A Different Stripe

Best of Booker:Last chance to vote for Siege of Krishnapur

It's the last week to vote for J.G. Farrell's Siege of Krishnapur as the Best Booker book ever (it's made a shortlist of six books). Though the 1973 winner may look like a long-shot, we can be heartened by a BBC story about an experiment done in a small English village, in which copies of all six finalist books were distributed and The Siege of Krishnapur beat favorite Midnight's Children. As reported on the Booker Prize site:
 

Despite being one of the earlier winners, the villagers called the book a "rip roaring yarn", enjoyed the humour and adventure, and likened it to the "Indiana Jones" films. Tim Samuels suggested the Best of the Booker award might bring the book back in to circulation after it had dropped off the radar for modern readers.

[when did the word "modern" come to mean anything that happened more than five years ago? is there some meaning drift happening, making "modern" a direct synonym for "contemporary"? maybe the shift is inevitable and we should stop being prescriptivists.]

We've finally tracked down Lavinia Greacen's Farrell biography, which turns up some other tidbits:

• Mary McCarthy and Edna O'Brien were judges that year
• John Banville was on the unofficial longlist; he would not win until 2005
• Iris Murdoch, who was the presumed winner, did not attend the award ceremony
• After criticizing the prize's sponsor in his acceptance speech, Farrell eased up on the company, which produced Tia Maria: "An acquired taste, perhaps, but delicious poured over vanilla ice-cream and served with a sprinkling of Ovaltine for the texture. I call it Sepoy's Surprise."

Vote here and spread the word!

Search for us at Google Books

It's finally possible to get limited previews of many NYRB titles—Classics and otherwise—at Google Book Search. Have a look at what's available by searching New York Review [of] Books under publisher.

Special on Classics at Bookcourt

According to Hibernaculum, Bookcourt on Court Street in the Cobble Hill area of Brooklyn is currently offering a 3-for-1 deal on NYRB Classics. But this is all really just an excuse to post this gorgeous photograph of the books the site's author purchased. Oh, for a little of that golden light in our white box of an office!

Bookcourt's site also has a bunch of photographs of the construction of its welcome expansion.

A provincial lady on A High Wind in Jamaica

"(Mem.: Would it not be possible to write more domesticated and less foreign version of High Wind in Jamaica, featuring extraordinary callousness of infancy?) Can distinctly recollect heated correspondence in Time and Tide regarding vraisemblance or otherwise of Jamaica children, and now range myself, decidedly and forever, on the side of the author. Can quite believe that dear Vicky would murder any number of sailors, if necessary."

from The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield; thanks to rbhardy3rd for posting this to the NYRB LibraryThing forum.

Old Weird America 101

Envy those University of Minnesota students who have the opportunity to take a class titled "The Old Weird America" from the man who coined a term that has come to define everything from aesthetic categories in music and art to that feeling you get when driving past burnt-out barns along the highway.

That's right, next fall, Greil Marcus will be teaching "Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature: The Old, Weird America":

"This course examines commonplace, authorless songs as elemental, founding documents of American identity. These songs can be heard as a form of speech that, with a deep foundation, is always in a flux; especially in the work of Bob Dylan across the last fifty years. Reading includes novels (Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days; and Lee Smith's The Devil's Dream, criticism (Constance Rourke's classic American Humor ), Bob Dylan's autobiography Chronicles, as well as music and film excerpts."

Walser Roundtable

All you ever wanted to know about the Swiss writer Robert Walser can be found at Words Without Borders—which is sponsoring a roundtable discussion about their June bookclub selection, Walser's The Assistant. It's nice to see a collaboration of so many people we've worked with here over many many years, including Damion Searls (who has two books forthcoming with us, one of which is a new selection from Thoreau's Journals) and Tom Whalen, whom we first came in to contact with in 2000, when we ordered a used copy of Handke's Sorrow Beyond Dreams from him, not having any idea of his Walser connections.

It all seems to be coming full circle: Part of WWB's Walser feature is a meditation by Tom about Walser and the visual arts (illustrated with several of his own Walser-inspired watercolors). He cites Walser's essay on Cézanne, reminding us that one of the two Handke books we're publishing next fall, Slow Homecoming, also concerns a Cézanne painting.

If you're wondering what all the fuss is about, have a listen to the Tribute to Robert Walser which PEN sponsored this spring. Deborah Eisenberg, Susan Bernofsky, Jeffrey Eugenides, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Michael Krüger put on a great show–some read, some discussed Walser, some went off on fascinating tangents. It was a (surprisingly) fun time.

listen to A Tribute to Robert Walser.

Boldtype

If you're one of the three people who hasn't come here from the review of The Invention of Morel in Boldtype, then there's a chance you didn't know that there was a review of The Invention of Morel in Boldtype. It was written by Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading and The Quarterly Conversation. Needless to say it behooves you to subscribe to Boldtype, Conversational Reading, and The Quarterly Conversation.

Pet Shop Boys and Post-Office Girls

Today brings an endorsement from an unexpected place: the disco floor. Neil Tennant's latest post on The Pet Shop Boys site reads:

Just finished reading this beautiful, fast-moving, tragic novel, The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig. It was written in the early 30s but has only just been published in English. I think it will haunt me for a long while. Highly recommended (as are many other works by this under-rated writer).

And he even links to The Nation review of the book.

Now if we could only find out if, in the lyrics to West End Girls, the band is actually referring to the Edmund Wilson history of 19th and 20th century radical revolutions, when they sing:

In every country, in every nation
From Lake Geneva To the Finland Station.

or is it just a colloquialism? As a Time article of 1939 explains,

The phrase "to the Finland Station" has a symbolic meaning, implies something like a rendezvous with destiny.

We should also mention that Tess Lewis at The Wall Street Journal also reviewed The Post-Office Girl this past weekend.

Twitterbug

We're really supposed to be twittering now? Sheesh! Here goes:

Staring despondently at the pile of contracts and invoices on my desk; logging on to typepad.

But it might not be a bad idea to make some blog posts shorter and snappier, in the twitter style.

A month in the country with Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh

Sam Jordison is getting to be our favorite Guardian blogger—if for no more than the simple reason that he writes so thoughtfully and at length about books we've happened to publish. Yesterday he used the occasion of the film adaptation of J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country being shown in London as part of a Booker film series to discuss the book on which it's based. He's nice enough to enumerate the book's virtues:

The story of the narrator's secret love for another man's wife and ongoing struggle to recover from the trauma of being a signaller in the first world war is moving. The rural setting is beguiling with its evocation of a lost world "at the end of the horse age" full of alarmingly plain speaking, but unfailingly generous Yorkshire folk. The writing is lovely too. It's as simple and rich as the countryside it describes ("ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint, trees heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars"), but shot through with a mordant wit that ensures the book has an edge to sharpen all that easy bucolic softness. Finally, there's also the added physical appeal of the slim volume itself - at least if you are lucky enough to have the splendid Quince Tree Press edition designed by the author himself.

Apparently the film adaptation doesn't quite do the book justice (full of eye-candy though it may be). We've never been able to see it. For the longest time it wasn't available in the US on VHS or DVD. Anybody know if it is now?