January 2012
35 posts
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WatchThe Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, and has rapidly been circulating through the book world. We like to think that we are doing a similar job: finding books a happy home, and brightening the lives of their readers.
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Meet Edwin Frank - our editor →
There are a couple of errors here—including the name of our managing editor—but if you’re interested in the beginnings of NYRB Classics check it out.
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Berlin Stories in The New York Times
…These essayish ‘stories,’ most appearing in English for the first time, reveal the exuberance (and, in a heart-rending coda, the defeat) of a young artist initiating himself into the glorious bustle of his adopted city. Everything is observed in language that asserts his professed posture as ‘a perfumed and mincing know-it-all and write-it-all.’ To Walser, Berlin’s...
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An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori
Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol got a great review in the British magazine The Spectator’s “Book Club”. It’s a bit of a staff favorite here as well :
The novel is a sensuous celebration of the variety and detail of life, and of the distinctive perceptions of childhood, which readers will be inclined to compare with Proust. It is a profound...
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Travel
If not for the accident of this journey, she herself would have died, rotted away, and turned to dust with no inkling of their glory. She’s been living as though all this didn’t exist, never saw it, hardly cared to; like a fool she dozed of in this tiny little room, hardly longer than her arm, hardly wide enough for her feet, just a night away, a day away from this infinitude,...
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“[The madwoman said] ‘How is humanity these days, prince? I remember it as being...”
– The Jokers, Albert Cossery — no joke, one of the best books I’ve read this year. (via fuckyeahmentalhealth)
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Happy Australia Day - continued
We are continuing our celebration of Australia Day by sharing from Norman Lindsay’s classic children’s book, The Magic Pudding. We’re dedicating this one to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who will probably prefer to forget today. This is Bunyip Bluegum reciting; he is, of course, addressing the Pudding thieves Possum and Wombat.
The blows you feel we do not deal ...
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Happy Australia Day!
Happy Australia Day! We wanted to share the slightly controversial national day of Australia by sharing a paragraph from the recently released Walkabout by James Vance Marshall. The action so far: a plane has crashed in the middle of the Australian Outback, leaving two American children as the only survivors. Stranded in a harsh environment, they run into a young Aboriginal boy, in the middle of...
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We were wondering … Where do you buy (or borrow) your NYRB Classics? And does that shop/store/library/aquarium have a Tumblr blog we should be following?
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A Very Short Review
“Her brothers weren’t the only smart ones.”
—- a “Very Short Review” by Tyler Cowen in The New York Times Magazine’s “The One Page Magazine”
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“There is no form. Man produces gestalts, and cuts form out of the plethora of...”
– Robert Sheckley, “Warm” (Galaxy Science Fiction June 1953)
“Warm” is collected in our forthcoming Sheckley story volume, The Store of the Worlds, coming this spring.
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Dwight Macdonald in The New Statesman
Dwight Macdonald’s Masscult and Midcult was reviewed by Leo Robson in the British newspaper the New Stateman recently, with particular attention paid to the variety of writing that Macdonald is famed for:
I first read the name Dwight Macdonald in the pages of Pauline Kael’s review collections, where it was invoked frequently and always with deadly intent. In a review of...
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Happy 150th Birthday, Edith Wharton
Today in 1862 Edith Wharton was born in New York City. To celebrate, The Center for Fiction is hosting a marathon reading of The House of Mirth by contemporary female authors, organized by Roxana Robinson, on Thursday at 5 p.m. Robinson also selected and wrote the introduction for our own collection of Wharton stories, The New York Stories of Edith Wharton. Here are the first two paragraphs from...
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Robert Walser's Berlin Stories
Today is the publication date for Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, a collection of his early stories, with some later ones as well, set in Berlin where he followed his elder brother in 1905, translated by Susan Bernofsky and others including Christopher Middleton. We thought we’d share the first story in the book, titled “Good Morning, Giantess!”:
It’s as if a giantess...
