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A Letter from the Editor on the Occasion of Publishing the 200th NYRB Classic

 

[With apologies to those of you on our mailing list. This will look familiar.]

In one of the many welcome messages NYRB receives from readers urging us to reprint one book or another, somebody posed a blunt question: Why so many books by Georges Simenon? It's a good question, since it's true that we have published more titles by Simenon than by any other author, with more to come. Here, too, we are featuring a new translation of one of his early romans durs, The Engagement, as the 200th title in the Classics series. What is it about Simenon and NYRB?

Well, the simple answer is that Simenon is simply a great writer: one who has a distinctive sense of human character (stripped, it's true, of any confidence in the humanity of humanity, though marked at the same time with a compassion for even the most aberrant members of our aberrant species); a true gift for setting a scene, whether in Africa, provincial France, or New England; and, finally, a memorably individual style. Think of Simenon—writing his books in a matter of weeks, writing one after another—as an improviser in words, playing over riffs while working in a defined space similar to an old 78 record, an artist more akin to Charlie Parker than, say, to George Eliot. To my mind, Simenon's novels stand out as an unprecedented and extraordinary feat of literary improvisation.

So there is the fact of Simenon's originality of form and consistency of inspiration to draw us to him, but there is also the fact that he's been largely neglected in England and America (though not of course throughout the world, where his books rival the Bible in popularity); and, too, that even where he has been popular, he has often been seen not as the consummate artist he is, but instead as merely popular, as an "entertainer"—oversights and misjudgments that provide all the more reason to single Simenon out as a writer who transforms our sense of what writing is and can be.

A Glimpse into the Future

Now that the NYRB Classics series has reached the two hundred mark, readers may also be curious to know what lies in the future. Our recent complete catalog includes titles appearing through the end of 2007, but I thought I'd provide a glimpse even beyond that. From the start, the publishing program has had an international character, and as we have gone along we have commissioned an increasing number of new translation of works from various languages. This last year, for example, we brought out both Grief Lessons , Anne Carson's version of some of Euripides' most harrowing plays, as well as the contemporary Russian author Vladimir Sorokin's Ice, the first volume of a trilogy which we will publish in its entirety. (Euripides and Sorokin, from the far ends of the western literary tradition, are both masters of the art of shock, scarifying, scabrous writers who offend conventional sensibilities.) Currently in the works are Stefan Zweig's posthumously published anatomy of nihilism, The Post-Office Girl, translated into English for the first time by Joel Rotenberg, and, from Richard Howard, Maupassant's poignant final reckoning with the vagaries of sex and the impossibility of love, Alien Hearts . Next year, we will also be reissuing Tove Jansson's meditative and beautiful Summer Book; Richard Hughes's terrifying tale of a ship held at the mercy of a storm at sea, In Hazard; and a legendary tour de force of "hard" science fiction, Christopher Priest's The Inverted World.

In non-fiction, upcoming publications include the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy's Journey Round My Skull, a surprisingly funny story of dealing with a brain tumor; Pilgrimage and Labyrinth, Tim Robinson's two-volume exploration of the coast and interior of the Aran Islands; Emmett Grogan's Ringolevio, which tells of growing up hard in New York before hitting the streets with the Diggers in 1960s San Francisco; and William Empson's Milton's God, a wonderfully original reading of a great poem that is also an exhilarating polemic against the Christian religion. Keep checking our website for news about these and other books.

In putting together this series over the last eight years, we have tried to keep our eyes open for books that appeal to what Virginia Woolf called the common reader, but who might equally be characterized as the adventurous reader, the reader who feels free to scramble over barriers of taste and cut across fields of study to see what's there to see. We're tremendously grateful for all the support we have received from readers, booksellers, and librarians, and for all the great suggestions we've been sent (please do keep them coming). And to the correspondent who wrote in asking why so much Simenon—I can only hope that there is something somewhere on our list that satisfies.

Edwin Frank, Editor

200 Classics: Which Ones Are You Missing?

To celebrate the release of our 200th classic, NYRB is presenting an unusual—if not unprecedented— opportunity to our blog readers.

If you're curious about what books you might be missing out of our two hundred, we'll be happy to help. Just give us a list of all the titles or ISBN numbers of books in your posession, and we'll email you with a list of  what you're missing.

Those of you with Delicious Library or Library Thing may have an advantage. For those without, we have a website with a handy search function to help. Please share with us how you compiled your list, we can let our other readers know if there's a better, easier, or more fun way than these other options.

Send your list in an email to nyrb at nybooks dot com.

The 2007 PEN awards

TO ALEXANDER BLOK

I had gone to see the poet
At exactly noon on Sunday.
His room was bare and quiet.
It was very cold outside.

