A Different Stripe

Will the real Ebenezer Le Page please stand up?

photos © Jane Mosse

Thanks to Guernsey(wo)man Jane Mosse (what do you call a woman who lives in Guernsey?), G.B. Edwards friend and dedicatee Edward Chaney, and the staff of the Guernsey Press Bookshop on St Peters Port, Ebenezer Le Page got reintroduced to the world in style. On July 20th a special reception was held in the book's honor and the Bookshop has gone all out with this incredible window showing a lifelike figure representing the old curmudgeon himself (also pictured is Edward Chaney).

I'm working on gathering some more Pagiana, including Edward Chaney's long article that appeared in the Guernsey Society's magazine over the course of three issues (if you're looking for information about the author or about his book, the article is the most comprehensive thing out there). I also hope to have some more photographs of places mentioned in the book and possibly a scan of an Ebenezer Map of Guernsey that's available at the Press Bookshop.

In the meantime, have a look at a recent article that appeared in The Guernsey Press about a "real life Ebenezer Le Page."

or buy the book itself, either alone (at 25% off) or as part of a grouping in the summer reading sale (at 40% discount)

or, download the reading group guide for the book and find out why the authors of Good Books Lately: The One-Stop Resource for Book Groups and Other Greedy Readers called it "The only book you'll need when you get marooned on that desert island: the glorious, heart-breaking epic of one Guernsey fellow's trip through the twentieth century"

Credit for the flickr slideshow programming goes to Paul Stamatiou. Thanks!

Monday Movie: The The Impotence of Proofreading

Not quite all about All About H. Hatterr

All About H. Hatterr goes on sale October 23, 2007

Recently, a reader wrote in about an earlier post having to do with a reading from Arun Kolatkar's poem cycle, Jejuri. In the post, I mentioned in passing that we'd be publishing a novel that was considered by the likes of Rushdie and Auden Eliot to be one of the classics of Anglo-Indian lit, All About H. Hatterr by G.V. Desani. I would say that Hatterr is one of the books we've had the most requests to republish. And it's always a pleasure to be able to respond to such requests with a simple, "Done."

I could attempt a word or two about Desani's book, but so many writers more intimate with the work than I am have done it so much better.

We can start with the aforementioned Rushdie, whose name often comes up in discussing the book. This is from Rushdie's preface to  Mirrorwork, an anthology of Indian writing, published in 1997.

The writer I have placed alongside Narayan, G.V. Desani, has fallen so far from favour that the extraordinary All About H. Hatterr is presently out of print everywhere, even in India. Milan Kundera once said that all modern literature descends from either Richardson's Clarissa or Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and if Narayan is India's Richardson then Desani is his Shandean other. Hatterr's dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language. His central figure, 'fifty-fity of the species,' the half-breed as unabashed anti-hero, leaps and capers behind many of the texts in this book. Hard to imagine I. Allan Sealy's Trotter-Nama without Desani. My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him.

The quote is found on Amardeep Singh's blog. I had the pleasure of hearing Professor Singh speak—along with the inspiring Rita Felski—on the topic: " Literary Criticism in the Public Sphere" at last year's MLA conference. He also has an extensive post about Hatterr here.

Singh points us to the "In Memorium Memoriam" statement by the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin.

Desani.org is a website devoted to the author. The "Talking Points" section of the site is fun.

Here is an analysis of the book from the blog A Mind @ Play.

And while we're at it, we've got some other books dealing with modern India in the classics list.

 

Sunbathing

Catching up on some old reviews of NYRB Classics in The New York Sun, I also find an article to whet the appetite for a forthcoming title (not yet scheduled).

Benjamin Lytal writes about Peter Handke and Robert Walser in "Visions from Mittleuropa."
Eric Ormsby points out that the US is still struggling to answer many of the questions posed by Henry Adams in The Jeffersonian Transformation.

Finally, Louis Begley introduces us to "The Pitiless Universe of Montherlant." We've recently acquired rights to Henri de Montherlant's Chaos and Night. Look for it in late 2008 or '09.

Image:   The Sun in a Persian document in the collection Wellcome Library, London

Allons enfants!

Today is Bastille Day, and though it's a poor tribute, I thought I'd point you to a nice little brochure we've drawn up highlighting the rather large selection of books having to do with France. The place of pride goes to our sister imprint, The Little Bookroom, which has recently published (for the first time in English) the guide to dining in Paris, Le Pudlo Paris.

The NYRB Classics series is no slouch in the French department either. Take a look.

Download the Discover France Brochure

Alistair Horne on Radio 4

For those of you not in the UK, here's a link to this morning's BBC Radio 4 interview with Alistair Horne. The interviewer asked mainly about Horne's recent (mainly) "off the record" sit-down with President Bush.

What was the author of A Savage War of Peace most surprised by?

How “well he looked—he looked like he had come off a cruise in the Caribbean. He seemed to have none of the worries of statehood.”

How thoughtful Bush seems in general, and “how much he reads.”

The archived page is not up yet, but if you're reading this after July 16, this is where I think it will be.

Genuine Nerds; or, three degrees of nerdiness

Seems to be a confluence of nerdiness today. Or, maybe it began last Sunday, when The New York Times declared Librarians to be cool (though we've been in on that secret for some time now; see link and link) Is the word Nerd currently undergoing reclamation by its previous victims in the way of another N word? Or has it already happened? Language Log, please explain!

So, I say, let's follow the trail of awkwardness and see where it leads us.

First: Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to Pop Culture (now in it's 10th year, and as cool as ever) is holding a roller-skating jam named "Nerds on Wheels" to raise some funds for themselves and the Independent Publishing Resource Center this Thursday (7.12.07) in Portland, OR.

Second: The Written Nerd provides a very nice write-up of Elaine Dundy's Dud Avocado. Meanwhile the new literature correspondent at About Last Night, the blogger known as CAAF, kicks off her first 5x5 list of recommended books with several of her favorites of the moment. #2 is The Dud Avocado.

Third:

Now here's the heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I've been fleeing all my life. And (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become. I'd taken my lamb by the hand to the slaughter and nobody even wanted it. Apparently there's a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify. So I finally found a little out-of-the-way, off-the-beaten-track library downtown and they let me put the books away.

So I felt I was accomplishing something.

—Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado.