A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, by Adam Morgan (Atria). At the heart of this lively history is the editor Margaret C. Anderson, a radical lesbian who is perhaps best known for publishing, in a literary magazine she edited, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in serial form. In 1921, Anderson was prosecuted by the U.S. government—the novel was thought “obscene”—and though Morgan focusses much of his attention on her trial, he also takes in her childhood, in Indianapolis; her years in Chicago, New York, and Paris; and her association with prominent figures of her time, such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the anarchist Emma Goldman. What becomes clear in his study is that, in the end, Anderson’s will to forge a new path was matched only by her disappointment in where it led.
Estate, by Cynthia Zarin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The text of this slim, compressed novel is a letter written by Caroline—a New Yorker who will be familiar to readers of Zarin’s 2024 novel “Inverno”—to her paramour, a man who is also seeing two other women. A wry spin on an infatuated lover’s monologue, Caroline’s letter is a skein of free-associative thoughts—about her children, about the husband from whom she’s separated, about whatever springs to mind. It’s all in elliptical, finespun service to Caroline’s ambition: to understand “how I had become the person who might write such a letter, and behave in such a way, behavior of which I deeply disapproved.”
