asteroid belt, as well as strange voyages to the stars, the bottom of the sea, through the human body, and into the mind. Diane Ackerman herself says: “I’ve always been baffled by people who write about nature only in terms of, say, junipers and cornfields, eschewing all things so-called ‘scientific,’ as if science were, per se, the spoil-sport of feeling. So wonderless a view of nature really doesn’t appeal to me.” The Planets is a rare fusion of art and science—one of the great poetic works of cosmic imagination.

A fiery modern retelling of three Greek tragedies, “written in an ageless prose that instantly strikes the reader as the work of a master.” (Rachel Cusk, from the foreword)First published in 1961, The Way to Colonos recasts three seminal plays by Sophocles into tales of modern women and warfare, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone—a stylish woman in her thirties—wheeling her father, Oedipus, onto the ferry to Colonos, is disgusted by his self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother, Clytemnestra, that may never come to pass. Philoctetes, a castaway soldier, navigates shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II. As Rachel Cusk writes in her foreword to this new edition, Cicellis was a woman before her time, whose work—written in English, her second language—offers particularly “shocking insight into the secret lives of young women” and is only now “free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority, who wish to see the world through sharp fresh eyes.”

Family trauma, race, and the destiny of a nation corrupted by slavery, cast in the light of epic myth: “More than a saga of Black revitalization . . . Part vision, part parable, it is a story for all America.” (The New York Times Book Review) The Snowdon family stands as a pinnacle of Black excellence in Washington, D.C.: educated, affluent, and influential. John Christopher, the patriarch, saves lives as a heart surgeon and is revered by his students at Howard University. His wife, Camille, governs an elegant house overlooking Rock Creek Park and devotes herself to reading, gardening, and raising their three daughters—Cynthia, Patricia, and Eva—to attend the very best schools and roam the world on a whim. Theirs ought to be a story of success and empowerment, but something is rotten in the house of Snowdon. Years later, when John Christopher’s granddaughter Johnnie comes to seek the truth about her own parentage, she unveils a legacy of unspeakable family secrets tangled up in America’s original sin. What begins as a quest for identity spirals into an apocalyptic vision of a nation on the brink of ruin. By turns a poetic epic, a ghost story, a historical saga, and a chilling dystopian fable, Thereafter Johnnie is a unique and uniquely American fusion of myth and hard-bitten reality: an erotic, horrifying, and even hopeful reckoning with centuries of injustice.

From Marginalian Editions: a far-seeing essay collection by the iconoclastic historian Jane Ellen Harrison—heroine to generations of writers from Virginia Woolf to Mary Beard—that explores the invisible tendrils between science and the sacred, the psychology of bias, the fulcrum of progress, and the countercultural courage of changing our minds in light of new understanding. Alpha and Omega is the culminating work of Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist who reshaped our understanding of ancient Greek culture and pioneered a radical vision of faith, imagination, and progress. Declaring herself a “deeply religious atheist,” Harrison rejected the confines of dogma to explore faith as the human capacity to transcend the known and imagine the possible. This collection of essays—published at the dawn of World War I—unpacks the invisible connections between science and spirituality, individual belief and collective consciousness, and reason and love as forces for societal transformation. With wit and daring, Harrison dismantles the binaries that divide us—young and old, feminine and masculine, sacred and profane—revealing how these tensions, when reconciled, can catalyze change. As Maria Popova writes in her introduction, Harrison’s essays are an “act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo,” challenging us to rethink our biases, beliefs, and most deeply held assumptions. From the influence of Darwinism on religion to the psychology of conversion, from the evolution of gender roles to the ethics of pacifism, Alpha and Omega is a timeless guide to the imagination and courage required to live through an age of division and uncertainty.

The 1950s classic that rewrote the myth of the American West and inspired its subsequent chroniclers from Sam Peckinpah to Marlon Brando to Cormac McCarthy. Hendry Jones isn’t quite Billy the Kid, but he’s “the Kid” all the same, and like Billy’s his story doesn’t take long to tell. He’ll do a fair amount of killing, be done in by an old friend, then get turned into a myth before his body is cold. Years later, one of the Kid’s last living partners in crime, “Doc” Baker—old and less than sober—tries to set the record straight: who killed who and why, and how none of that old craziness is worth swooning over or rehashing. Except that Doc is a bit of a poet despite himself, and in drawing together what he knows and remembers about the Kid’s last days, he winds up saying just about everything that needs to be said about the American West, about kids playing with guns, about boys playing at being men out on the frontier, where they thought no one was watching. As Will Oldham—whose moniker as a musician, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, was partly inspired by Billy the Kid—notes in his introduction, Hendry Jones served as fodder for a field of artists grappling with masculinity and violence in the West: Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks, Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian are all impossible to imagine without Neider’s Kid having first blazed the trail. A concise and brutal modern masterpiece, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones is one of the few Western novels worthy of the name.

“The best book about Sin City ever written . . . [Dunne’s] grotesqueries aren’t drug-induced, they’re very real. His is the genuine Vegas.” (Esquire) “In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada.” So begins John Gregory Dunne’s neglected classic of first-person writing, a mordant, deadpan, grotesque tale that blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, confession and reportage. Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. There he plans to write an account of the city as he finds it; the book he ends up writing is “a fiction which recalls time both real and imagined.” The remarkable central characters are Artha, a student at cosmetology college by day, a sex worker by night; Buster Mano, a private detective whose specialty is tracking down errant husbands; and Jackie Kasey, a lounge comic who opens for Elvis at $10,000 a night and wonders why he is still only a “semi-name.” Pimps, bail bondsmen, parking-lot moguls, used-car tycoons, ex-jockeys, and women who look as if they had “spent a lifetime meeting guys in Vegas or Miami Beach or Louisville for the Derby”: these are the people who wander through the lives of Artha, Buster, and Jackie—and, for a dark season, the life of the narrator. John Gregory Dunne captures a low point in American culture and in one American life with rare vitality, honesty, and perception. Sad, powerful, wildly funny, Vegas is like no memoir before or since.

Marginalian Editions presents a groundbreaking poet’s biography of the forgotten scientist who founded physical chemistry, shaping much of the 20th century—and an ingenious, expansive treatise on American creativity, character, and remembrance.Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) was an American visionary whose work shaped a century of science by bridging classical mechanics and quantum physics. A kindly and shy bachelor who lectured at Yale in relative obscurity for more than thirty years, he single-handedly created the field of physical chemistry without ever completing a single experiment. Gibbs’s visionary work enabled future scientists to predict what states a substance can assume and under what conditions—the implications for industry, agriculture, and warfare were vast. Hailed by Einstein as “the greatest mind in American history,” Gibbs remained essentially unknown.To acclaimed poet Muriel Rukeyser, Gibbs “lived closer than any inventor, any poet, any scientific worker in pure imagination to the life of the inventive and organizing spirit in America.” Rukeyser’s thoroughly researched and lyrical tribute to Gibbs is much more than a biography: it is an alchemical compound of philosophy, history, ethics, and literature writ large. It is the story of a country, a century, a global epoch of scientific creativity that would color every realm of human imagination and aspiration, from poetry to politics.