New York Review Books

06/20/2024

A range of books forthcoming this summer and fall. 🌞

Tell Me a Mitzi by Lore Segal, illustrated by Harriet Pincus (June)
Everything Under a Mushroom by Ruth Krauss, illustrated by Margot Tomes (August)
Fire by George R. Stewart (August)
Mourning a Breast by Xi Xi, translated by Jennifer Feeley (July)
Three by Tsvetaeva, translated by Andrew Davis (August)
The Lily in the Valley by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Peter Busy (July)
Granny Cloud by Farnoosh Fathi (September)
The Pornographer by John McGahern

06/14/2024

Fresh deliveries. Simon Critchley makes the case for mysticism. Lutz Seiler’s portrait of a poet squatting in 1989 Berlin. On shelves this fall.

06/05/2024

The Singularity begins when Ermanno Ismani, a soft-spoken university professor of electronics, is asked by the Ministry of Defense to embark on a top-secret mission of “vital nationalist interest” and “extraordinary scientific value” at an isolated military base. Ismani accepts but the project remains mysterious. Is he embroiled in a nuclear program? Or is it something even more powerful—something that can think and communicate? The Singularity is a prophetic parable—by turns enigmatic, intense, and romantic—of artificial intelligence, human consciousness, desire, and revenge. A pioneering work of Italian science fiction, it was published yesterday in a brisk new translation by Anne Milano Appel.

05/22/2024

The NYRB Poets edition of George Dillon & Edna St. Vincent Millay’s classic translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil is out this week. As Millay writes in her preface to the book, “The title Les Fleurs du Mal is not adequately translated as Flowers of Evil. These poems are flowers of doubt, flowers of torture, flowers of grief, flowers of blasphemy, flowers of weakness, flowers of disgust; cemetery flowers, fertilized by the corruption of the ardent and well-cared-for flesh; flowers forced on the sterile bough of the mind’s unblossomy decay.” Included in the collection is a poem appropriate for the spring, “The Sun,” in which Baudelaire, one of poetry’s gloomiest practitioners, writes an uncharacteristic appreciation of the bright light of day.

05/15/2024

Nancy and Sluggo know how to live.

A collection of the best and wisest Nancy cartoons from and . Thank you Ernie Bushmiller for making us laugh.

Nancy has a big exhibit coming up . Opens next week and Nancy Fest runs from 11/24 - 25.

05/14/2024

“No lover of literature will fail to love these vivid novels by a master of prose.”
—Annie Dillard

After publishing several of his recent books, NYRB Classics is pleased to bring back ‘s first three novels, with unique cover designs by . A Strange and Sublime Address, first published in 1991, follows ten-year-old Sandeep, an only child whose visit to his aunt’s large, old Calcutta home becomes a formative moment as it happens. Afternoon Raag presents an older iteration of a semi-fictional Chaudhuri avatar: a young Bengali studying literature in rainy Oxford, who makes new friends even while, unbeknownst to him, his music teacher is dying. Freedom Song has a large cast from Calcutta in 1993, when tensions between Hindus and Muslims boil over once again. Among the family is Bhaskar, a layabout who becomes involved in the local Communist Party whose parents would prefer for him to marry. The narration of these novels shifts through memories, anecdotes, conversations, and rumors. Like a Renaissance painting, landscape, movement, the time of the day, and character are relayed in vivid color and care. These three early works affirm Chaudhuri’s status as one of the great contemporary English-language writers.

“Amit Chaudhuri has, like Proust, perfected the art of the moment. . . . [His novels] were masterpieces of intimate observation: their narratives slight, their manner rich and lyrical.”
—Hilary Mantel

“Chaudhuri has only one of the novelist’s qualifications, but he has it in abundance . . . he is in love with life, and with people, and he can communicate this love directly and unsentimentally. Nothing is too small or too boring for him: he defamiliarises the everyday, reinvigorates the ordinary, and makes the humdrum seem exciting.”
—Jonathan Coe, London Review of Books



“Nothing at all seems to happen, in the most beautifully modulated way.”
—Anne Enright, The Guardian, Anne Enright’s Top 10 Slim Volumes

05/14/2024

“No lover of literature will fail to love these vivid novels by a master of prose.”
—Annie Dillard

