Round About Midnight

TK-page paperback / 5.5" x 8.5" / ISBN 9781589882249
Publication Date: 5/11/2027 (available for preorder)

Over the course of a decade, James Campbell wrote nearly fifty profiles for The Guardian. In Round About Midnight, he has collected and reworked seven of them—Seamus Heaney, V. S. Naipaul, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Hilary Mantel, Shirley Hazzard, J. G. Ballard, and Gore Vidal—along with three memoir-essays about literary figures that he knew personally, James Baldwin, Eddie Linden, and Jim Haynes. Taken together, these profiles and essays offer a view on to a literary landscape which the attention-sapping deluge of gadgetry and tech has made hazier in the intervening years. 

PRAISE FOR JAMES CAMPBELL'S BOOKS:

"James Campbell has ably blended both scholarship and personal recollection."
―New York Times on Talking at the Gates

"Immensely readable, serious, careful, and informed."
―Boston Globe on Talking at the Gates

"A uniquely personal miscellany of wit, weirdness, and waspish provocation."
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post on NB by J. C.

"A spirited tale of an unconventional road to adulthood, livelihood, and the world of literature."
―Booklist on Just Go Down to the Road

“A witty and insightful look at a fascinating, romantic land by a native son.”
―Library Journal on Invisible Country


James Campbell's books include Invisible Country: A Journey through Scotland, Gate Fever: Voices from a Prison, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin, Just Go Down to the Road (Paul Dry Books, 2022), and NB by J. C. (Paul Dry Books, 2023). For many years he was an editor and columnist at the Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.