How prefaces, author’s notes, and essays in books by Elmore Leonard, Peter Matthiessen, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Sam Tanenhaus, David Greenberg and Virginia Roberts Giuffre reveal the real story.
Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927-28 | Dorothy Parker | McNally Editions (224 Pages)
The Picket Line: The Lost Novella | Elmore Leonard | Mariner Books (128 Pages)
I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but I had an epiphany reading a book of book reviews by Dorothy Parker. And I’m sure Dorothy Parker would have rolled her eyes (or probably made a better joke about it).
It happened when I was reading a compilation of Parker’s book reviews, Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28. Dorothy Parker, the ultimate prototype of a literary cool girl — poet, screenwriter, and a founder of the legendary Algonquin Round Table, known for her wit and still quoted today. The woman who held her own with Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman. So cool.
The introduction was written by Sloane Crosley, a fantastic humorist and essayist once called a “mercurial wit.” To complete the cool-girl trifecta, the book was published by McNally Editions, the indie chain Sarah McNally has built into a literary institution with pitch-perfect selections and the smartest book club calendar. ( Take “The Broken Dishes Book Club,” which reads books about disrupting domestic bliss. That’s the stuff.)
Anyway, back to the intro, where Crosley describes Parker’s gleeful habit of reviewing not only books but their press releases and dust jackets: “Oh, how she is irked by packaging and praise! What, you might ask, is below low-hanging fruit? The people who plant it, I guess.”
Parker turned her wit toward the machinery of publicity that framed what she was meant to review. Brilliant. Just brazen and fun, and talk about the ultimate dis. And as someone who tries to publish one review a week, I get it. A perfect hack for me, an admitted hack writer, churning it out.
I may not be a cool girl, but I can certainly steal from the best of them.
At the time, I was struggling to review Elmore Leonard’s Picket Line( Mariner Books, 128 pages) — an early, previously unpublished novella that includes a sharp, sympathetic introduction by C.M. Kushins, who situates the book in the middle of Leonard’s long apprenticeship as a stylist. Crosley’s introduction sparked the idea. C.M. Kushins’s proved it. Sometimes, reviewing the introduction (as well as the author’s notes, the forewords, the contextual essays) makes sense.
And the best part? You can usually download a sample that usually includes the intro. For free.
In an age of algorithmically generated book recommendations and 1,040-page biographies, knowing how to extract the essence — whether from an introduction, an author’s note, or a brilliant essay — feels less like cheating and more like survival. Parker went after the machinery of hype. I’m going after the machinery of context.
Picket Line was shelved for decades before its long-delayed release. It’s an excellent work, a point made by other reviewers very eloquently already. The work’s subject gives it current-events resonance — striking farmworkers (many immigrants) in the 1970s faced civil injunctions and extrajudicial intimidation. Okay-ish for a legal angle I usually work for my book blog. Not great.
Then I realized it was the introduction to Picket Line that pulled me in to the novella. It was written by C. M. Kushins, a journalist and biographer whose previous work includes Nothing’s Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon (Warren Zevon!) and Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard. So, very cool.
Kushins’s introduction to Picket Line performs what every good biographer should aspire to do: bring to life the writer, the work, and the conditions under which it was made. He excavates the entire ecosystem that buried it, reconstructing a strange episode in Leonard’s career when a commission for an online magazine called Contentville, started by Steven Brill (the legal journalist who founded Court TV and The American Lawyer), briefly brought one of America’s great crime writers into the early digital age, only for the venture to collapse before publication. (Full disclosure: I worked for Brill at both places.)
Leonard wrote it as a screenplay assignment loosely inspired by the Delano grape strike and Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers. The book is fiction but feels like Leonard must have really reported it out. Call it nonfiction-adjacent fiction.
By the time you finish Kushins’s essay, you already know the characters, conflicts, and publishing odyssey. But what lingers is his larger argument: that marginal works (the prefaces, the notes, the connective tissue of literary history) deserve closer reading. And that Picket Line itself deserves to be read. Because Leonard’s novella is fierce, empathetic, and bracingly relevant: a story about labor, justice, and the immigrants who pick our food that reads like it was written yesterday, not fifty years ago.
By the time you finish Kushins’ essay, you already know the characters, conflicts and the publishing process. What lingers is this: Kushins made the case for the importance of the novel and, incidentally that marginal works (the prefaces, the notes, the connective tissue of literary history) deserve a closer reading.
Another time I indulge in my love introductions? When considering a big, hefty doorstopper. Here are some recent weighty tomes by best-of-class, real-deal writers I’d lap up at 400 pages. Not so sure I’m game at their actual page counts.
Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen: 736 pages. I do like Peter Matthiessen, but enough to read about him at that length? No. Fortunately, the introduction gives me the author’s take on The Snow Leopard, a segue through Thoreau’s Walden, Matthiessen’s place among the extraordinary post-WWII writers (Baldwin, Mailer, Capote). I learn about his activism with Cesar Chavez and the American Indian Movement — law, protest, spirituality all wrapped together. How he shed his ego in the Himalayas, as one does. Look, I’m sure it’s great. But for me? Kind of done and dusted.
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History — and How It Shattered a Nation: 592 pages. There’s no introduction but an excellent author’s note giving the scope of the book and his access to new material. Better yet? “A List of Key Characters and the Company They Kept.” Under investigators, I found myself intrigued by New York prosecutor Ferdinand Pecora, the “Hellhound of Wall Street,” who led the investigation into bankers after the crash. The legal reformer who took down the banking elite. It’s the perfect judicial hook for me. Almost intrigued enough to buy the book, but first I love going to a bookstore and spot-read aided by the index.
Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America: 1,040 pages. No introduction. Odds are, I’ll never read it, though my best friend tells me to stop being a baby pointing out that William F. Buckley is that consequential and Sam Tanenhaus is that good a writer. Fair. But I don’t even know how to hold a 1,040-page book.
David Greenberg’s John Lewis: A Life: 704 pages. No intro. John Lewis is a hero of mine, a man who literally got beaten for the rule of law. I have a sweater from the Lingua Franca embroidered with his quote telling us to raise: “Good Trouble.” I have the John Lewis Forever commemorative stamps that I will never, ever use. So, a maybe. At 700+ pages, I’d never finish, but I’ll die defending the idea that his story matters.
Sometimes an introduction or author’s note does more than frame a story. It illuminates the moral argument behind it. Amy Wallace’s introduction to Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre is a case in point. Giuffre’s book is a tragic, brave, and unflinching account of surviving Epstein’s sex trafficking. Wallace’s introduction frames Giuffre’s story with such care that it becomes an act of advocacy. It’s a reminder that books sometimes do what courts don’t: give survivors the last word. It will break your heart, and I’m going to buy the book.
That intro reminded me of another powerful work on sexual assault, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count. The beautiful novel reimagines a real case, giving voice to a victim the legal system failed. I loved the book — my review was called “ When Fiction Delivers Justice.” More accurately, I reviewed the author’s note, where Adichie explains how fiction can deliver the kind of justice the courts could not. The note reads like an appellate brief, delivering the verdict the criminal justice system failed to render.
And when there’s no introduction? My hack is finding a great review in The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books. Kelefa Sanneh’s “How John Lewis Put a Legacy of Heroism to Use” in The New Yorkergave me an excellent take on the Greenberg’s biography. For the Buckley tome, The New York Review of Books had not one but two articles on Tanenhaus’s biography — a jackpot. (And to be honest, I riff all the time on books I’ve never read. Now that I’m liberated from the shackles of being diligent by Parker, I’ll admit it.)
Dorothy Parker would approve of these shortcuts, I think. She made a career of them. The queen of the pithy one-liner, Parker knew writing short was harder than writing long. Distillation is torture for most of us. Parker understood that literary culture includes its own self-promotion and mythology. The dust jackets, the advance praise, the introductions — they’re all part of the conversation. She brilliantly mocked the hype; I’m mining the fine print.
Thanks to Mariner Books and NetGalley for the ARC of Picket Line.