After publishing several of his recent books, NYRB Classics is pleased to bring back ’s first three novels, with unique cover designs by . A Strange and Sublime Address, first published in 1991, follows ten-year-old Sandeep, an only child whose visit to an old, crumbling Calcutta familial home is poise to be a formative moment in his life. Afternoon Raag presents an older iteration of a semi-fictional Chaudhuri avatar: a Bengali studying literature in rainy Oxford far from his music teacher and parents. Freedom Song has a large cast from Calcutta in 1993, a moment when tensions again begin to rise between Hindus and Muslims. Among the family is Bhaskar, a layabout who becomes involved in the local Communist Party but whose parents push for a marriage. The narration of these novels shifts through memories, anecdotes, conversations, and rumors. As in a Renaissance painting, landscape, movement, the time of the day, and character are relayed with vivid color and care. These three early works affirm Chaudhuri’s status as one of the great contemporary English-language writers. These short novels are treats for the soul and the mind.

“Amit Chaudhuri has, like Proust, perfected the art of the moment. . . . [His novels] were masterpieces of intimate observation: their narratives slight, their manner rich and lyrical.”
—Hilary Mantel

“Chaudhuri has only one of the novelist’s qualifications, but he has it in abundance . . . he is in love with life, and with people, and he can communicate this love directly and unsentimentally. Nothing is too small or too boring for him: he defamiliarises the everyday, reinvigorates the ordinary, and makes the humdrum seem exciting.”
—Jonathan Coe, London Review of Books

“Nothing at all seems to happen, in the most beautifully modulated way.”
—Anne Enright, The Guardian, Anne Enright’s Top 10 Slim Volumes

05/07/2024

Big news! Over the next several months, the Authors Guild Foundation will be offering an online seminar series inspired by Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting. Running between May 22 and December 11 of this year, the seminar will feature monthly classes taught by Cohen and other writers, including Colm Tóibín, Saidiya Hartman, and Daphne A. Brooks about American literary greats such as Henry James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston.

More info and tickets at 🔗 in bio.

05/06/2024

Link to our fall catalog in bio. Check it out. Cover art from ’s The Picture Not Taken.

04/30/2024

From

Today is the day: SPIRAL & OTHER STORIES by is out in the world! We’re so proud to publish this book, and finally share what the New York Times calls Koch’s “assured minimalism” and “poetic dialogue”. A very big thank you to for her essay and work on this book.

Also today, Aidan will be at in Portland (OR) between 5 - 7pm

04/22/2024

Happy Earth Day from Jules Renard and his Nature Stories (trans. Douglas Parmée)! Worm illustration—and many other lovely illustrations throughout—by Pierre Bonnard.

04/19/2024

We’ve been waiting for this book for a long time. It better be good. We hear it’s very good. Edwin Frank is the founding editor of NYRB Classics and all our other imprints.

04/18/2024

More fall covers. Including some from

04/18/2024

Fall books cover dump.

Format not quite right but you get the point.

04/10/2024

Rachel Cohen will be at The Seminary Co-op Bookstores tonight, 6pm, to talk about her innovative work of biography, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters, with Deborah Cohen.

https://www.semcoop.com/event/rachel-cohen-chance-meeting-0

04/03/2024

April 3 is National Walking Day, but unfortunately, the weather in NYC today is exactly the opposite of what you’d want for a pleasant amble: It’s cold, windy, and wet. If you want to celebrate the occasion a different way, try reading the new anthology Globetrotting: Writers Walk the World, edited by the UK’s “laureate of walking,” Duncan Minshull. Out this week, the collection features the work of more than fifty walker-writers who have traveled the world’s seven continents by foot, including Edith Wharton, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Rabindranath Tagore, D. H. Lawrence, Isabella Bird, Katherine Mansfield, Mark Twain, Rachel Carson, Jean-Paul Clébert, Helen Garner, Matsuo Bashō, Colin Thubron, and more.

Photo by

03/29/2024

Lewis Carroll’s Guide for Insomniacs is out this week from ! Written by the famed author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—an insomniac himself—and introduced by Gyles Brandreth, this delightful book collects a splendid variety of entertainments devised to help pass “the wakeful hours.”

Ranging from puzzles, rhymes, and limericks to simple number problems and calming calculations; from composing rhymes and planning dreams to preparing nightcaps, here is a feast of intriguing activities guaranteed to keep keep any reader entertained as they search for an elusive good night’s sleep.

Photo by

03/25/2024

Another side of Eve Babitz

Before Eve Babitz became a published writer, she was a visual artist, and her chosen medium was collage. Inspired by Joseph Cornell and Andy Warhol, she created the album cover art for Buffalo Springfield’s “Buffalo Springfield Again” and The Byrds’ “Untitled.”

03/19/2024

In 1854, a young Henry James goes with his father to have a daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady, and is captured in a moment of extreme self-consciousness. Brady goes on to take photographs of the American Civil War that completely enrapture the photographer Richard Avedon. Meanwhile, Gertrude Stein, a student of William James’s, attends a performance of The Rite of Spring with Carl Van Vechten; Van Vechten invites Zora Neale Hurston over for breakfast; Hurston embarks on a road trip with Langston Hughes; James Baldwin, who went to high school with Avedon, writes a devasting review of Hughes’s collected poems; Norman Mailer meets Baldwin at a Paris party; and Mailer and Robert Lowell march on the Pentagon in the anti-Vietnam War demonstration of 1967.

Such are the serendipitous real-world encounters that Rachel Cohen () brings to life in her dazzling nonfiction book A Chance Meeting: American Encounters. Through thirty-six interconnected chapters, Cohen maps the friendships, rivalries, reconciliations, and love affairs between thirty towering literary and artistic figures spanning the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. Drawing extensively from autobiographies, notebooks, diaries, novels, letters, poems, and photographs, Cohen provides a wealth of insightful detail on the intersecting lives of such luminaries as Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, Sarah Orne Jewett, W. E. B. Du Bois, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marcel Duchamp.

The resulting book, both expansive and playful, affirms, time and again, the profound importance of relationships and the exchange of ideas in the history of American culture. As John Banville praises in The Guardian: “Strange, beautiful and unclassifiable…. A Chance Meeting is not only a significant study of a century of American culture, but also a fascinating entertainment.”

03/14/2024

“Follow the ships. Follow the routes plowed by worn, melancholy vessels. Don’t stop. Avoid even the humblest anchorage. Sail up the rivers, down the rivers. Lose yourself in the rains that flood the savannas. Deny all shores.” —Álvaro Mutis, “The Snow of the Admiral,” translated by Edith Grossman ⚓️

We’ve been waiting a long time for this one: Maqroll’s Prayer, a collection of poems by Colombian writer Álvaro Mutis, went on sale this week. (It has been in the works for some time.) This collection serves as the provenance for Mutis’s most beloved character, Maqroll the Gaviero, or the watchman, also the subject of the The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Beginning in 1948, Mutis published several volumes of surrealist-tinged poetry that interrogated, through the figure of Maqroll, the nature of human existence, both its immense beauty and its interminable despair. His poem “The Snow of the Admiral” inspired Mutis to adapt Maqroll’s saga into his eponymous novella.

It took three translators to bring this book together in the end—Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, and Alastair Reid. Sadly, the last two died before the collection was published.

Find at your favorite purveyor of poetry.

03/14/2024

"The authorities, unable to get a fix on Platonov’s attitude, declined to publish Chevengur during his lifetime. In fact, this black herald of the dawn of the Soviet experiment didn’t appear in Russia until 1988, in the fading dusk of the U.S.S.R. Now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, a new English-language translation of the novel, by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, gives us another chance to trap the mercury of a prose style that seems intended both (lyrically) to stir one’s heart and (satirically) to freeze one’s blood, in the same escaping moment of history."

Andrei Platonov’s “Chevengur” depicts a Communist utopia, but Stalin loathed his writing, calling the author “scum.”

03/13/2024

Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting is a brilliant group biography of America's greatest writers and thinkers. She'll be doing events next week at Labyrinth Books Princeton on Wednesday, 3/20, at 6pm, and then Greenlight Bookstore on Thursday, 3/21, at 7:30pm.

02/27/2024

Big day at NYRB HQ: Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard and Red Pyramid: Selected Stories are out for the first time in an English translation by Max Lawton.

Published in 1999, Blue Lard is Sorokin’s most notorious book. Featuring a graphic s*x scene
between Stalin and Khrushchev, the novel led to po*******hy charges against Sorokin, and inspired pro-Putin protestors to throw the author’s books into a gigantic makeshift toilet in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. Blue Lard begins in a laboratory where genetic scientists clone famous Russian writers, forcing them to write in the style of their progenitors. As they write, the clones’ bodies excrete the eponymous substance, which the scientists harvest and send back in time to an alternate 1954, where a long-haired Hi**er and lascivious Stalin revel in their triumph over the Allies. Audacious wordplay and nested narratives converge spectacularly in this surreal, boundary-defying romp through Russian literature and alternative twentieth-century history.

