Operating as usual
"The Human Comedy resembles the office of the census. But much more fun."
Peter Brooks on the many and magnificent characters created by Balzac, from Brooks's new book Balzac's Lives.
Honoré de Balzac’s life has often been told, but it’s less compelling than Balzac’s lives, the extraordinary, extravagant, profligate creation of the well over 2,000 fictional beings who people his…
It’s #NationalDogWeek! To celebrate, check out the @nottinghilleditions anthology On Dogs, with an introduction by Tracey Ullman and featuring humorous black-and-white dog portraits by Rhian Ap Gruffydd. Inside, you’ll find David Sedaris recounting stories of his family’s many canine companions, including a pair of flatulent collies named Rastus and Duchess; Alice Walker on her beloved Labrador retriever, a lively pup she calls Bob Marley; a poetic ode to Pekingese dogs by Tzu-hsi, the late-nineteenth-century empress of China; and more than two dozen other essays, poems, and assorted writings about the bond between man and man’s best friend.
“J R is a rude demanding complex riotous uncomfortably edifying novel, a howling maelstrom of voices, a grabby talky disorderly inferno of the spirit.” —Joy Williams, from her introduction
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William Gaddis’s cacophonous satire of American finance, J R, arrives next month (10/20). And look out for our edition of his landmark debut, The Recognitions, later in the fall.
"I can only present a small selection of the 2,472 figures who enter this imagined world, of course, but chosen carefully they open onto the whole Balzacian universe. They serve as optics on the world: they offer what Proust called the only true adventure—to see the world through another’s eyes."
—Peter Brooks on Balzac's characters from the introduction to the upcoming Balzac's Lives.
Honoré de Balzac’s life has often been told, but it’s less compelling than Balzac’s lives, the extraordinary, extravagant, profligate creation of the well over 2,000 fictional beings who people his…
Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence comes out in the US today.
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“I knew at once that I had no general theory of the sentence, no prescriptive attitude towards the sentence, nor aspired to write its history. If I must (and I felt I must) write about my relationship with sentences, I would have to follow my instinct for the particular. Thus twenty-seven essays of varied lengths—I was aiming for twenty-five, and overshot—each of which looks at, or wanders away from, a single sentence.”
“Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.”
Brian Dillon's Suppose a Sentence comes out in the US today! For a sample, see what he finds in a caption that Joan Didion wrote for Vogue in 1965. Good writing can be "putting one thing beside another."
The caption, in the August 1, 1965, issue of American Vogue, sounds like Didion in its rhythm, care, and thrift, and also in its swerve toward something more troubling or mysterious.
"And at the very end there is, for us, a moment of the purest rapture when Mr. Dillon, writing about a sentence of Anne Boyer’s, closes the clasp of the bright bracelet of his themes with a satisfying snap."
—John Banville can write a sentence.
From Shakespeare to Didion, the beauty of the written word’s most elemental structure.
A film based on the life of the author of The Summer Book is playing at the Toronto Film Festival (TIFF). The Variety review raves about the acting and the production values.
The engaging biopic “Tove,” from Finnish helmer Zaida Bergroth, recounts a formative decade in the life of the bisexual, Swedish-speaking, Finnish visual artist and author Tove Jansson (1914 – 2001…
“Colin was to learn as he lived longer that important days often begin like ordinary days.” —Mary Chase, Loretta Mason Pots 🌞
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Mary Chase, author of the play Harvey (you know, the invisible rabbit), wrote a couple of books for children in her time, and this one from 1958 is about as charming as a story you’ll ever read. One day, young Colin Mason learns, rather accidentally, that he has an older sister, the very bad, very rude Loretta Mason Potts. This discovery sets off a series of events that eventually find Colin in a hidden, Narnia-type world where his mean, mean sister is beloved by all, much to Colin’s displeasure. It’s grand fun. Our edition, which is available in paperback as of this week, has illustrations by Harold Berson throughout. #classicchildrensbooks #vintageillustration #marychase
Janet Malcolm got a second chance on the stand after Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson sued her for defamation. What did she write about him? Read In the Freud Archives. It's more tasty than a meal at Chez Panisse.
In an afterword to The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), I wrote about Jeffrey Masson’s lawsuit, taking a very high tone. I put myself above the fray; I looked at things from a glacial distance. My aim wasn’t to persuade anyone of my innocence. It was to show off what a good writer I was. Read...
