New York Review Books

New York Review Books New York Review Books publishes the NYRB Classics, NYR Children’s Collection, NYRB Poets, and NYR Comics series of books.

Rea Irvin was the first art editor of The New Yorker and the creator of the magazine’s iconic mascot, the butterfly enth...
12/11/2025

Rea Irvin was the first art editor of The New Yorker and the creator of the magazine’s iconic mascot, the butterfly enthusiast Eustace Tilley. He was also the cartoonist behind The Smythes, a 1930s comic strip about a married couple, Margie and John Smythe, and their clumsy attempts to climb the rungs of the social ladder. Satiric but never scathing, humorous but rarely uproarious, these are some of the most plainly beautiful comics ever put to page, with Irvin’s distinct design sense on full display. Out this week, the new edition of The Smythes contains a selection of strips hand-picked by and (who also penned the introduction together) and an afterword by .

Friday is Michel Tournier’s retelling of Robinson Crusoe, taking Defoe’s story of solitude and survival and lending it a...
12/09/2025

Friday is Michel Tournier’s retelling of Robinson Crusoe, taking Defoe’s story of solitude and survival and lending it a more sensual, mythological flavor. Rather than Friday learning from Crusoe, in Tournier’s version it is Crusoe who learns from Friday. Crusoe still attempts to “civilize” the island, but observing Friday, he soon begins to doubt his own impulses. Eventually he wonders if his whole European way of thinking and feeling may be “only a dead weight that he must be willing to shed before embarking upon a new way of life.”

Written over the course of four decades, François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave is among the gre...
12/05/2025

Written over the course of four decades, François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave is among the greatest of all autobiographies. This third of four volumes finds Chateaubriand a man in middle age, his military career behind him, already one of France’s most celebrated writers, and now an ambassador and statesman under the Bourbons. Chateaubriand is once more carried along on the current of chaotic and transformative years in his native country, bearing witness to the revolution of July 1830, the inauguration of Louis-Philippe and the establishment of the July Monarchy, and finally the birth of the short-lived Second Republic.

But Chateaubriand’s memoirs are much more than history retold: they are a melancholic and digressive dispatch from a man in the evening of life trawling an immense archive of memories, regrets, lost passions, and old yearnings. Rendered in prose of unparalleled richness and beauty—prose which inspired a young Victor Hugo to declare “I will be Chateaubriand or nothing!”—the Memoirs are a literary testament like no other. To put it simply, readers will find here a soul laid bare.

Soraya Antonius’s The Lord re-creates the extraordinary richness and vivacity of Palestinian life before the Nakba. It t...
12/03/2025

Soraya Antonius’s The Lord re-creates the extraordinary richness and vivacity of Palestinian life before the Nakba. It tells the story of Tareq, an itinerant magician performing in the hillside towns and villages who is rumored to have surprising powers and might be a leader in the resistance against the British colonial government, culminating in the Arab Revolt of 1936. His story is being unearthed in the early ’80s by a journalist reporting on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. She interviews Miss Alice, Tareq’s British missionary school teacher, who still lives in Jaffa. A clear-eyed examination of a chapter of British colonial history that laid the groundwork for conflicts that continue to rack the Middle East, The Lord remains as timely and telling now as ever.

Soraya Antonius was born in Jerusalem, the daughter of George Antonious, author of The Arab Awakening, and Katy Nimr, a leading socialite. Soraya was a founding member of the Fifth of June Society and is also the author of the novel Where the Jinn Consult, which NYRB Classics will reissue in the future.

Out from NYRB Classics this spring, Light While There is Light is poet Keith Waldrop’s “fictional memoir” of his upbring...
12/01/2025

Out from NYRB Classics this spring, Light While There is Light is poet Keith Waldrop’s “fictional memoir” of his upbringing in a deeply religious family in the American Midwest and South. A restless spiritual seeker, his mother moves the family from place to place, sect to sect—but this grasping for fulfillment leads only to fear, confusion, and eventually, madness. Though his story evokes Hawthorne, Poe, Faulkner, and O’Connor, Waldrop’s voice never veers into religious fervor or self-righteous scorn. He is always a sympathetic but utterly unsentimental observer, plain-spoken and beautifully clear. This new edition features an introduction by Ben Lerner.

“My favorite J. Kerouac is Jan, hands down.” –Heidi Julavitz Baby Driver is a heavily autobiographical novel by the othe...
11/12/2025

“My favorite J. Kerouac is Jan, hands down.” –Heidi Julavitz

Baby Driver is a heavily autobiographical novel by the other J. Kerouac’s only child, one that hops between memories of Jan’s adolescence on the Lower East Side (she and her mother lived around the corner from Allen Ginsberg) and her freewheeling early adulthood on the road between Mexico, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and beyond. She drops acid at 13, finds herself deep in the jungles of Peru, and meets her famous father only twice. (He never publicly acknowledged her existence.) She writes about her many misadventures with poetic detail and a winning sense of humor. Baby Driver is a major trip and it’s out now.

Amanda Fortini, who wrote the intro to the NYRB Classics edition of the book, and Meghan Daum will discuss Baby Driver over zoom at 5pm ET tonight. Link in bio for more information.

Out today, Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers is a panoramic novel about the lives and fates of three generations of a German J...
11/11/2025

Out today, Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers is a panoramic novel about the lives and fates of three generations of a German Jewish family, beginning in 1878 and ending in 1948. Though history is always occurring in the background, the novel plays out not in grand, solemn scenes but in short, propulsive chapters full of delicious dialogue, gossip, and incident. It’s a big book, but it moves at a glorious speed.

With Noah Isenberg, Sophie Duvernoy will discuss her deft translation of the novel at the Goethe-Institut in NYC (30 Irving Place) next Tuesday, November 18, at 6:30pm.

Recent arrivals in the office, all in the NYRB Classics series:- Friday by Michel Tournier (trans. Norman Denny)- A New ...
11/04/2025

Recent arrivals in the office, all in the NYRB Classics series:

- Friday by Michel Tournier (trans. Norman Denny)
- A New World and The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri
- Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1815–1830 by François-René de Chateaubriand (trans. Alex Andriesse)
- Effingers by Gabriele Tergit (trans. Sophie Duvernoy)

Happy Halloween from NYRB and Jan Kerouac. 🎃 You can read Amanda Fortini’s intro to Kerouac’s Baby Driver over . Link in...
10/31/2025

Happy Halloween from NYRB and Jan Kerouac. 🎃 You can read Amanda Fortini’s intro to Kerouac’s Baby Driver over . Link in bio.

Photo courtesy of the Estate of Jan Kerouac

Back in the print for the first time in decades, Robert Gluck’s Jack the Modernist is a lush and intimate work of q***r ...
10/30/2025

Back in the print for the first time in decades, Robert Gluck’s Jack the Modernist is a lush and intimate work of q***r experimentation that’s still considered one of the high-water marks of the New Narrative movement. The novel portrays the slow disintegration of a love affair in the early 1980s between Bob, the narrator, and Jack, his elusive lover. We follow Bob as goes to the baths, gossips on the phone, thinks about werewolves, and discovers a number of truths about Jack. All of it coheres into a one-of-a-kind meditation on desire and obsession, roving effortlessly from low art to high, from the colloquial to the philosophical, from the everyday to the eternal.

Out this week, Idiocy is Pierre Guyotat’s bracing and boldly poetic memoir about two different rebellions in his early a...
10/29/2025

Out this week, Idiocy is Pierre Guyotat’s bracing and boldly poetic memoir about two different rebellions in his early adulthood: first escaping his father to become a writer in Paris, then revolting against the French military authorities as a conscript in the Algerian War. Guyotat pulls no punches, dragging readers right down into the violence and squalor of his harrowing coming-of-age. As Dodie Bellamy writes, “I didn’t just read Idiocy, I was captured by it. It is a book that throws off your blinders, that changes you.”

Mattia Filice, who spent almost twenty years working as a driver for the French railway, has poured into Driver, a novel...
10/21/2025

Mattia Filice, who spent almost twenty years working as a driver for the French railway, has poured into Driver, a novel, the kind of obsessive, specialized knowledge which can only emerge from the accumulation of a long-held professional routine. Composed of a striking mixture of prose and free verse, we are immersed in the episodic dramas of the train: delays, accidents, malfunctions, shift changes. Filice, detail by tender detail, conveys the effects of the passage of time, and of the continual struggle for dignity and solidarity.

Time Tunnel offers a new selection of stories and essays, some translated for the first time into English, drawn from every stage of the career of the great Chinese writer Eileen Chang. “Young at the Time” follows a student who develops an unwelcome crush on his teacher. The primary protagonist of “Genisis” is a young woman from a downwardly mobile family, who works at a pharmacy and is pursued by an unscrupulous young man, until the narrative takes up the story of her mother’s unhappy marriage. “Blossoms Alfoat, Flowers Adrift” tells, in a back-and-forth manner, the story of an immigrant who travels from the countryside to Shanghai and then to Hong Kong, following and losing family amidst the uncertainties of post-civil-war China.

These two books go on sale today.

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