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Greetings from Hoxton Square, where the office is much tidier than it has been in many months in preparation for the arrival of our new spring publications. As we’ve spent so much time of late looking forward, we thought it apt to delve back into the vast Slightly Foxed archive and landed in Issue 6, published in June 2005.

There we meet Mary Flanagan reflecting on the summer of her second year of university and learn of her particular attachment to James Baldwin’s extraordinary novel, Giovanni’s Room. Please find an extract below, together with a link to read the full article. We hope you’ll enjoy it, and that this weekend brings much good reading.

With best wishes, as ever, from the SF office staff
Hattie, Jess & Jemima

On the Loose


MARY FLANAGAN
 
After my sophomore year at university, I took the $500 I had saved teaching swimming at the local playground and went to Europe, leaving behind the man I then thought I would marry. Michael had just graduated and, that summer, was doing social work among the street gangs of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

He wanted me to leave university for a year and travel with him in Mexico, a country he’d visited and loved. I couldn’t or wouldn’t decide and worried about my scholarship and what my parents would say. I’d also fallen in love, in advance, with Greece and was determined to go there. My future was a purposeful haze, and I probably thought that by excluding nothing I could have everything.

In August 1963 I was staying in Rome and running out of money. Then Michael’s letter arrived. I stood on the pavement outside American Express and read it three times. He was coming to Italy. He had a cheap flight and would meet me in the Piazza Navona on 21 August at 6 p.m. From there we’d go to Greece. He loved me, this I knew. I also loved him. But I had turned 20 that May and was, as we used to say, ‘on the loose’ and wanting to be just that little bit looser if I could get away with it. I was escaping my upbringing (small town Irish-American Catholic), and I considered this mission almost but not quite accomplished. Michael was beautiful, he was sexy and he was good. I could not believe my luck. But it occurred to me that he might be re-entering the novel of my life a couple of chapters too soon.

To compensate for this structural flaw, I went to Athens and had the adventure I wanted to have. Then I nipped back to Rome, found a seedy pensione and holed up there until he arrived. For two days I lived on peaches and pasta and read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room . . . 

Click here to read the full article for free on our website

James Baldwin

Giovanni’s Room

The James Baldwin Bundle


Go Tell It on the Mountain

Drawing on Baldwin’s own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, this blazing tale is full of passion and guilt, of secret sinners and prayers singing on the wind.

Another Country

When Another Country appeared in 1962, it caused a literary sensation. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, Baldwin draws us into a Bohemian underworld.

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