@thisispattismith is reading Skylark! 📖
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@thisispattismith:
This is
a late afternoon break.
Tea and literature-a
writer from Subotica.
A book called Skylark.
The pigeons partake of
the last of my crackers,
school children named
Lucy and Ruby stop to
say hello. Fall is indeed
in the air. I write a few
lines then saunter home.
#nyrb
Two novellas, in one book, by the great Natalia Ginzburg—on sale today. Valentino is a hapless but handsome son of a poor family who marries the rich but ugly Maddalena. Valentino’s sisters aren’t quite as charmed by their lazy brother, but family is family, thick through thin. Sagittarius is another story of misplaced confidence recounted by a wary daughter, whose mother moves to the suburbs eager to find new friends. She meets one, the mysterious Scilla, and together they decide to open an art gallery. These are two of Ginzburg's most beloved works, translated by Avril Bardoni, and exhibit the mordant humor, keen psychological insight, and unflinching moral realism that has won Ginzburg so many fans.
!["Among the literary gems produced by the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire, this memoir [The Snows of Yesteryear] b...](https://external.fymy1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQDaX08MdwqtEdKM&url=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.wsj.net%2Fim-230707%2Fsocial&_nc_cb=1&_nc_hash=AQAOibbopdwK2u5Z)
"Among the literary gems produced by the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire, this memoir [The Snows of Yesteryear] by Gregor von Rezzori—writer, publisher, TV personality and bon vivant—shines bright as the sun."
From the author of the novel ‘The Last Laugh.’
Brian Dillon's Suppose a Sentence makes the cut into LitHub's books to read in September. Which 28 sentences (or authors, to make it a bit simpler) make the cut into Suppose a Sentence? Not answered here, you'll have to read the book.
Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through (Riverhead) Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend shot into bestseller-dom in 2018, one of the select few bestsellers that has, in my humble opinion, earned the stature…
Melissa Monroe’s new poetry collection, Medusa Beach, is out today. Swipe through to read selections from two of the book’s poetic cycles: one inspired by Old English and Old High German spells, and the other featuring language from a book of 1940s-era criminal slang. And be sure to tune into the @communitybookstore Zoom discussion between Monroe and NYRB Classics editorial director Edwin Frank next Wednesday, September 16, at 7:30pm EDT.
“How fast the summer was going now!” —B.B., The Little Grey Men 😱
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B.B.’s ecologically-minded novel The Little Grey Men is a perfect end-of-summer read with its immersive descriptions of nature—rivers, streams, woodlands, and all the creatures that call those places home. You don’t have to be a kid to love Sneezewort, Baldmoney, and Dodder, the last gnomes in Britain. #gnomes #britishliterature #bb
Dorian Stuber gave us a small gift before the long holiday weekend: an article of appreciation in Forma Journal. https://formajournal.substack.com/p/lost-no-more-loving-nyrb-classics
📷 seriouslyreadmore (on IG)
"My favorite hero and villainess come from the same book, Lucky Jim.... It’s the only truly funny book I’ve read.... vulgar for producing such immoderate laughter.... hatred of his existence.... constant brick dropping..... fine array of private nasty faces.... She is the most...in western literature."
“My grave will be called ‘Mount Cleese.’”
!["[H]e portrays a society riven by a class war that has devolved into a grisly procession of tit-for-tat murders.""He tur...](https://external.fymy1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQBOEFLc_048pij8&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fimages%2Fprint-edition%2F20200905_BKP007_0.jpg&_nc_cb=1&_nc_hash=AQBB0y4X8xMMU-pD)
"[H]e portrays a society riven by a class war that has devolved into a grisly procession of tit-for-tat murders."
"He turned this unrest into a series of politically engaged pulp fictions as smooth as a well-oiled revolver."
"His characters’ interests are narrow but deep—in particular, what bullets do to bodies and the weapons that fire them."
—Discover Jean-Patrick Manchette in The Economist.
Unlike today’s noir fiction, his books waste no time on psychology
Curious about what books we have coming?
https://www.nyrb.com/collections/forthcoming
"The other night, when I was drunk, you told me you had a motive."
—An excerpt from Jean-Patrick Manchette's No Room at the Morgue, translated from the French by Alyson Waters, is up at CrimeReads. Will P. I. Eugène Tarpon find the murdered? What's the deal with Memphis Charles? You'll need to read the whole book to find out.
