For me there is nothing quite as shiny and new as a moldy old book, painstakingly restored to the light; amid a bewilderment of flashy annuals, it’s the perennials that catch my eye.

 

Can you believe that Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus turned 40 in 2020? Celebrating its canonization by Penguin Classics this March, the novel, which traces with devastating eloquence the lives and loves of two sisters, is every inch a classic. You’ll stop every five minutes to read aloud some especially ringing or trenchant passage, annoying your spouse: best just to read it aloud together. Also turning 40 is Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, which, thanks to the New York Review Books Classics edition due in May, is likely to be remain in print for decades. None of the current spate of unreliable narrators can match Aroon, the awkward scion of a declining Anglo-Irish family over whose ungainly shoulder we glimpse delicious flickers of something very dark just below the placid surface. Those same trendy suspense writers owe a debt to Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story “In a Grove” (aka Rashomon), included in Pushkin’s handsome new collection Murder in the Age of Enlightenment (Apr.). For those who like it rough, Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics is reprinting Dorothy B. Hughes’s riveting noir Ride the Pink Horse (Mar.), with its bracingly unsympathetic hit man antihero. And from the sublime to the ridiculous, there’s Hard Case Crime’s reprint of Donald Westlake’s Castle in the Air (Mar.), a rollicking and marvelously forgettable European crime caper in which an international cast of eccentric baddies team up to steal the hottest rock of all, an entire castle.