August 2012
52 posts
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Thomas Browne on the Current Political Climate
NYRB: Sir Thomas, do you care to comment on the election cycle today, as the Republican National Convention winds down and the Democrats gear up?
Thomas Browne: In all disputes, so much as there is of passion, so much there is of nothing to the purpose; for then reason like a bad hound spends upon a false sent, and forsakes the question first started. And this is one reason why controversies are never determined, for though they be amply proposed, they are scarce at all handled, they doe so swell with unnecessary Digressions, and the Parenthesis on the party, is often as large as the maine discourse upon the Subject.
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The Republican National Convention. In...
Okay, okay, you might be sick of hearing about Mitt, but what about his father? What happens when Digger Emmett Grogan meets George Romney, from Grogan’s memoir Ringolevio. Read the rest of the story at the Daily Kos.
One day a strange thing happened which afforded Emmett a golden opportunity to scare the living shit out of a man who might have been and still may be elected...
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Renoir père et fils
When I think that I might have been born into a family of intellectuals! It would have taken me years to get rid of all their ideas and see things as they are.
—Jean Renoir, in Renoir, My Father, his biography of his father the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Renoir père’s early work was recently the subject of an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel called “Renoir. Between Bohemia...
Oh Daphne, DAPHNE
Sure, maybe it’s just your generic “this old house is full of seeeeeecrets and and irons you could never find at Restoration Hardware” schtick, but, let’s face it, everyone who wrote after du Maurier owes a debt to du Maurier. “The Birds”? That was her, too! So, obviously du Maurier is a genius, let’s talk about Rebecca.
Don’t Look Now but The...
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Boisterous Russian Wits
Like the countless domed churches and monasteries with their towers and crosses scattered over sacred pious Russia, countless numbers of tribes, generations, nations seethe in all their variety and rush over the face of the earth. And each and every nation which carries its innate promise of strength, which is full of the soul’s creative abilities, its own well-defined peculiarity and...
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Memoirs of a Revolutionary in The Guardian, again.
When I first read these memoirs, as a young would-be Soviet historian at the time of their first publication in English, the paragraph that struck me most poignantly and remained imprinted was Serge’s confession that ‘the feeling of having so many dead men at my back, many of them my betters in energy, talent, and historical character, has often overwhelmed me, and that this feeling...
Dorothy Baker and David Park
Back in the early years, when Dorothy Baker wrote Young Man with a Horn, it was with real admiration that David spoke of Dorothy spending night after night sitting in speakeasies in New York City, soaking up the jazz and impressions of the musicians. Her book was published in 1938, with David’s small drawing of a horn on the book jacket. At that time Howard and Dorothy were living in the...
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Thomas Browne at the Mini-mall
Homage to Sir Thomas Browne by Anne and Patrick Poirier. Photograph from Literary Norfolk
Today, Norwich, where Browne lived for much of his life, commemorates its most famous resident with a sculpture of his brain near the place of Browne’s internment. A pamphlet about the sculpture cheerily notes that Browne “was very ‘brainy’” and that “his house was approximately where the café Pret a...
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Cassandra at the Wedding
Of course, nothing illustrates so vividly as family the essentially unsatisfactory nature of being a person. The first thing one learns in life is that the self is a partial thing; at the very moment of birth one is consigned to terminal separateness. The one attribute we can be sure that we all share is incompleteness. And perhaps that’s our strongest suit, because without it where would...
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“My background is deep and set in deep time, and in a narrow space, oral...”
– Alan Garner, author of Red Shift, interviewed in The Guardian
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Stefan Zweig in The New Yorker
Leo Carey has written the “A Critic at Large” piece in the current issue of The New Yorker about Stefan Zweig, five of whose books we have published: Chess Story, Beware of Pity, The Post-Office Girl, Journey Into the Past, and most recently, Confusion. Here’s Carey on Chess Story, considered one of his best novellas.
In Chess Story a group of men on an ocean liner bound for...
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Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking on NPR's Weekend...
WERTHEIMER: Let’s just talk for a minute about Elizabeth David and especially about the book Summer Cooking. I think that it is a classic. That’s how I think of it - fun to read and fun to cook from, fun to sort of use for ideas. Do you think that book stands the test of time? I mean as a professional cook, what do you think?