We took the Toronado that was waiting on the muddy path, a short distance from the garden that had gone to seed. The driver had had the keys on him, and now I had them. I asked the girl what she’d …
"It is wondrous how a creative life, once snatched from the cultural dustbin, does not age or decay as do our mortal parts but rather expands, gains traction, and picks up a momentum of its own."
— Caryl Emerson on Sigizmund Krzhizhanvosky, whose writing has a bright life in English through the translations of Joanne Turnbull. Unwitting Street, a new collection of stories, is filled with Krzhizhanovsky's characteristic metaphysical play and the joys of fantasy, thought, and reading.
The Russian phantasmagorical modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950), lost to his own time and now being found in ours, was single-handedly saved twice. The first rescue was of his immortal …
Founded in 2007 and located in Traverse City, MI, @brilliantbookstc bills itself as “Your Long Distance Local Bookstore.” With a monthly subscription service and a generous stock of NYRB titles, they’re a true gem of the Midwest—and they ship anywhere in the US for no extra charge. From the folks at Brilliant: “You can stop by to browse our shelves if capacity permits, but you can also shop from home on our website at Brilliant-Books.net. No one will ever know if you opt to browse our New York Review Books collection in your pj’s…” #independentbookstoreday
"Anniversaries was making clear that the daily time of political emergency is always also matched by an irreconcilably different time in which it is already too late for purely individual salvation."
—Nicholas Dames on reading Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries during the coronavirus pandemic, and staying in NYC while your neighbors leave.
Someday, and for those of us in a country incapable of reasoned, collective care that day will have to be a matter for personal calculation, it will have been a year since the current conjuncture began. What I will remember of its beginning is the people leaving.
Tomorrow is Independent Bookstore Day! To celebrate and show our appreciation for indie booksellers, we’ll be spotlighting a few stores from across the country here on our page. We’re kicking things off with @storiesbooksandcafe, located on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Noted “NYRB enthusiasts” (swipe through to see a few of their picks from the Classics series), they’re currently open for browsing and have a patio available for seating. You can also order books directly from their website: storiesla.com. #independentbookstoreday
MoMA The Museum of Modern Art will reopen on August 27 with its delayed exhibition "Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde — From Signac to Matisse and Beyond." Luc Sante translated Fénéon's series of brief accounts from the world around him in 1906, in a book titled "Novels in Three Lines." Roberta Smith describes them in her excellent review:
"These capsule accounts of scandals, murders, accidents and crimes of passion are exquisitely wrought. Their wry compression and uninflected prose startle and please, making the inequities of everyday life they highlight all the more savage and shocking. In one, he wrote: 'Finding his daughter insufficiently austere, Jallat, watchmaker of St. Étienne, killed her. It is true he has 11 children left.' They are the living ancestors to Cubist collage, the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse drawings and all kinds of 20th-century poetry. In them, Fénéon the aesthete and Fénéon the anarchist meet, and the non-artist becomes an artist of lasting achievement."
The Museum of Modern Art reopens with an exemplary show devoted to an essential figure who multitasked his way through the aesthetic and political ferment of Belle Époque Paris.
Robert Lowell was married to three authors now in the NYRB Classics series: Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood.
Michael Hofmann recounts the end of the Lowell-Hardwick relationship and the beginning of the Lowell-Blackwood one in reviewing two new books: a new edition of Lowell's controversial long poem The Dolphin and a selection of letters between Hardwick, Lowell and their circle from the same period (including Hardwick's private letters that Lowell used in his poems without permission).
Hofmann finds that "Hardwick emerges as a superior person altogether, so much more diligent, more intense, more compassionate, more aware, more committed than anyone else around. This is the unsurprising revelation of the book. Her white pieces overwhelm his black. Sometimes, reading her, you think she is even better at being Lowell than he is, the more literary, the more acute, the more inspired, the better phrasemaker, the originator, even, perhaps, of that style that took off 'on the wings of adjectives', as it says on the last page of Sleepless Nights."
Book review | The Dolphin Letter, 1970–1979, edited by Saskia Hamilton; The Dolphin: Two versions, 1972–1973, by Robert Lowell, reviewed by Michael Hofmann
"The renowned Nigerian author Cyprian Ekwensi (1921-2007) was one of the first authors to be selected for the pioneering Heinemann African Writers Series by its editor, Ekwensi's fellow countryman, the novelist Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)."