The raspberry sunlight
Made smoky streaks of shadow
And my host said very little—
All he did was look at me.

His eyes were so astonishing
They still compel my memory,
And I thought, I must be careful
Not to look at them at all.

But I recall our conversation
And the sunlight and the shadow
In a tall house built of granite
Where the river meets the sea.

                    —Anna Akhmatova, 1914 (translated by Paul Schmidt)

Last night Paul Schmidt was posthumously recognized for his translations of the pre–Russian Revolution poets including Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Blok, Khlebnikov, and Akhmatova collected in the volume The Stray Dog Cabaret. The book was one of two runners-up for the 2007 Poetry in Translation Award given by PEN. Stray Dog was chosen from among one hundred works of poetry in translation, so it's no small honor to be a runner-up. Also deserving of an award for stamina is Peter Cole, the prize's sole judge.

And who knows, if The Selected Poems of Wang Wei (translated by David Hinton) can't fulfill its duties as winner, perhaps Stray Dog will have to fill in.

This isn't the first time the classics series has had a brush with PEN. In 2003, R.W. Flint won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize for his work on Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires. Flint's translation had been rejected by Farrar Straus in the 60s and he kept the manuscript, typed carefully on onion-paper, stashed away until he submitted it  to us following our publication of Pavese's Selected Works. And in 2004 Mavis Gallant was awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime literary achievement.

One unfortunate note from the awards ceremony. It seems that The Book of the Month Club will no longer be sponsoring PEN's translation prize, following some major cutting back at its parent company. Anyone interested in becoming a sponsor should get in touch with PEN.

Welcome aboard, booksellers!

Several additional bookstores signed up for displays marking the 200th NYRB Classic since we first wrote about it last month.

• As Evan has documented, all six Olssons locations have Classics on display.
• And in the Southwest/West areas of the country, we're pleased to note the addition of: AC Vroman's (Pasadena, CA), Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park, WA), and Book People (Austin, TX).

Look here for other participating bookstores around the US.

And thanks are due too, to the hardworking sales staff at Random House distribution for getting the word out and making this promotion such a success.

Olsson's NYRB Sale

I was in Washington D.C. last weekend, just in time to document  Olsson's Records and Books Buy 2 Get 1 Free NYRB Classics sale.

The sale is on through May 31st, and it's a sight to behold. I saw a few autographed copies of White Walls at a D.C. location, and I was pleased to see some nice staff reviews for Moon and the Bonfires and Warlock at the store in Arlington, Virginia.

Olsson's is the oldest independent book store in Washington--no easy accomplishment given the city's rich tradition of booksellers.

Bit-O-Heterodoxy

With all the hue and cry going on at the moment about the collapse of literary culture, it's particularly bracing to read some opposing viewpoints.

Today I happened upon two articles that reveal the monsters confronting us as the gentle creatures they really are.

Did you know that British publisher Orion was about to unleash a line of compact (i.e. abridged) classics? The horror! Or maybe not. In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Terry Teachout outs himself as a childhood reader of Reader's Digest Condensed books. He didn't turn out too bad, and he's betting that many people introduced to literature this way will be ok too. Or it could just be an age thing: "The older I get, the more I appreciate those artists who say what they have to say, then shut up." I couldn't have put it more succinctly myself.

Bob Hoover at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette thinks that, despite book sections being cut left and right,  we should all just relax. "The writing and reading of books persevere regardless," he writes. And he's cheered by, of all things, publishers' sales reps, whom he likens to "peddlers of Viagra, sump pumps or beer" but ones who really really love those sump pumps.

More please! Otherwise we might have to go back to gnashing our teeth.

Reading the World

The 2007 Reading the World site is up and ready to be perused. The home page is here and the NYRB Classics page is here.

More to come...

Big days for big books

Two of our largest books have gotten some recent attention.

First, Joseph Epstein praised Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate in Saturday's Wall Street Journal:

To attempt a novel modeled on "War and Peace" is easy; to write one that is unembarrassing by comparison is not. Far from embarrassing, "Life and Fate" is one of the great novels of the 20th century. The book has more than 150 characters, panoramically representing almost all strains of Russian life during the nightmarish Stalin years; various plots and subplots are neatly interwoven with detailed descriptions of battles and penetrating excursuses on totalitarianism, on the history of the persecution of the Jews...on the evolution of morality and kindness.

and today, Salon published an interview with Alistair Horne (author of A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962) called "Bush's Favorite Historian" in which we learn that Sir Alistair was recently invited to the White House for a chat with the president.

Other gleanings from the piece include:

Bush has apparently read the whole of A Savage War (or at least has been briefed on it well enough to be able to discuss its finer points).

We can add General Pinochet to the list of the book's admirers.