Lovers’ quarrels in the French countryside, a milestone for a storied imprint, and meat of dubious origins inspired last month’s best bookish soirees, which made the most of July’s long, warm evenings.

July 7: McNally Editions’ Élisabeth Launch Party

Before French filmmaker Éric Rohmer became an icon of New Wave cinema, he was a novelist. His first and only novel, Élisabeth, was published in 1946, four years before he would make his first movie. It took 80 years—and the film-savvy editorial team at McNally Editions—to bring the novel into English for the first time. Published on July 7 as a skin-soft, peach-colored paperback, the release was marked by a gathering at McNally Jackson’s Soho store. The book’s summer release is fitting, since Rohmer’s films are known for their breezy landscapes and sensual compositions.

About halfway through the night, André Aciman ascended halfway up the staircase to survey the room. From his perch, the Call Me By Your Name author, who penned the new introduction for Élisabeth, might have seen crowds of staffers from McNally Editions and New York film hub Metrograph punctuated by displays of bright new book covers, like Andrew Joseph White’s Villa Coco and Sarah Wang’s New Skin, or fingers swiping rainbow cookies off a fast-shrinking platter.

Aciman, who also teaches at CUNY, gave remarks with a warm, professorial air. “What makes [something] Rohmerian? It’s the fact that everybody speaks obliquely, and yet they speak a lot,” he told the room. “The art form is in the speech itself.”

Élisabeth tends to inspire reflections on Rohmer’s artistic process, especially since he came to literature before film. Jeremy Davies, the McNally editor who acquired Élisabeth but was unable to make the party, later described Rohmer’s worlds as “strange and haunting” on a call with PW.

“Kind of anachronistically, we can look at his films and say, Yes, this is where those movies grow out of,” Davies continued. “Rohmer was always a very literary, very verbal filmmaker.”

The marketing and publicity campaign for the book was meant to bring together the film and publishing worlds, introduce younger people to Rohmer, and allow his established fans to “appreciate his talent in a different way,” according to McNally Editions publicist Kate Dwyer.

As part of that campaign, McNally partnered with Metrograph on a Rohmer screening series to promote the book, which will tour the country in the coming days. On the week of its release, Élisabeth was McNally Jackson’s bestselling title, Dwyer said.

July 8: FSG’s 80th Anniversary Open House

Unless you’re taking an unadvised dip in the East River, lower Manhattan’s Financial District isn’t exactly known as a swimming spot. Still, FSG managed to conjure up the image of a poolside oasis—minus the pool—at its 80th anniversary party atop the Equitable Building.

The sun-drenched roof deck at Macmillan’s headquarters was scattered with buoys, buckets of ice-cold white wine, and, most impressively, FSG-branded beach balls. Rainbow fish danced across the covers of the imprint’s new 80th anniversary editions, comprising 10 reissued titles by such authors as Joan Didion, Shirley Hazzard, and Grace Paley featuring sprayed edges in FSG’s signature shade of green.

“The great thing I think is every year, we’re picking books that we hope in the future will feature in a collection of this kind,” FSG president and publisher Mitzi Angel said in her remarks. “We are trying to find writers who can give us some hope that we can have faith in the possibilities of the human.” She turned toward the river, looking out from behind sunglasses at the Statue of Liberty.

On the way out, guests had the chance to grab copies of FSG’s fall titles, including Rachel Cusk’s buzzy new novel Life of M—rumored to be based on the real life of Natalie Portman—and a shiny deluxe edition of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey.

But just as many guests—if not more—went for a branded t-shirt, emblazoned with “Farrar Straus Giroux” stacked in plain black text. FSG’s list may have earned eight decades of recognition on its own merits, but the imprint’s stylish aesthetic has certainly helped.

July 29: The Secret Dinner Launch at Berimbau Brazilian

The last time Celadon Books went all-out for a party was before the pandemic, but the Macmillan imprint knew it had to cook up something special for Raphael Montes’s new crime thriller, executive director of publicity Christine Mykityshyn said.

Servers bustled through the narrow space between the bar and an out-of-use DJ setup (the hosts opted instead to put someone’s phone on aux). A cadre of New York Times staffers huddled in close to hear Montes and his editor, Celadon VP and editor-in-chief Ryan Doherty, talk about the book’s origins on Brazilian BookTok.

According to Doherty, fans in Montes’s home country went rabid for The Secret Dinner, about a group of friends who adopt “unorthodox” methods to keep their lives in Rio afloat, when it was released in 2016. Brazilian fans are “so intense” in general, Mykityshyn said (with nods from Montes), but this specific enthusiasm feels prescient given that cannibal reads have recently become more common fare.

The conversation paused to let Celadon associate marketing director Jaime Noven announce the next dish, a small bowl of mocequa, Brazilian fish stew, made with coconut milk “and hu—” Noven hesitated. “And seagull meat.”

The night was rife with sinister references, and the room hummed with the intimacy of all being in on the same joke. A spicy mezcal-based drink called Dante’s Inferno was served topped by a pink foam that bore a suspicious resemblance to organ meat. Montes, who had supplied the party with shots of Brazilian liquor, was so charming that you almost wondered if he really was hiding something.

Neither Montes nor his Brazilian audience consider The Secret Dinner a horror book. It’s a quirk of the American psyche, perhaps, that almost every guest at the launch did—including horror maven Clay McLeod Chapman, who has penned his own forays into human flesh.

Montes wrote his first novel, Roulette, at age 19, while studying to become a lawyer. He said he was always drawn to crime fiction as a way of “talking about important matters without the reader noticing—so we are talking about violence, culture, inequity, under a good story with many plot twists and stuff.” Since his literary breakout, Montes has also worked as a showrunner on TV crime dramas for HBO and Netflix.

As it turns out, Montes was harboring one big secret, which he revealed on the way out: “I’m actually scared of everything.”