GRIGSON: Oh, I think totally. Chefs, food writers and...
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Black Cat Appreciation Day
So you’re looking for a way to celebrate Black Cat Appreciation Day and you’ve absolutely worn out your books about Jenny Linsky, the shy little black cat of Greenwich Village? You’d like to see something in black, mmm, but with a little more hauteur? We hear you. Why not try on Carbonel, King of Cat Country, and star of Barbara Sleigh’s addictive trilogy? Here he is,...
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A sneak peek from The Other
And up in the barn, moving from the open door, out of the sunshine, stepping back into the shadow of the loft and once more laying his glasses down, Russell Perry blinked into the dim void and took four long steps to the edge of the loft. Arms flung wide, he leaped. ‘I’m the King of the Mountain!’ Down and down and down. Hardly soaring, but dropping merely, the smell of...
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The Expendable Man in The New Yorker Page-Turner...
Her [Dorothy B. Hughes’s] books were widely praised for their atmospheres of fear and suspense, and criticized when they reached, as the New York Times said of The Fallen Sparrow, ‘toward conflict and situations that are rather beyond the usual whodunit scheme.’ But this is Hughes’s point. It is not whodunit, but who-ness itself, that she’s after. By this I do not mean that...
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Sir Thomas Browne Read Today
The New York Times recently published an article about the resurgence of interest in Sir Thomas Browne’s work to coincide with publication of our edition of Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, introduced and edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff. Here’s a description of writers interested and influenced by Browne:
Coleridge numbered him among his ‘first...
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Tyrant Banderas by Ramón del Valle-Inclán
Corpses bobbed in the foaming waves lashing the fortress wall, their bloated bellies bruised black-and-blue. Clamoring mutinously, prisoners climbed the ramparts. The waves rocked the corpses and rolled them up against the prison wall. The blazing sky was home to mangy buzzards, hovering high in the cruelly indifferent turquoise. The prisoner who was mending his blanket broke his thread and...
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Store of the Worlds in Bookforum
…Sheckley’s work is unabashed termite art. He illuminates standard sci-fi’s cutout characters and quasi-magical contraptions with a hallucinatory, Technicolor vibrancy, spinning yarns more fabulist than plausible, banged out as permutations of his own pet obsessions, among them mind control, extraterrestrial psychology, and the cruelties of love. Writing in 1956, his contemporary Damon...
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The Vet's Daughter—Essential Surrealist Reading
Published in 1959 and written in an offbeat style similar to Robert Walser but even stranger, Comyns walks the line between harsh reality and neon-colored dream when Alice learns she can levitate. When her father discovers her powers, he imagines the lucrative possibilities, and the book ends with a struggle between escapist dream and bruise-worthy reality with room for only one outcome.
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Our Most "Rated" Books on Goodreads
When looking up a book on Goodreads one can see how many people have “rated” it. We’ll assume this means read. The other thing that Goodreads does is “combine” editions, so if you look up a hardcover edition and somebody else has reviewed a paperback edition they will all be together (for example The War of the Worlds has 139 editions). Which is fine for...
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It's Tove Jansson's birthday and the ebook of her... →
(click the above for links to on-line and independent booksellers that carry NYRB Classics including the Apple iBookstore)
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Happy Birthday Tove Jansson!
Brunström’s island taxi put Helga ashore on a June evening. She greeted them quietly and solemnly as if at a funeral. Helga was still short, but she had grown in girth. Her face bore an expression of reserved obstinacy. They walked up to the cottage, where a fish soup stood ready on the stove, and had a hard time getting a conversation started. Helga did not want to unpack....
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Louise Fili Recommends The Wine Dark Sea
Designers and Books has Louise Fili’s reading list, which features Sciascia’s The Wine-Dark Sea - - a collection of thirteen short stories which “deftly captures the essence of Sicily.”
Louise Fili has designed numerous books for NYRB, most notably the titles of our Children’s Series. You can see more of Louise’s work in her upcoming...
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Fukuoka on the Road
Larry Korn, who studied with natural gardening pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka, is taking to the road (in the Pacific Northwest) to talk about The One-Straw Revolution and the publication of a never before translated book by the sensei, Sowing Seeds in the Desert.
Larry’s full calendar can be found on his personal site.