"High Dike" by Li Ho
Continuing with a celebration of Chinese New Year, we’re sharing poems from Poems of the Late T’ang, translated and edited by A.C. Graham. This one is called “High Dyke” by Li Ho (791-817; also spelt Li He), another member of Han Yü’s circle whose work was ignored in the eighteenth-century anthology Three Hundred T’ang Poems but later returned to prominence...
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Happy Chinese New Year!
To celebrate Chinese New Year we thought we’d share some poetry from our edition of Poems of the Late T’ang, translated and edited by A.C. Graham. This one is from Meng Chiao (751-814), perhaps the best poet from the circle around Han Yu, and famous for his bare, bleak style.
Sadness of the Gorges
Above the gorges, one thread of sky: Cascades in the gorges twine a thousand cords....
nakedness tonight: The Other Elizabeth Taylor →
nakednesstonight:
I have been reading A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor, who is of course THE OTHER ELIZABETH TAYLOR, and I can’t think of anything worse than trying to publish in the late 50s, early 60s and having your name be the same as one of the biggest movie stars of all time. Even worse,…
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Fall 2012 Books Preview: Part II
Yesterday we posted the first half of our Fall 2012 list, and today we are previewing the second half. This does include all of the imprints under the New York Review Books umbrella, which includes NYRB Classics (all the titles yesterday were Classics), The New York Review’s Children’s Collection, The Little Bookroom, and NYRB Collections.
Happy Moscow by Andrey Platonov: Andrey...
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Fall 2012 Books preview: Part I
As we prepare to officially launch our Fall 2012 list we wanted to share our upcoming books. This is the first part of the season, and we’ll post the remainder later:
Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman: Paul Goodman was a sociologist, philosopher, poet, writer, educator, anarchist, and gay rights activist. He was one of the most influential thinkers in the second half of the 20th century,...
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The Ten Most Difficult Words to Translate →
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The Company They Kept, Volume Two
She disliked being photographed and usually hated the result. The whitening hair grew thick above a face each year somehow rounder and softer, like a bemused, blue-lidded planet, a touch too large, in any case, for a body that seemed never quite to have reached maturity. In early life the proportions would have been just right. A 1941 snapshot (printed in last winter’s Vassar Bulletin)...
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Walkabout
We are proud to release today Walkabout by James Vance Marshall (it’s actually a complicated authorship, the introduction below has more details), which was famously adapted into a film by Nicolas Roeg, starring David Gulpilil in his first role.
The novel is different from the film, but still captures the conflict between two very different cultures, and the surprising beauty of the...
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Elizabeth von Arnim in Downton Abbey
We know we are jumping on the bandwagon, but we couldn’t resist. The New York Times ran a piece about the publishing world’s eager reaction to Downton Abbey, and we just had to chime in with our own related author. In the first episode of the new season the odious Molesley presents a book to the virtuous servant Anna in hopes that it will win her over. The book is Elizabeth von...
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"I finally get it; I finally feel like I’ve grown... →
Another convert to the church of Mme Gallant.
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An Ermine in Czernopol
This past week we released An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori in an original translation by Philip Boehm. Reminiscent of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the story is about the childhood of a brother and sister growing up in a declining aristocratic family in Czernopol, a town with a breathtaking melange of ethnicities (Jewish, Germany, Romanian, Russian, etc.), no longer part of...
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“People as a rule do mean much more than they understand.”
– The Pilgrim Hawk, Glenway Wescott (via winterlief)
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Proud Beggars
The following is a paragraph from Albert Cossery’s Proud Beggars. In this scene, Gohar, an ex-professor who gave up him successful life and career to enjoy the ‘peace’ of poverty, is being interrogated by Nour El Dine, the police officer who is investigating the murder of a prostitute and whose double-life as figure of authority and gay lover makes him miserable. The following...
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A Very Angel New Year
“After Christmas, the days were of an enervating neutrality. The watery light stayed later each day, hung colourless above the railway-bridge and behind the gray and yellow brick terraces. The deep darkness of winter was over, the muffled cosiness of the foggy afternoons, and now there would be two months or more of biting winds raking the bare branches and this pale light stretching out a...
