May 2013
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World Turtle Day
There’s rubbish in the ocean now far from any land, Coca-Cola tins perhaps circling among the icebergs. If turtles have memories the beaches the old ones remember are not what they would find now. Perhaps the only decent thing would be a monster Turtlearium charging a proper admission, with turtle rides 10p and YOUR PHOTO WITH A SEA TURTLE 50p. Something has got to be whole in some way...
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Jan Morris: Travels Round My House
Truly surprising, and much more entertaining, was … Jan Morris: Travels Round My House which … took us to Morris’s home, a converted barn in the remote countryside of north Wales, looking for objects that might explain the conundrums of her complicated personality. Why, for instance, does she keep a gravestone below stairs, etched ready and waiting for erection once she’s dead and...
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Not Writing It Down
“Aren’t you going to write another book?”
Then under that severe gaze of his that demanded the full truth, it just burst out of me. “I? No. Let me tell you why. As a little boy I often went on school trips. The trips were a lot of fun, but then the next day our teacher assigned us a composition on the subject, ‘Our school trip.’ And when we came back from summer vacations we always had to write a...
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Decades Later And Across An Ocean, A Novel Gets... →
NYRB Classics series editor Edwin Frank was interviewed, along with Anna Gavalda, by NPR’s All Things Considered, about the amazing success John Williams’s Stoner is enjoying throughout Europe.
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Early Praise for Hickory
What is this story about? Carter: A mouse. Nothing really happens to the mouse. Holland: He gets his toes pinched by a booby trap for mice!
What is your favorite thing about the book? Carter: The beginning where he goes outside. Holland: Hop. She’s a grasshopper.
What will happen to Hop if the frost comes? Holland: She would get killed. Carter: She will die.
So what did they do? Holland:...
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Book Club Members Unite!
Hey @nyrbclassics - I was reading Turtle Diary in cafe in NYT building & stranger came up & said: “Ah, the NYRB book club!” Fans everywhere!
— Levi Stahl (@levistahl) May 17, 2013
Proof that signing up for our subscription book club is an excellent way to meet like-minded strangers. If you sign up by June 15 (2013) you will get Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary (and a free...
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Hickory and Hop
“The grasshopper’s name was Hope, so Hickory called her Hop for short. Together they went exploring, and they discovered the sweetness of blackberries and the sharpness of sassafras twigs. They learned useful things—that chicory is bitter, but sorrel only sour. And they learned useless things too—that the track of a snail is silver winding through the grass, but the light of a...
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“I tried Ivy Compton-Burnett when I was 20, and it didn’t take. I thought, ‘She...”
– Hilary Mantel on Ivy Compton-Burnett and other writers she feels sympathetic or antipathetic to (Henry James is out, Alice and William in) in the New York Times’s “By the Book” column
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"Kafka on the shores of occupied France"
Though it was originally published in the ‘50s (and this month, newly translated by New York Review Books Classics), the absurdity of Transit makes it feel timeless — like it exists outside of any real time or place. But that’s the haunting part: Transit is a very real story, based on Seghers’s own experience as a German Jew trying to flee France. The result is a darker Catch-22. There’s a...
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In a word, man must create his own essence: it is...
Existentialism: A Clarification, from We Have Only This Life to Live.
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Kingsley Amis Goes to Church
“What’s it like in your country? We hear so many strange things of it which can’t be true. Not all of them.”
“It’s beautiful, Hubert, which nobody believes who hasn’t seen it. And various, because it’s so extensive. Seven hundred miles from north to south, four hundred miles across in places, three times France. In the north-east in winter,...
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Green Men
Kingsley Amis’s very funny and very scary ghost story, The Green Man, has just been released. The cover features an excellent depiction of the Green Man by Eric Hanson, following in the footsteps of many wild cover variations, including the above, and this one too.
Striking a different tone altogether is the soft-core 1970s Panther edition. Thanks to Ryan Britt’s Tor.com review...
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The Eternal Pizza and Rosé
We entered the pizzeria. I took a seat facing the open fire…. They brought the usual rosé. The first two glasses of rosé always go down like water. I like watching the open fire, you know, and the way the man hits the dough with his bent wrist. Yes, things like that are the only things in the world I really like. That is to say, I like things that have been and will always be there. You...
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On Monday, Throw back a pint with Kingsley Amis
On Monday, May 6th at 7 PM, writers Lev Grossman, Nathaniel Adams, and Jen Vafidis will discuss Kingsley Amis’ newly reissued novels, the alternate history The Alteration and the ghost story The Green Man at the Half King. Co-sponsored with Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Full details here.
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Tonight! Martin Amis, Edwin Frank, Jochen... →
part of the 2013 Pen World Voices Festival
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“Victor was a blue-point Siamese, a neutered tom-cat now in the third year of his...”
