November 2011
38 posts
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Teaching The Bear That Wasn't
We’ve always said that The Bear That Wasn’t would make an excellent graduation gift (“Welcome to the real world, kid!”), but now Rosalie Franks, blogging at The Southern Poverty Law Center, has a suggestion about how to work the book into a lesson plan:
Through this tale, students consider a profound question: Is each one of us who we think we are or are we defined by...
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Correction! Alley Cat Books is not Dog Eared Books
The sharp-eyed Harmless Balderdash has noted that the photographs we posted yesterday were falsely reported as being of Dog Eared Books when they were in fact taken of the all-new (and not yet officially opened) shop Alley Cat Books. What isn’t up for dispute is that both shops have the same owner and that they each have a dedicated NYRB Classics section. Hurray!
Here is a photo of the...
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Bookstore of the Day: Dog Eared Books in San...
Our West Coast Spy Network has sent us a couple photographs of a very special shelf in a very special bookstore*:Dog Eared Books Alley Cat Books in the Mission District of San Francisco. How special is this place? In the shop’s own words, “at Dog Eared you’ll find anarchist magazines next to Vanity Fair, Nina Simone cds next to Joy Division and Michelle Tea poetry next to...
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Mac the Knife—the Literary Critic →
“Oh the shark has pretty teeth, dear
And he shows them, pearly white.”
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Happy Birthday Stefan Zweig
Today in 1881 in Ancona, Italy, Stefan Zweig was born. Here’s André Aciman on Zweig from the introduction to Journey into the Past, which we published in 2010 (we will be publishing Confusion in April, 2012).
The word that keeps coming back is fluent. Stefan Zweig was born fluent. Fluent in everything. Everything seems to come easily to him. Born in 1881 into a very wealthy,...
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The Millions on Elisabeth Gille's 'The Mirador' →
The Millions has posted an extensive review of Elisabeth Gille’s The Mirador, a “dreamed biography” of her mother, Irène Némirovsky.
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Thoreau's Thanksgiving, 1858
Who better to contemplate on Thanksgiving that Henry David Thoreau. We found this 1858 entry in his Journal 1837-1861. Makes one feel grateful for food and family, and more accepting of traffic jams and cold weather:
Nov. 25. While most keep close to their parlor fires this cold and blustering Thanksgiving afternoon, and think with compassion of those who are abroad, I find the sunny south...
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Happy Thanksgiving from Jules Renard
From Jules Renard’s Nature Stories, in the chapter named TURKEYS. The illustration is by Pierre Bonnard:
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SHE’S STRUTTING ABOUT THE FARMYARD as if she was living under the monarchy. The other fowl merely go on eating all the time, anything they can find. She has regular mealtimes and, in between, her only concern is to look grand. All her feathers are starched and the ends of her...
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Red Shift at The Alchemy of Writing →
To sum up, captivating and cryptic, with realistic, unique characters and situations, all presented with a masterful use of mystery and suspense. Add to that spell-binding dialogue, rich with layer on layer, and it’s a work that resonates with you long after.
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The Pumpkin Eater
At our Goodreads bookclub we have been reading Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater this month. And while there is plenty to discuss on a well-written book that predates Betty Friedan and speaks to a complex and modern version of relationships and love; one of the great things about reading such a book is the discovery of related works. For example, compare the images of the movie The...
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Read Aloud Dad Loves 'Beyond the Pawpaw Trees' →
“Sometimes you just feel it.
Boom, boom.
The heartbeat of a book. Unmistakable.
But with other books there is no sound.
They tiptoe silently, coming up right behind you, and then they seize your heart without you feeling it.
It is strange how you can fall victim to a good book.
Reading aloud calmly and then, all of a sudden, boom!
You stare for a second, incredulous.
You blink. You...
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Neil Gaiman on The Simpsons
Neil Gaiman is going to be on The Simpsons this Sunday, and if you think animation and Gaiman go hand-in-hand we highly recommend this animated video of James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks from B&N.com. Gaiman narrates the video, and wrote the introduction to our book. Here’s the first the first couple sentences from his introduction: “This book, the one you are holding, The 13...
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The Company They Kept Volume II
From the NYRB Collections comes The Company They Kept, Volume Two, a collection of 27 accounts of friendships between authors, poets, and artists, written by contributors to The New York Review of Books. The first chapter is by Anna Akhmatova on her friend Osip Mandelstam (in 2004 we published The Selected Poems of Osip Mandestam translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin), here’s the...
Congratulations Stephen Greenblatt
Congrats to Stephen Greenblatt (pictured on the far left), winner of a National Book Award for non-fiction for his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Mr. Greenblatt, along with Ramie Targoff, has edited and written the introduction for our upcoming Religio Medici and Urne-Burial by Sir Thomas Browne, which will release in May of next year.
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A Simenon character's definition of "tiresome"
low-country:
I’ve just found a stranger in my house … in bed, in one of the rooms on the third floor … He died at the exact moment I reached him … Will you see about it, Gérard? … It’s really tiresome.
