New York Review Books

14/01/2025

Dino Buzzati was a master of the strange and absurd, a keen innovator of the short story who effortlessly channelled the anxieties and horrors of his day into tales straddling the border between the real and the fantastic. We find that reading Buzzati is not unlike entering The Twilight Zone, for though each story may begin in a world similar to ours, by the end they end up in a place unsettlingly different. In “The Colomber,” for instance, a young seaman who spots a legendary shark in the waves is pursued by said shark till his dying day; in “The Writer’s Secret,” a successful author decides to write garbage to avoid the envy of his friends; in “Elephantisis,” plastics start to expand to enormous dimensions; and in “Panic at La Scala,” the high society of Milan spend an anxious night inside the lobby of La Scala, where they imagine a revolution taking place around them. Call them magic realism, absurdist, horror, or fantasy—the stories of Dino Buzzati are as provocative as they are delightful.

Lawrence Venuti has translated and compiled fifty of Buzzati’s finest stories in The Bewitched Bourgeois. This Thursday at Seaport (4 Fulton St.) at 6:30 pm we will be celebrating its release at an event with Venuti and the critic Michael Wood. We hope to see you there.

12/12/2024

"Critchley is a generous enthusiast, as unpretentious as he is distinguished….For all his readability, he is a serious academic. You have to pay careful attention. But it pays off: this book is a real intellectual adventure."

A rave review in the FT of Simon Critchley's Mysticism. We humbly think it would be a good Xmas gift.

Two books, by Will Eaves and Simon Critchley, explore how we can broaden our minds through religion, mysticism or music

12/12/2024

Out this week: Paul Celan’s Letters to Gisèle, a big collection of the poet’s missives to his wife, the French artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. 💌

The letters cover twenty years of their relationship, during and after the end of their marriage. Celan, known for his dark and difficult poems, writes letters that are at turns tender and doting, anxious and haunted, many spilling over with declarations of love for Gisèle. In these letters, Celan sometimes translates his poems into French for the benefit of his Francophone wife, creating versions of his poems that exist nowhere else, many of them quite different from their published form. On the whole, the letters give a glimpse into the mind of a significant artist, one of the most important of the 20th century. The book also includes letters from Celan to his son Eric.

04/12/2024

“Should New York City preserve, say, it’s shrinking flower district? What would that mean, practically speaking? Would it mean specialized breaks and subsidies? The flower district is but one of dozens and dozens of business clusters that once defined the commercial geography and cultural identity of the city.”

Michael Kimmelman’s contribution to Beyond Architecture on “intangible heritage” had a beautiful spread in the New York Times yesterday. Beyond Architecture is a collection of essays on landmark preservation, construction, housing, and architecture edited by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel. The book goes on sale next week.

03/12/2024

“Monsieur Teste is a monster, and is meant to be—an awesome, wholly individualized machine—yet in a sense he is also the sort of inhuman being Valéry aimed to become himself: a Narcissus of the best kind, a scientific observer of consciousness, a man untroubled by inroads of worldly trivia, who vacations in his head the way a Platonist finds his Florida in the realm of Forms.” —William Gass

Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, an enigmatic exploration of the nature of consciousness and language, is on sale today in a stunning new translation by Charlotte Mandell.

27/11/2024

Three books that came out this week.

At the Louvre presents a hundred poems, newly commissioned exclusively for this volume, by a hundred of the world’s most vibrant poets. They write about works from the museum’s collection. They write about the museum and its history. They write what they see and feel, and together they take us on a tour of the museum and its galleries like no other.

In 1967 the US military began its largest ground operation of the Vietnam War. Operation Cedar Falls was designed to seal off the area not far from Saigon and close to the Cambodian border known as the Iron Triangle, which was effectively governed by the National Liberation Front. A young journalist named Jonathan Schell accompanied the American armed forces into a village in the Iron Triangle called Ben Suc, which was quickly levelled and its residents moved into American camps (with no plans for where to relocate the residents in the future). Schell’s reportage, which became the book The Village of Ben Suc, changed the way Americans viewed the war, and remains a classic book of wartime reporting.

Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the most compelling and influential contemporary Ukrainian writers. Set Change compiles poetry that Andrukhovych wrote in the eighties and nineties, when he drew on the rich resources of Ukrainian literature while coming to terms with the long history of violence and shifting borders of Eastern Europe. Andrukhovych’s poems are ironic and elegiac, witty and allusive, lyrical, experimental, and political. As translated into English by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, they offer readers a powerfully transformative vision of the place of poetry in a fractured world.

21/11/2024

“Samuel Larned had lived one whole year on crackers and the next exclusively on apples. One Fruitlander believed that clothes hindered spiritual growth and that the light of day was pernicious. Another crowed like a c**k at midnight if a happy thought struck him. One, holding that words only betrayed the true spirit, greeted the rest with ‘Good morning, damn you.’” Now reading in the NYRB office: The Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes.

19/11/2024

Saul Steinberg’s All in Line is out today! Featuring an introduction by and an afterword by Iain Topliss, this is a new edition of one of the legendary New Yorker cartoonist’s earliest collections of drawings, originally published in 1945, only a few years after Steinberg arrived in the U.S. after fleeing from the fascist government in his native Romania. The book captures both Steinberg’s initial impressions of his new home country and his wartime impressions while serving in the U.S. Naval Reserve in China, India, North Africa, and Italy. Fanciful delight and grim reality sit side-by-side in this volume, a lively record of Steinberg finding his way (and his line) as an artist in America.