– Kingsley Amis knew his cats. This is from his ghost-story The Green Man (which is also the name of the narrator’s inn, from which dogs are banned in deference to the feline Victor Hugo).
and here’s Amis’s poem “Cat English.”
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How an “ordinary Missouri English professor”...
‘Stoner is magic,’ said Oscar van Gelderen, publisher of Lebowski, which published the Dutch edition in 2012 and now has over 100,000 copies in print. Currently, it’s the #1 bestseller in the Netherlands, where it’s been near the top of the charts for weeks. It was one of Israel’s bestselling books of 2012. And it’s moving units in France, Spain, and Italy; over 50,000 copies have...
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April 2013
32 posts
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The Conversation of the Hours
The first hour says to the second, I am a hermit. The second hour says to the third, I am an abyss. The third hour says to the fourth, put on morning. The fourth hour says to the fifth, stars rush down. The fifth hour says to the sixth, we are late. The sixth hour says to the seventh, animals are clocks also. The seventh hour says to the eighth, you are...
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“Good God am I glad someone started a topic about... →
People are talkin’ (about our books on Reddit)
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"The funniest novel I have ever read"
Are you a rereader? What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?
I don’t do much rereading anymore because I’ve been ill and feel that I’m running out of time. But recently I did reread all of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, and was pleased to find that he was almost as thoughtful as, say, Olivia Manning, although his snobbery sometimes grates. Also, I enjoyed Lucky Jim, by Kingsley...
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Wouldn't you like to help kickstart an Uncle... →
All six Uncle books by J.P. Martin, illustrated by Quentin Blake, in one lavish edition with new introductions by Neil Gaiman and more.
We publish Uncle and Uncle Cleans Up in our Children’s Collection—but there’s more Uncle to be had.
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Renata Adler/Issue Project...
This gentleman was reading Renata Adler’s Speedboat on the Q train to work this morning. You can hear Renata live in the flesh tomorrow at 155 Freeman St., between Manhattan & Franklin Aves in Greenpoint, as part of the Issue Project Room “Littoral” event series, tomorrow at 8 p.m. She’ll be reading from her novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark, and talking with our...
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“And an invented person makes the greatest impression, naturally, on the...”
– From Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s short story “Someone Else’s Theme,” collected in Memories of the Future.
Thanks to biblioklept.org for alerting us to this excellent excerpt.
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"Blood and Tragedy: The Caucasus in the Literary...
Ironically, it was when Russia was ruled by a Georgian—Stalin—that cruelty toward people of the Caucasus was most vehemently recrudescent. In 1944, he simply deported about a half a million of them eastward from land on which they had lived for centuries. The only reason this mass displacement is little remembered is because there were so many other atrocities taking place. It is...
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A conversation with the devil
‘Now then, I want you to stand up to Underhill and, uh…Put paid to him.’ ‘How?’ ‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. Sorry to be a bore, but I’ll have to leave the whole thing to you. I hope you make it.’ ‘Surely you know? Whether I will or not?’ The young man sighed, swallowed audibly and smoothed his fair hair. ‘No. I...
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Renata Adler at the Center for Fiction
“Well, you know. His wife was chased by an elephant.” “No.” “How extraordinary.” “Yes. it was too awful. They were watching the elephants, when she simply fell down. The elephant ran over and knelt on her. she was in the hospital for months.” “No.” “How extraordinary.” “Quite different from anything she ever got from Roger, I expect.”
Renata Adler reading last night, perhaps from this,...
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When in Doubt—Wash
‘If you have committed any kind of error and anyone scolds you—wash,’ she was saying. ‘If you slip and fall off something and somebody laughs at you—wash. If you are getting the worst of an argument and want to break off hostilities until you have composed yourself, start washing. Remember, every cat respects another cat at her toilet. That’s our first rule of...
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“I was indeed a cat, many generations ago.”
Paul Gallico was a legendary sports writer and a best-selling author of adventure novels (The Poseidon Adventure among them), but his special subject was the inner lives of the animals we see everyday without paying much mind. We’ve just published his The Abandoned, in which a lonely boy finds himself transformed into a cat and is schooled in the ways that humans wrong animals. The...
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Tove Jansson: The Artist Whose Writing You Need To... →
How did we miss this nice endorsement of Tove Jansson from inkt|art, a journal of women in comics? (A journal that lists Nicole Hollander as “grande dame” in its masthead!)
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The End of the Avant-Garde →
Tonight at the NYU Humanities Initiative at 20 Cooper Sq, at 6 pm, a conversation with Richard Sieburth, Michael Kunichika, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Matvei Yankelevich, celebrating the release of Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think.
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Don Share on Miguel Hernández →
Today, at Poet’s House, 7 pm, Don Share, senior editor of Poetry magazine, reads from and discusses the work (and his award-winning translation) of Miguel Hernández, framing this great poet’s life and poetry in the context of his time and the poets around him.
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