New York Review Books

27/08/2024

On sale today 🔥 George R. Stewart’s Fire, like a novelistic take on a logbook, chronicles the eleven-day lifespan of a forest fire, dubbed Spitcat, that burns its way through California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Sparked by a single strike of lightning, the fire grows from a gentle, smoky smolder to a full-blown inferno. Using the perspectives of humans and animals alike, the novel tracks the fire’s evolution through the eyes of forest lookouts, firefighters, and the threatened wildlife in its destructive path. Spitcat itself is treated as a character, too, as it struggles and thrives and is, eventually, subdued.

Published almost 80 years ago, the contemporary relevance of a story like Fire is all too apparent. A follow-up to Stewart’s other work of ecological fiction, Storm (which NYRB Classics reissued in 2021), Fire is a bracing read.

26/08/2024

Tomorrow night Seaport at 6:30pm we celebrate the publication of Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast, translated by Jennifer Feeley. Feeley will be in conversation with Dorothy Tse and Emmeline Clein about Xi Xi and this remarkable book. ALSO: we have it on good authority that a few of Xi Xi’s famous homemade teddy bears, which she began creating as a form of physical therapy following cancer treatment, will be making appearances as well. 🧸

22/08/2024

Mysticism, for Simon Critchley (), is a path to happiness. His latest book, Mysticism, is “a book about trying to get outside oneself, to lose oneself, while knowing that the self is not something that can ever by fully lost.”

Detachment, devotion, negation, and eroticism are all part of Critchley’s definition of mysticism, the history of which he traces from Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart to William James and Caroline Bynum. Critchley then looks at how we can experience mysticism today, through art and music and particularly writing, with Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, T. S. Eliot, Julian Cope, and Nick Cave as prime examples.

In this reading, mysticism is not an archaic, dead strand of Christianity. It is a lived and living tradition, a way of life that offers new, helpful forms of perception and thought. And maybe even a way to achieve ecstasy.

21/08/2024

We suspected that might like Tell Me a Mitzi (words by Lore Segal, pictures by Harriet Pincus), but could not know he was looking for his old copy as the book was in the mail. He sent us this comic to show the result of reading to his youngest. Even his older daughter still enjoys.

12/08/2024

"I have always loved scenes, bars where people come in and out in various degrees of flash, despair, gossip, and brilliance."

In 70s LA, Eve Babitz partied with everyone from Salvador Dali to Jim Morrison, but she was also a trailblazing writer. As a new generation discover her work, her sister and agent celebrate her originality, ambition and lust for life

06/08/2024

In Blurry, the latest graphic novel by , a cast of assorted characters face a common dilemma: the difficulty of making a choice. As the story switches from character to character—some facing major decisions (whether or not to leave a job or relationship), some more minor (choosing a shirt color or a flavor of ice cream)—these moments of doubt coalesce into a Matryoshka doll–like structure that then loops back on itself to beautifully illustrate the chain of chance, fate, and circumstance that links together seemingly separate lives.

One of contemporary comics’ most celebrated authors, Dash Shaw’s previous book was Discipline (2021), also published by , and named one of the best graphic novels of the year by the New York Times. Dash is also an animated filmmaker, and his most recent film, Cryptozoo, will be playing at this Sunday at 7pm in a special event co-sponsored by . Dash will be discussing the film and signing copies of Blurry, which comes out today! Congrats to Dash and NYR Comics. Choosing a book to buy can be a hard decision, but Blurry is a sure bet.

01/08/2024

“The cinema is a space of expectations…every time, no matter what, you end up seeing further than you had before, exploring a horizon that would not exist with- out the screen.”

The narrator of Esther Kinsky’s Seeing Further is traveling along the Great Alford Plain, south of Budapest, when she discovers a dilapidated movie house, or mozi, in the small town she is passing through. Would the foreigner like to buy and relaunch the mozi? She is asked by the owner. She would. What follows is a history of place, told through the stories of the town’s few remaining inhabitants and uncovered in physical traces of the past left behind in the grand old building. Seeing Further illuminates the cinema’s former role as a communal space for collective imagining, a site rooted in ritual that has steadily disappeared. For Esther Kinsky, it nevertheless remains a place of wonder, a dark room that unfurls a vastness not beholden to the ordinary rules of time and space. Seeing Further is an homage to the cinema in words and pictures. Coming in an English translation by Caroline Schmidt on October 22nd.

24/07/2024

The Lily in the Valley is Félix de Vandenesse’s confession, told to Natalie de Mannerville, who he is wooing and who has asked for his dating history. He begins with his unhappy childhood, but then gets to Henriette de Mortsauf, a beautiful but married woman who he meets at a ball and covers her neck in kisses. A big social faux pas. Recovering from the subsequent rejection, Félix moves to a farm in the Tourraine, which happens to be across the valley from the de Mortsauf’s home. A courtship begins whose premise is that Félix will worship Henriette without displaying the least sign of desire. With the restoration of the Bourbons, Félix heads to Paris for a career in politics, where he meets the free-minded, sexy, and English Arabella Dudley. Their relationship is not chaste, and things turn sour when Henriette hears learns about the affair. What will Félix do? And how will Natalie, the third woman in his life, respond to all this information? The Lily in the Valley is a key work in Balzac’s comédie humaine, displaying the psychological depth, social codes, and descriptions of landscapes that made Balzac one of the greatest and most fertile of fiction writers.

We know that the flowers in the photograph are not lily of the valley (muguet des bois in French), but the French title of the book (Le Lys dans la Vallée) doesn’t refer to them anyway. Another point of interest, it’s considered the most autobiographical novel. (Balzac was from Tours) And it’s in a wonderful new translation by Peter Bush.

09/07/2024

On sale today: Xi Xi’s autobiographical novel, Mourning a Breast, translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley.

Xi Xi’s book about her experience with breast cancer was groundbreaking when it was first published in China in 1992. In China and Hong Kong, where Xi Xi lived, speaking about cancer openly, much less breast cancer, was considered taboo. Xi Xi’s frank approach to writing about the disease and her own body cast off this stigma. She writes the book as if addressing a close friend, her tone at turns warm, funny, and vulnerable. She shares what gives her comfort and strength: art, literature, sword dancing. She mourns what the disease does to her body, but celebrates her victories, too. We don’t often use the words “life affirming” around here, but the phrase definitely applies to Xi Xi and this book. Get it from your favorite bookseller.

20/06/2024

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

14/06/2024

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

05/06/2024

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.

22/05/2024

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.

15/05/2024

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.

14/05/2024

“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

14/05/2024

“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

07/05/2024

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.

06/05/2024

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

30/04/2024

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

22/04/2024

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

19/04/2024

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.

18/04/2024

More fall covers. Including some from

18/04/2024

Fall books cover dump.

Format not quite right but you get the point.

10/04/2024

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

03/04/2024

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

29/03/2024

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

25/03/2024

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.”

19/03/2024

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.”

14/03/2024

“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.

14/03/2024

"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.”