Did you catch mention of a 30% discount on Walser tickets on yesterday's post? Have another look.
Instead of the regular price of $15 for the event, you'll be charged the very reasonable PEN-member price of $10.
Buy tickets here.
On Saturday, May 3rd, come find out why Jeffrey Eugenides, Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Krüger, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Susan Bernofsky find miniaturist and microsciptologist Robert Walser one of the most compelling of 20th-century writers.
Get a taste of Walser's brand of sad-sack humor at N+1
The New Novel
translated by Damion Searls"Exceptionally estimable, good, nice, dear people they all were but they all, unluckily, kept asking me about the new novel, and that was excruciating.
"Whenever I met an estimable friend on the street, he said and asked: 'How's your new novel coming? Countless avid readers are rejoicing in advance and are already eager to see your new novel. You were nice enough to let on that you're writing a new novel, were you not? I hope it'll be out soon, the new novel.' " [more]
Edwin Frank (NYRB Classics editorial director)
Francisco Goldman (introduction to The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll)
A.M. Homes (introduction to The Diary of a Rapist)
Fanny Howe (introductions to Mouchette and the forthcoming Rock Crystal)
Janet Malcolm (author of In the Freud Archives)
Albert Mobilio (introduction to The Wine-Dark Sea)
Michael Ondaatje (introduction to Paris Stories)
Francine Prose (introductions to A High Wind in Jamaica and A House and Its Head)
Charles Simic (author of Dime-Store Alchemy and introduction to The Late Mattia Pascal)
Matt Weiland (introduction to the soon-to-be-released Names on the Land)
One of he most heartening things about staffing the NYRB table in the nosebleed stands of the AWP was the popularity of books that have been, to put it kindly, something less than popular.
Most notably, several people came over to us expressly to get a hold of David Jones's highly-allusive modernist prose-poem memoir of World War I, In Parenthesis.
From W.S. Merwin's introduction:
As a “war book” In Parenthesis is incomparable. In his account of those months of stupefying discomfort, fatigue, and constant fear in the half-flooded winter trenches, and then of the mounting terror and chaos of the July assault on Mametz Wood, David Jones made intimate and inimitable use of sensual details of every kind, from sounds, sights, smells, and the racketing and shriek of shrapnel set against the constant roar of artillery, to snatches of songs overheard or remembered, reflections on pools of mud, the odors of winter fields of beets blown up by explosives, the way individual soldiers carried themselves at moments of stress or while waiting. All of these become part of the “nowness” that Jones said was indispensable to the visual arts. The resulting powerful and intense evocation, however, occurs in what seems like a vast echo chamber where the reverberations resound from the remote antiquity of military activities, and of the language and mythology of Britain, from Shakespeare’s Histories, in English, and from the poems, conflicts, and divinities of the more venerable traditions of Wales and the Welsh, and from the legacy, civil, political, and military, of the Roman occupation of the island, some remnant of which Arthur himself had fought to preserve.
Merwin mentions Jones's beliefs about the visual arts because Jones was as much an artist as he was a poet. He drew from an early age and studied under Walter Sickert. But perhaps the most important influence in life as an artist was fellow Catholic-covert Eric Gill. In the 1920s Jones lived with the Gill family, illustrating books and experimenting with different print making styles. He was even engaged to one of Gill's daughters for a time.
The illustration on the cover of In Parenthesis is a detail of a drawing of Jones's that belongs in the collection of the Tate Britain. He was also involved with the design and typesetting of the interior of In Parenthesis, of which the NYRB edition is a facsimile.
Languagehat on David Jones
Modernism's David Jones pages
If you'd like to get some good deals on Classics and other New York Review books, and maybe even give your two cents to a staff member, come visit our booths at the AWP conference (which begins January 30th—and is sold out) and the Left Forum conference (March 14th-16th).
NYRB will have table at each show, and plans for a Victor Serge panel are in the works for the Left Forum event.
That is, UCLA professor Christopher Looby will be discussing his rediscovery of Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself—a truly lost American classic in which the titular character (and putative author) evades death and climbs up and down the social ladder of antebellum America by inhabiting a series of bodies and identities—at Booksoup in Los Angeles on Thursday, January 24th.
Download the introduction
Download a chapter
Come by McNally Robinson booksellers this Friday, January 18th to hear Zadie Smith and Gary Shteyngart read from Gregor von Rezzori's complicated and darkly humorous novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. Erica Jong introduces the work.
Download Deborah Eisenberg's introduction to Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
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New York City
McNally Robinson
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: Zadie Smith and Gary Shteyngart will take part in a reading and discussion of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. The event will be introduced by Edwin Frank, editor of the NYRB Classics series. |
Los Angeles
Booksoup
Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself Learn more about Robert Montgomery Bird and Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself from UCLA Professor Christopher Looby, the author of the book's introduction. |
On Monday, November 12, the Tenement Museum in New York City will present "How the 'other' Other Half Lived: Edith Wharton's New York." Wharton scholar Hildegard Hoeller and editor of NYRB's The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, Roxana Robinson, will discuss Wharton's unique relationship with her native city.
When: November 12 at 6PM
Where: The Tenement Museum, 108 Orchard Street, (212) 982-8420
Free and Open to the Public
For more information, please visit www.tenement.org
On Monday, October 22nd, the 92nd Street Y, in New York City, will present authors Andrea Barrett and Tatyana Tolstaya in conversation. Andrea Barrett is the author of the collection of short fiction, Ship Fever, which received the 1996 National Book Award; she also introduced the NYRB Classic The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West. Tatyana Tolstaya is one of Russia's foremost writers and has been praised by Michiko Kakutani as having "a wholly distinctive voice, a quirky yet lyrical voice that blurs the line between poetry and prose, visionary magic and plain, old-fashioned description.... She is an enormously gifted writer." Both her novel The Slynx and her collection of stories, White Walls, are published by NYRB Classics.
For more information and tickets, please visit www.92ndy.org.
If you happen to be on the Galloway Coast of Scotland this weekend, stop by Wigtown—"a town of 900 people, a malt whiskey distillery, and a quarter of a million books—for their annual book festival. On Saturday (October 6, 2007) John Simenon, son of the Simenon, will be talking about his father. As far as I know, John S. doesn't give many talks, so this one should offer at least a couple of revelations.
Guardian's book blog on Wigtown
The event is sponsored by Ming Books, a shop in Wigtown that specializes in Crime fiction. It looks like an excellent source for first-edition and rare Simenons.
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