A Different Stripe

Menand on Trilling, Sorokin on the queue, Charles Taylor on us

The September 29th issue of The New Yorker includes a profile of Lionel Trilling by Louis Menand that is a much-expanded version of the introduction he wrote for our edition of The Liberal Imagination.

Words Without Borders reprints Vladimir Sorokin's witty and nostalgic afterword to his novel The Queue. Is there a word for poignant remembrances of the Soviet Union as nice as the one coined for East German nostalgia, ostalgie?

Charles Taylor wrote a love letter to NYRB Classics in the LA Times last week. Ok, he also mentions some other publishers too, like Europa Editions, Hard Case Crime, and Persephone who've recognized the failure of the marketplace to give real readers what they're looking for. If you don't have time to read the full piece, we suggest scanning its section headers: "Part of this Little Club," "Faulting Modern Fiction," "Threat to Establishment"—they don't exactly capture the article, but they're amusing.

The LA Times piece quotes Peter Miller of Freebird Books in Brooklyn, NY, remarking that "he displays the NYRB series near his register because 'you feel as if you're part of this little club that NYRB has curated for you.'"—which reminds us that we never linked to a roundup of Miller's NYRB favorites, complete with a photograph of Freebird's Classics shelf. And—would you look at that!—it turns out that John Wyndham's Chrysalids is the store's November book club pick. Thanks Freebirds!

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 3-for-2 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.

Shelf Shots: Dark Orpheus's Unlikely Combinations

Not too long ago Debi Alper put a call out for unlikely pairings of readers and books (the tattoo-artist reading Wuthering Heights, a homeless man reading Jeffrey Archer, etc.), well, here we have our very own surprising combination: Carebears™ and NYRB Classics. Visit Dark Orpheus to find out which books these stuffed animals are sitting on.

Shelf Shots: Imani

As the first person to heed our call for pictures of their own NYRB Classics, Imani gets the honors of the first post. She also gets props for having both volumes of the Human Predicament series by Richard Hughes (author of A High Wind in Jamaica), about two families'—one British, the other German—experiences with Nazism in the stack: The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess.