DISCOVERIES

The Week-End Book

Edited by Francis Meynell

Duckworth Overlook:

368 pp., $17.95

POETRY, how to play bezique, various bird songs, knots, stars and “Dishes to Come Home To” are a few of the wonders in this gentle, good-looking volume, first published in June 1924. The book came into being when Bloomsbury writer David “Bunny” Garnett and friends found themselves burdened on an Italian walking tour by rucksacks heavy with books. “How wonderful, they thought, if they could pack just one book that would cater for all their needs,” writes John Julius Norwich in his introduction. Beyond its beauty and whimsy, the book reveals the importance of leisure in middle- and upper-middle class British life between the world wars. These people knew how to play games, pursue idle interests, identify flora and fauna and, above all, read.

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The Memory Book

Neil Curtis

Allen & Unwin:

172 pp., $11.95 paper

THIS pictorial memoir of artist Neil Curtis’ early childhood immediately after World War II in London includes stunning drawings accompanied by a line or two of text. Next to a wintry tree, for example, is the line: “I was always lonely.” Next to a hammy fist squeezing what looks like blood (or ink) from a piece of paper: “My father didn’t like me much. He was bigger than me.” Curtis’ book is a sort of antidote to verbosity and excessive imagery; in its simplicity it reconnects the image to the word and shows the jaded eye how powerful they can be together. “I was surprised,” he writes in a brief introduction, “at how clear the memories were.” The virtues of childhood and memory are in evidence, not least the transcendent power of a child’s mind. Like most of Europe, he writes, London in 1950 was “still bombed flat and all the people struggling to stay alive. Still, for the children that survived, the wreckage was our playground.”

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Night, Again

Contemporary Fiction

From Vietnam, 2nd edition

Edited by Linh Dinh

Seven Stories Press:

174 pp., $14.95 paper

THERE is a wonderful tradition in Vietnamese literature of using irreverent, playful writing to subvert those in power. It is part of a larger, deeply held belief that literature is, above all, as editor Linh Dinh writes in his introduction to this collection, “a moral guide.” In Vietnam, there is a kind of cultural reverence for the written word, something we in the West tend to forget or take for granted. Some of these authors, born in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, have emigrated to France and the United States, but many still live in Vietnam. Their stories are full of yellow leaves, grains of rice, river spirits, lime leaves, characters forgetting and remembering, and violence. “It would have been a peaceful neighborhood,” writes Do Khiem in “The Pre-War Atmosphere,” “if not for the sound of gunfire, the wrong soundtrack for the scene.”

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My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes

Uncensored Iranian Voices

Edited by Lila Azam Zanganen

Beacon: 132 pp., $12 paper

ANTHOLOGIES can throw our preconceived ideas into chaos. Stories like these from Iran, where 50% of the population is younger than 25, can be especially revealing. These 15 essays, by a philosopher, a human rights lawyer, a visual artist, a filmmaker, a journalist and others, reveal the Iran of store mannequins, secret sex parties, women’s rights, street culture and night life. “At present,” writes Azar Nafisi, author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran” in her essay “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of,” “the most powerful forces for change in Iran’s social landscape are emanating from women as well as from the younger generation of Iranians, the very children who, the Islamists had hoped, would in time rekindle their parents’ long-lost political fervor.”