—Paddy Kehoe review Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City for Ireland's RTÉ.
The renowned Nigerian author Cyprian Ekwensi (1921-2007) was one of the first authors to be selected for the pioneering Heinemann African Writers Series by its editor, Ekwensi's fellow countryman, Chinua Achebe.
“They went off for the day and left him, in the slyest, sneakiest way you could imagine.” —Mavis Gallant; Green Water, Green Sky; Chapter 1 🙎♂️
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Yesterday, @apublicspace kicked off their virtual book club for Mavis Gallant’s Green Water, Green Sky, led by @lelliottholt 🌵🌿☘️ You can find the short novel in our edition of A Fairly Good Time (in the back). We’ve shared Holt’s thoughts about the first two chapters in our stories. (If you are reading along, we are at p. 306!) #apstogether #mavisgallant
Two new books arriving from @nottinghilleditions this fall: A. J. Lee’s Brazil That Never Was (10/6) is a memoir of the author and neurologist’s childhood fascination with the doomed Amazonian journey of Colonel Percy Fawcett—subject of David Grann’s The Lost City of Z—and his quest years later to uncover the truth behind the mythic imaginings of his adolescence. A. A. Milne’s Happy Half Hours (10/27) collects nearly three dozen essays & short prose pieces by the Winnie-the-Pooh creator on subjects as varied as geography, golf, marriage, superstition, writing for children, and his own ardent pacifism.
Coming in October is a collection of Nikolai Leskov's short stories, in new translations by Donald Rayfield. The title story, "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk," was made into an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, a critical and popular success until attacked in an anonymous article titled "Muddle Instead of Music" that may have been penned by Stalin. Leskov's stories served as the inspiration for Walter Benjamin’s great essay “The Storyteller,” in which Benjamin contrasts the plotty machinations of the modern novel with the strange, melancholy, but also worldly-wise yarns of an older, slower era that Leskov remained in touch with.
A motley cast of Russian gentlewomen, Roma, and Old Believers populate this masterly collection from Leskov (1831–1895), a lesser-known contemporary of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. In stories spanning the
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Have you met Monster? Might we introduce you to him in this delightful stop-motion animation clip, animated by the team behind Wallace and Gromit and narrated by Michael Palin. We’re bringing Monster—created by Ellen Blance, Ann Cook, and Quentin Blake—back in a new treasury called Meet Monster: The First Big Monster Book (May), which collects his first six adventures.
#BeautifulBookAlert ..... Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy by @thedesirina comes out tomorrow! And we’re pleased as punch that Moderan and The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe are included.
Marion Fayolle’s gorgeous The Tenderness of Stones (@nyrcomics) went on sale yesterday and we just wanted to share a short preview.
You know you’re reading a d’Aulaires book when.....
One is the story of the wind from around the globe (and outer space) and throughout time; the other is a modern Swedish fairy tale; both go on sale today! #publicationday
Looking for a summer read for the whole family? We’d like to suggest The Curious Lobster by Richard W Hatch, with illustrations by Marion Freeman Wakeman. The book follows the many adventures of Mr. Lobster who swims up a river, goes on land and into a forest, hangs out with bears and beavers and turkeys, and even sails to an offshore island.
What you see is all we have left here at #awp19. Stop by booth 3043 while we still have books! #goodbooks
The awesome artist Joanna Neborsky made a video from versions of the covers to Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: A Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl. They all look great! ・・・ I tormented @nyrbooks (and myself) making these many options for the covers of Uwe Johnson’s two-volume Anniversaries. See where we landed when the boxed set lands in stores Oct 18 — their biggest book ever!
A little video from @mairakalman’s party at @bklynlibrary this past Sunday, celebrating the re-release of her Max the Dog books and her latest, Cake. Everyone square danced the morning away, then stuffed themselves with cake. Watch till the end to see Maira.
Dominique Goblet in action! 🙌🏼 She's signing books at the NYRC table right. now. #moccafest2018
This is all we have left on this last day of #awp18, so come and get it!
And the award for cinematography goes to...THE NYRB CLASSICS WINTER SALE! http://bit.ly/NYRBWinterSale
End, grim winter, end! #henricole #noreaster
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