Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan

In this sparkling memoir, novelist and playwright Pinckney (High Cotton) recollects his salad days in the 1970s and ’80s in the vibrant circle surrounding the New York Review of Books. The epicenter of the action was the home of the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, his English professor at Columbia and lifelong friend, whose affable presence and acerbic commentary—“You’re the worst poet I’ve ever read,” she observed after sampling his verse—pervades the book. Also in his orbit were Review editors Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, essayists Susan Sontag and James Baldwin, and avant-garde documentarian Howard Brookner. Pinckney limns the intellectual ferment in the liberal literary establishment as it opened up to gay, Black men like him, swirling with dinner parties, readings, painful editing sessions, political protests, drugs, B-52s shows, innumerable witticisms, and, increasingly, AIDS deaths. His prose is entertaining, gossipy, and full of vivid thumbnails yet, in its loose-jointed way, deeply serious about literature and craft (“Then Susan was eating an omelette and talking about the fear when you think people will criticize you for writing about something you know nothing about, something she said I said when I was trying to write on Döblin”). The result is a captivating portrait of the writing life in one of its richest settings. (Oct.)