August 9th Port Townsend, WA Public Talk, Port Townsend Community...
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Ride a Cockhorse reviewed in The Guardian
In Ride a Cockhorse, whose title appears less arbitrary the further one goes into the book, Mrs Fitzgibbons actually attempts to rape a man, and the scene is both horrific and comic – as one may indeed compare it with the sex scene with the drum major. For a while I thought that this book, obviously good though it is, had a major problem, in that it suggested that there is something nightmarish,...
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“But it is not on the praises of others, but on his own writings, that [Thomas Browne] is to depend for the esteem of posterity; of which he will not easily be deprived, while learning shall have any reverence among men: for there is no science, in which he does not discover some skill; and scarce any kind of knowledge, profane or sacred, abstruse or elegant, which he does not appear to have...
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Caustic Cover Critic: Hanson on Amis →
The “reliably amazing” (two can play at that game) Caustic Cover Critic has a round-up of our forthcoming Kingsely Amis covers by Eric Hanson, including two you probably haven’t seen yet.
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Publication day for Thomas Browne's Religio Medici...
11. Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty yeares, which to relate, were not a History, but a peece of Poetry, and would sound to common eares like a fable; for the world, I count it not an Inne, but an Hospitall, and a place, not to live, but to die in. The world that I regard is my selfe, it is the Microcosme of mine owne frame, that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but...
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Congratulations Jamaica on 50 Years of...
The Rastafari, he explained, were Ethiopians, and they had all come to live in the Dungle before going back to Africa and their King—but not, he said, before they had conquered the West and driven away the white men. But, I said, none of the slaves that came to the West Indies were from Ethiopia, which was inhabited by a different, a Semitic race. He waved this aside....
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“I wanted to do a tragic love story and, with vague memories of being captivated...”
– Ian McEwan on the inspirations for Atonement, including L.P. Hartley’s Go-Between.
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Happy Birthday Guy de Maupassant!
Guy de Maupassant’s career, at least as the world rapturously acknowledge it, was of course not as a novelist (though he was never a mediocre writer in any form he undertook—not only novels of great brilliance and power, but poetry, plays, travel narratives, journalistic chronicles, criticism) but as the author, in no more than a dozen years, of a remarkable number of what in English are...
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Gore Vidal on E. Nesbit's The House of Arden
[I]n The House of Arden a contemporary boy, Edred, must be tested before he can become Lord Arden and restore the family fortunes. He meets the Mouldiwarp (a mole who appears on the family coat-of-arms). This magic creature can be summoned only by poetry, freshly composed in its honor—a considerable strain on Edred and his sister Elfrida who have not the gift. There are adventures in the past...
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NYRB Forum set up by The Mookse and the Gripes →
The wonderful book review blog The Mookse and the Gripes has started an open forum for discussing all things NYRB. It just launched but we expect to see plenty of posts…
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“The family are in a terrible financial crisis. However we continue to eat as...”
– Nancy Mitford in a letter to her brother (via nicolebonnet)
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As Chester Himes had shown two decades earlier in If He Hollers Let Him Go, the hardboiled noir idiom was well-suited to evoke the pressures and risks of being black in pre-Civil Rights America. Hugh’s upper-middle-class black identity is threatened by the specter of white violence, by the fear of a primordial American racism against which no level of status or attainment can insulate...
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“It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent—lose...”
– Tove Jansson, Fair Play (via goldenfeet)
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4 of our kids' books can be won at this site →
To celebrate its SEVENTH birthday, Vintage Kids’ Books My Kid Loves is giving away four of our children’s books: The Backward Day by Ruth Krauss and Marc Simont; Three Ladies Beside the Sea by Rhoda Levine and Edward Gorey; Uncle by J.P. Martin and Quentin Blake; and Pecos Bill by James Cloyd Bowman and Laura Bannon. Aren’t we all children these days?
Join the Cat Club in...
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Best Made Axes, Best Made Books
The Best Made Company sells these:
They also sell these:
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Apples and books
Our e-books are now available on Apple!
If you search “new york review books” you’ll see all our current e-books up in the iBookstore. And don’t worry non-Apple-users, our website links each individual bookpage to all the e-retailers where we sell e-books. And there are plenty of our books that don’t have e-books at all. So print readers rest easy.