—Georges Simenon, The Strangers in the House (1940)
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Patrick Leigh Fermor in Harper's
In the November issue of Harper’s magazine, Robert Macfarlane has written an article titled ‘Voyagers: The restless genius of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin.’ Here’s the first two paragraph, referring to the trip that was the basis for Leigh Fermor’s famous travel books: A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water:
In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick...
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Happy Birthday Daniel Pinkwater
Happy Birthday Daniel Pinkwater (or Daniel M. Pinkwater, or Daniel Manus Pinkwater, or D. Manus Pinkwater). To celebrate his birthday we thought we’d share the author bio from Lizard Music, recently re-published in our Children’s Collection series:
DANIEL PINKWATER has written about one hundred books, many of them good. Lizard Music was almost the first one he wrote, and remains...
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On Gyula Krúdy
When reading Gyula Krúdy’s Sunflower, one is immediately thrust into a Budapest clouded in mystic realism; deceased, heartbroken lovers climb out of their coffins to win back their true loves, and memories of the sordid characters strolling the dark streets of ‘Pest’ are so haunting and real that they can assume human form. These harrowing memories and resurrected corpses, however,...
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Happy Birthday Constance Rourke
Today in 1885 Constance Rourke, author of American Humor, was born in Cleveland, OH. Luc Sante has also commemorated the date with this little bio in Hilobrow:
CONSTANCE ROURKE (1885-1941) died — from a slip on an icy porch — way too young. If she had finished her projected five-volume Roots of American Culture, it might have synthesized all her research into a grand Key to the American...
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Hav by Jan Morris →
From a review of Jan Morris’s Hav up at Full Stop:
“Hav is a fictional travel narrative and in it, Morris mixes fact into fiction like mushrooms into scrambled eggs – if you look for the bits of mushroom, you can pick them out of the eggs, but unless you spend a lot of time scraping, you’ll never get all the egg off. When Morris wrote the first half of this novel, published in 1985...
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“Within a week I have had made a pair of corduroy pants, which cost when done...”
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Henry David Thoreau, Journal entry, May 8, 1857
Was HDT a founding member of the Corduroy Appreciation Club? Did he look anything like this fella in his get-up?
[Repost in honor of the Corduroy-est Corduroy day of the century]
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Veteran's Day Book →
In honor of Veteran’s Day we’re highlighting John Horne Burns’s The Gallery. Written in 1947, the material for the book comes from Burns’s experiences serving in Military Intelligence, both investigating charges against US troops in Europe and POWs. It is also one the first to look at homosexuality in the military, and the devastating impact the war had on both US soldiers...
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Which NYRB Classics have you read? A Facebook poll →
We put up a Facebook poll for which NYRB Classics you may have read. Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica is in the lead, followed by Stoner and then The Dud Avocado. Unfortunately only 100 titles can be put on the poll, still we thought it might be fun.
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“I remember all this part so very clearly. And I remember a little later...”
– The Dud Avocado (via gimme-kisses)
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Alice James by Jean Strouse reviewed by Dead... →
Topics discussed include illness, failure, Freudian psychology, sexuality, biography, and the dynamics in one quite exceptional family.
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Beyond the Pawpaw Trees
We have recently republished Palmer Brown’s Beyond the Pawpaw Trees. In it, Anna Lavinia, and her cat Strawbery, leave home for a trip to visit her Aunt Sophia Maria, the sister of her father who has been away for two years “chasing rainbows.”
To get there—see the map above—Anna takes the train to the end of the line, is the guest of a pasha, visits the island...
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Alice James by Jean Strouse
Last week we released Alice James, the biography of Henry and William’s sister, by Jean Strouse. Alice is most famous for her Diaries, which present her witty and insightful opinions on life around her. She has often been considered a feminist icon: struggling through her multiple illness and the social conventions that kept her, as a woman, from achieving the worldly success that she...
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Red Shift by Alan Garner
This week we published Alan Garner’s Red Shift. Garner is famous for his children’s fantasy stories and re-tellings of traditional British folk tales, firmly rooted in the landscape, history, and folklore of his native county, Cheshire. Red Shift is considered one of his best works, and while sharing the natural landscape of Chesire—a central theme is Mow Crop, pictured...
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Act of Passion
Roger Ebert wrote the introduction for Act of Passion by Georges Simenon, the recent addition to our series of his roman durs (hard novels). Here’s half of a paragraph that explains the book very well:
Act of Passion is essentially a question posing as an answer. As Charles Alavoine [the protagonist and narrator] writes his long letter to an examining magistrate, he implies that if the...
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Paul Goodman Changed My Life
Last night a handful of us went to see Paul Goodman Changed My Life at the Film Forum in NYC. The keynote on the film’s poster reads “The most influential man you’ve never heard of,” and while many remember him very well, still others are unaware of his impact. Goodman was a philosopher, activist who became very influential in the 60s student and anti-Vietman movements,...