Red Pyramid spans Sorokin’s career, assembling some of his most outlandish and scathing stories. In the O’Henry Prize–winning story “Horse Soup,” a young woman is paid handsomely once a month to eat nothing but thin air in front of a spectator. In “Nastya,” a text drawing yet more pro-Kremlin vitriol and prompting petitions for a book ban, a family roasts and cannibalizes their sixteen-year-old daughter. And in “White Square,” four game show contestants descend into an o**y of violence after being injected with an experimental drug. Shocking and shockingly lyrical in their depictions of violence, cannibalism, love, and scatology, these stories offer a comprehensive view of several decades of Sorokin’s uniquely radical voice and nightmarish renderings of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian society. One for fans of Marquis de Sade.

02/21/2024

On sale this week! Roger Duvoisin’s funny and completely adorable story about two unlikely friends, a dog named Day and an owl named Night. 🦉🐕‍🦺 The two creatures first meet when Day saves Night from a ravenous fox. The owl, very grateful, tells the dog that he will be his friend for the rest of his life. “Don’t mention it,” says Day. “I like your face with your two round eyes like two moons in the sky. I will be your friend, too.” Only, how to be friends if Night is only out and about after dark, when Day must stay inside with his sleeping family? They chat through the kitchen door, of course. Only, they are rather noisy and end up keeping Day’s owners, the Pennyfeathers, awake at all hours. Thankfully, little Bob Pennyfeathers comes up with a brilliant solution that suits everyone.

02/21/2024

"The disasters Kinsky writes about go beyond simply disrupting daily life, or wrecking familiar places, or traumatizing people and communities. Something on the scale of the Friuli earthquake, a vast tragedy centered on a small and sparsely-populated area, derails a shared sense of reality."

Aditya Narayan Sharma reviews Esther Kinsky’s “Rombo.”...

02/20/2024

The Variations tells the story of Selda Heddle, a reclusive but famous composer of classical music, her grandson, Wolf, and her old friend, Ellen Montague, all of whom have “the gift”—the ability to tune into voices and sounds from the past.

The book begins with a bravura set piece in Strasbourg during the Dancing Plague of 1518, but quickly shifts to the present at Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has ministered, taught, and protected those with the gift. Ellen is now headmistress at Agnes, where Wolf has been taken in a coma-like state. Has Wolf inherited the gift from his grandmother, who was discovered dead in the snow a few days before? Can he live with the newly unleashed voices in his head? And will he make complete of the final composition Selda was working on before she died?

Patrick Langley is a talented young English writer whose short story, “Life with Spiders,” was just published in ; The Variations is his first novel to come out in the U. S., which comes out in England (as did his first novel, Arkady) from .

Ambitious and exhilarating, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty—or impossibility—of living with the past.

02/15/2024

From Robert Chandler, translator of Vasily Grossman.

“In 1958, Grossman wrote to his stepson Fiodor Guber, ‘The artist has just called round, with illustrations for FOR A JUST CAUSE (i.e. the novel now titled STALINGRAD). Nearly all the characters are not in the least like themselves - but, believe it or not, Shtrum has turned out perfectly. I gasped in amazement. He is exactly how I imagined him.’

The illustration, by Orest Betekhtin, is to Part I, chapter 37. Victor Shtrum and his colleague Postoev have just arrived in Moscow. The illustration was not published and I have never seen it before. I have just received it from my friend and colleague Julia Volohova.”

02/02/2024

Farewell D. G. Compton, the author of The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe and our friend.

Among other things, The Guardian obituary mentions that Sylvia Plath dedicated The Bell Jar to Compton and his wife, Elizabeth.

02/01/2024

Farewell to our dear friend D.G. Compton, author of The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe and many other books. Read his obituary, written by Christopher Priest and David Langford.

Science fiction writer whose novel foreseeing reality TV was adapted as Bertrand Tavernier’s film Death Watch

01/30/2024

Ann Goldstein, Jenny McPhee, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat will discuss Antifascism and Italian Women Writers on Thursday (6pm) at Rizzoli Bookstore (1133 Broadway, NYC). Alba de Céspedes, Elsa Morante, Elena Ferrante will be the central subjects, but no doubt there are other writers to discover.