14/11/2024

“Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness—these were the things that called her thoughts away from the comfortable fireside.” Now reading at the NYRB office: Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

12/11/2024

Seeing Further, Esther Kinsky’s follow-up to her polyphonic ecological novel Rombo, presents readers with only a single voice, that of a keenly perceptive narrator who stumbles upon a dilapidated movie theater while traveling through Hungary’s Great Alföld. She soon embarks on the colossal (and somewhat quixotic) task of renovating the theater in an attempt to preserve a shared way of seeing. For isn’t that what we’re losing with the collapse of moviegoing? “The cinema used to have presence,” the narrator writes, “it had weight in almost everyone’s life, not as an exceptional experience, but as a commonplace in a less privatized world that first the television invaded bit by bit, and later the permanent accessibility of private screens caused to fully unravel.” An ode to the cinema as a space of collective imagining, and containing nearly four dozen black-and-white photos, Seeing Further is out today!

12/11/2024

Mysticism was named as one of the October 2024 Must-Read Books by ! This week in the club’s magazine, writes about “five key insights” from the book. Click the link in our bio to read more!

04/11/2024

For writer and photographer , the ways we relate to the world has been irreversibly altered by photography. Across eight essays that take a variety of approaches—historical, theoretical, philosophical, technical, but always and above all, acutely personal—Swett employs another form of art, writing, to tease out what photography does to our perceptions, emotions, and thoughts. Whether he’s looking back at his father’s past, or recalling a tragedy that befell his daughter, or reminiscing about a trip to visit Shaker buildings, Swett uses the viewfinder of the mind to explore the multitudinous ways in which photography helps us rethink the world around us. The Picture Not Taken is the first book of prose by a subtle and rigorous mind, written in an idiom accessible, lyrical, and intimate.

31/10/2024

From our house to your house

31/10/2024

“The contemplatives, thinkers, and writers that we think of as mystics did not see themselves as mystics. The very concept of mysticism is a modern category projected back over a largely invented tradition…. Mysticism is not a religion, it is a tendency, a distillation of existing devotional practice, textual interpretation, theological teaching, and conceptual, philosophical reflection.”

brings back mysticism in his new book, Mysticism, which went on sale this week. Included in the book are Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, and Hadewijch of Antwerp, but also Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, T.S. Eliot, and Nick Cave. It is a book full of learning, puzzlement, pleasure, and wonder. It opens the door to mysticism not as something unworldly unimaginable, but as a way of life. It is also filled with images.

29/10/2024

Big publication week for us over at NYRB HQ. Simon Critchley’s Mysticism, Benjamin Swett’s The Picture Not Taken, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (illustrated by Tove Jansson!), and CF’s Distant Ruptures are all on sale as of today.

A few notes—

There’s a great review of Mysticism out today by Elvia Wilk in (link in bio). Critchley will be talking with Caroline Bynum at UWS (536 W 112th St, NYC) on 11/12.

On The Picture Not Taken, writes: “A provocative book to shelve alongside Sontag, Barthes, Cartier-Bresson, and other philosophers of the image.”

To drive home the point: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is illustrated by TOVE JANSSON.

There’s a CF event THIS SATURDAY (7pm) at (540 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn). Distant Ruptures is a selection of CF’s shorter works from 2000–2010. Gabriel Winslow-Yost writes in his intro to the book: “[CF’s] style grows a little more elaborate as the years go by, but even the earliest, most minimalist comics show his unique mix of scuzzy visual noise and dainty harmony, and his slantwise storytelling.”

22/10/2024

A giant of modern Turkish literature, Oğuz Atay remains largely untranslated into English. First published in 1975, Waiting for the Fear is Atay’s only collection of short stories, praised by the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk for having transformed the art of short fiction.

Atay’s stories are vivid with life’s absurdities and psychologically true to life, while his characters, oddballs and losers all, are utterly individual. In the title story, a nameless young man returns to his home on the outskirts of an enormous nameless city to discover that he has received a letter in a language he neither knows nor recognizes—after which, step by step, the inscrutable missive reshapes his world. In “Railroad Storytellers: A Dream,” a professional story peddler lives in a hut beside a train station in a country that is at war—unless it isn’t. He can’t remember. What do such life and death realities matter, however, so long as there are stories to tell?

Ralph Hubbell’s fluent and vigorous English rendering of this key work of world literature is a revelation. wrote the introduction. The book is available to purchase at bookstores today.

04/10/2024

“‘Stories are better than walking in the dark,’ the co**se spirit whispered. ‘O king, may I tell you another one?’”

The Oceans of Cruelty: Twenty-Five Tales of a Corpse-Spirit is Douglas J. Penick’s retelling of the Baitâl Pachchisi, thought to be one of the oldest collections of stories in existence, first recorded in writing in Sanskrit over one thousand years ago. At the start, a young king falls into the hands of a wicked sorcerer, who orders him to find a vetāla, or co**se-spirit, which hangs upside down from a tree. Night after night the king comes to the charnel ground and takes the vetāla on his shoulders; night after night, on their journey, the vetāla whispers a riddling story in his ear—tales of suicidal passion, clever deceit, patriarchal oppression, and narrow escapes from death.

As long as the king can solve the riddles and problems the stories pose, his bo***ge continues, and the vampiric creature goes on commanding his attention in the dark. Only when the king is out of answers will he at last be free. Comparable to One Thousand and One Nights, these stories have captivated audiences for thousands of years. In Douglas Penick’s new English version, they will continue to haunt and entrance.