A Different Stripe

HALF-PRICE SALE

“There are many more sorts of stories than there are sizes. Epics; ballads; historical or biographical or autobiographical narratives, letters, diaries; myths, fairy tales, fables; dreams, daydreams, humorous or indecent or religious anecdotes; all those stories that might be called specialized or special case—science fiction, ghost stories, detective stories, Westerns, True Confessions, children’s stories, and the rest; and, finally, ‘serious fiction’.... For there are all kinds of beings, and all kinds of things happen to them; and when you add to these what are essential to the writer, the things that don’t actually happen, the beings that don’t actually exist, it is no wonder that stories are as varied as they are.”—Randall Jarrell, introduction to Jarrell's Book of Stories

My first two picks from the list of books on sale are:

Conundrum by Jan Morris
Jan Morris could write exquisite copy for cuisinart manual, so imagine the delight to be found in this memoir of her life, which includes a stint in British Intelligence, being among the first to climb Mt. Everest, fathering five children, and—oh yeah—undergoing sex reassignment surgery in Morocco in the 70s.

Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White
After some debate, we decided to publish this book as part of our Children's Collection, but it really would have worked almost as well as part of the adults' classics series. The book reveals the further adventures of Gulliver's Lilliputians. Seems they ended up on a small island located in a pond a remote estate. There they lived for two-hundred years, unbothered by the outside world. But their seclusion comes to an end once they are discovered by the orphaned Maria (she of the coke-bottle glasses and knobby knees on the book's cover) and her unscrupulous guardians—one of whom goes by the name "Mr. Hater"!— who want to exploit the small folk as a circus act.

Hope to have a couple of more staff sale picks in the next day or so.

Cast a vote for English, August

A former intern who now works at Oxford University Press has alerted us to a book tournament, the winner of which receives the Rooster Award. We were excited to see that Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August (to use the convenient shorthand we've developed for this hilarious and searching book, it's the Indian The Catcher in the Rye) is a candidate. You can read a chapter of the book and Akhil Sharma's introduction at our website. Powells.com is a sponsor and are offering all the books on the list at a nice 30% discount. So vote early and vote often!

The Tournament of Books page

People Reading

"Richard looked to see what everyone was reading, and found that his progress through the plane described a diagonal of shocking decline. In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War I, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina. As for Business World, it wasn't that the businessmen and businesswomen were immersing themselves in incorrigibly minor or incautiously canonized figures like Thornton Wilder or Dostoevsky, or with lightweight literary middlemen like A.L. Rowse or Lord David Cecil, or yet with teacup-storm philosophers, exploded revisionist historians, stubbornly Steady State cosmologists or pallid poets over whom the finger of sentimentality continued to waver. They were reading . . . outright junk. Fat financial thrillers, chunky chillers and tublike tinglers . . . And then he pitched up in the intellectual slum of First Class . . . and nobody was reading anything—except for a lone seeker who gazed, with a frown of mature skepticism, at a perfume catalogue. Jesus, what happened on the Concorde?"—Martin Amis, The Information

For more book voyeurism, take a look at the site People Reading, which first came to my attention when the author posted a photograph of a man reading Simenon's Red Lights while doing some dive-bar hopping around San Francisco. The match of subject matter to place is so perfect as to seem staged.

Old age must come

"And Natasha began to dream: if old age must come to me as well, then let me turn into a clean, pink, white-haired old lady, a beloved schoolteacher, kind and funny, like a hot cross bun. But she wasn’t made to be a hot cross bun and so was obliged to become a stooped, muddy-gray old lady with jowls."

—Tatyana Tolstaya, "The Moon Came Out," from White Walls: Collected Stories

Vollmann on Berkman

William T. Vollmann's new condensed version of Rising Up and Rising Down briefly mentions Alexander Berkman's autobiography Memoirs of an Anarchist.

"In 1892, the anarchist Alexander Berkman goes to Pittsburgh in hopes of avenging by assasination the ruling class's murders of the Homestead strikers."

Vollmann has a very brief quote of Berkman's description of the industrial landscape, but it's still enough to give you an idea of Berkman's writing:

"The sight fills me with hatred of the perverse social justice that turns the
needs of mankind into an Inferno of brutalizing toil."

As you may be able to glean from our book cover, Berkman has to undergo more than a little brutalizing toil of his own, once incarcerated.

Arun Kolatkar poetry reading in India

In what looks to be the first NYRB Classics event on the subcontinent, the Kitab Festival in Mumbai will feature a reading from Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri on February 25th. The reading is part of an evening called "Mumbai Meri Jaan!" (which, I think, translates as "Mumbai, My Darling") that seems to be the festival's finale. And, just before the reading, Amit Chaudhuri (who wrote the foreword to our edition of Jejuri, and who brought the book to our attention) and his band(!) will be performing.

We've had some inquiries about how to buy copies of Jejuri in India. Well, now we can say conclusively that they will be available at the event.

I hadn't heard of the festival, which is in its second year, but it seems to be a celebration of UK/Indian relations, with a heavy focus on the literary. The roster of speakers really is impressive, but that's no surprise, given the richness of the theme. Maybe next year we can coordinate an event in honor of our republication of G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr—a book that exists as a monument to that linguistic relationship.
 

February. Take ink and weep,

February. Take ink and weep,

write February as you’re sobbing,

while black Spring burns deep

through the slush and throbbing.

 

Take a cab. For a clutch of copecks,

through bell-towers’ and wheel noise,

go where the rain-storm’s din breaks,

greater than crying or ink employs.

 

Where rooks in thousands falling,

like charred pears from the skies,

drop down into puddles, bringing

cold grief to the depths of eyes.

 

Below, the black shows through,

and the wind’s furrowed with cries:

the more freely, the more truly

then, sobbing verse is realised.

                    —Boris Pasternak

Tatyana Tolstaya quotes the first line of this poem in The Slynx. (It's one of the pieces of literature claimed by the Great Leader of the futuristic Moscow of the novel). I've no idea if this translation is any good, but it is offered for non-commercial use by A.S. Kline (thank you Mr. Kline!). Any other suggestions of better ones?

In searching for the complete text of the poem, the name Regina Spektor kept popping up. She apparently quotes from it in her song "Après Moi."

How it Looks from Old Europa

We've added a link to our "We're Fond Of" list on the right: Sign and Sight, the English-language version of the popular German online magazine perlentaucher.de. Sign and Sight combines original features and — like the beloved Arts & Letters Daily, but from a European perspective — a round-up of all sorts of cultural and political news and views you may not run across elsewhere.

Curious about NYRB author Peter Handke's latest controversy, or Sigmund Freud's affair with his wife's sister? What are they saying across the pond about the latest Pynchon? Want to read the new Taliban military codex translated into English, or Wim Wenders on images of the European dream, or a hilarious rediscovered interview with Thomas Bernhard?

Sometimes the site links out to an untranslated article but mostly it's an English-language look at how it looks from over there. Lots of pearls to dive for.

Rejected back-cover art for Pecos Bill

There are so many great, small b/w Laura Bannon illustrations (in addition to her antic, Southwestern-paletted color drawings) in Pecos Bill that it was fun, but also frustrating to choose one. Here are some we didn't end up using:

Our designer was keen on this, and I thought it was a great suggestion, but then I noticed that the flowers were actually growing through the eye sockets of the animal's skull. Not sure this is the right place for a momento mori.

Our production manager suggested this. Yes! that's sums up the spirit of the American Cowboy (to which the book is dedicated). But wait, is that a...monocle? Hmm, guess that would belong to the character known as "the English Dude."

And everybody's favorite image is, sadly, unusable for obvious reasons.

The good news is that all of these pieces of spot art are right where they belong, in the pages of Pecos Bill.