Second Chances

Jonathan Lethem uses the 2024 McNally Editions reissue of Wilfrid Sheed’s 1966 novel Office Politics as a springboard to track the recent boom in literary reprints and to argue that revival series do more than simply bury forgotten writers. He recounts a bookseller’s view that revival imprints can seem like tombstones, then describes how presses such as Virago, Vintage, NYRB Classics, and newer players like McNally have turned reissues into a kind of curatorial project: uniform attractive editions, quality materials, and thoughtful front- and back-matter that create collectable identity and renewed readership. Lethem catalogues notable rescue missions - John Williams’s Stoner, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Lucia Berlin, Fran Ross - while acknowledging that many revivals fail to stick and that the resurgence reflects both a taste for analog pleasures and a market for less predigested cultural life.

The summary of Sheed’s career and fiction centers on his urbane, ironic prose and his ambivalent place in midcentury literary circles: a prolific critic and novelist who could be both convivial and bruising. Office Politics is sketched as a deliriously precise comic study of a small weekly, The Outsider, whose imperious editor Gilbert Twining precipitates a low-key succession crisis after a heart attack. The novel’s deadpan workplace warfare - passive-aggressive lunches, clipped contempt, and arch social maneuvering - reads as a small-stakes Game of Thrones of literary life, and the reissue has restored a largely forgotten but striking comic achievement to contemporary view.