The sale includes books from all three imprints: Classics, New York Review Collections, and the Children's Collection—but it ends March 9th, so get a move on!
February 29, 2008
Moving Sale: 40%–60% off cover prices
February 28, 2008
A Lost Round-up
If you missed the cameo appearance of The Invention of Morel on Lost last week, there'll be another chance to the episode tonight.
Elsewhere, the internet is abuzz with discussion about the book:
"Fugitives? Island? Anomalies? I see a pattern here!"
Wondering what else shows up on the character Ben's bookshelf?
"[The plot] sounds a bit familiar, no?"
Ever read a book just because it's appeared on Lost?
An entry on the "Lostpedia" that could use some fleshing out.
The Mother Jones blog is discussing Lost? Isn't there an election to cover?
A reader suggests a story by Bioy Casare's friend and collaborator Borges that might prove fascinating to Lost viewers: "'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,' which is about a decades-old conspiracy to make an imaginary world 'real.'"
and so on...
In researching all of this, I uncovered another NYRB–Lost connection. A while ago, we mentioned that Frigyes Karinthy, whose memoir of surgery, A Journey Round My Skull, we'll soon be publishing, is frequently credited with the now-ubiquitous (and recently disproven?) proposition that all people are connected to each other by only six degrees. Now I see that Karinthy is mentioned in the Season 2 Bonus disk for Lost. On the disk, writer-producer Carlton Cruse, in voice-over, asks:
"Have you ever sat next to someone at a bar and felt that your paths have crossed before? Has the thought ever crossed your mind that the stranger behind you at the store would become a significant part of your life? In 1929, a Hungarian writer (Frigyes Karinthy) put forth the idea that anyone of us could name any one person among the earth's billions of inhabitants and through, at most 5 acquaintances, connect that person back to themselves. He called it 'The Theory of Centrality.'"
Hmmm. Who knows what other connections lurk in the pages of the Lostpedia?
February 22, 2008
Commonplace: Unforgiving Years, pt. 1
In honor of New York City's first real snowstorm of the season.
"A blizzard of thickly falling snowflakes, more opaque than white, held nightfall back over the airfield and gave Daria her first deep thrill. Snow, I salute you, dear whirling snow, you that soften the cold and fill the darkest of nights with intimations of lightness, blotting the pathways, making space huge, and setting the wolves to howling! You deliver me from the sands, no more desert, yesterday is simply the past. You deliver me from the rot of inaction."
Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge
Read a note from the editor about Victor Serge
February 21, 2008
Nikki McClure's Midnight Folk
The Midnight Folk, the companion book to John Masefield's Box of Delights, isn't coming out till next September, but—the necessities of publishing being what they are—we already have the cover in house.
Nikki McClure, whose paper-cut illustrations are all done by hand, and who illustrated the cover of the earlier Masefield book (and kept us in line, reminding us that wolves weren't really evil—no red eyes!—and that metallic inks are environmentally unfriendly) has outdone herself here with a suspenseful image of Kay Harker and his rat pal shrinking in a basement corner while the witchy Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and her coven march down the steps.
We've been fans of Nikki's ever since noticing her work (including her yearly calendar, which has a cult following & which has been spotted around town at several of our favorite shops) at Buy Olympia.
Last year Abrams brought out a book collecting the works in all of the previous years' calendars.
Some of us in the office, though, have been aware of Nikki's work since prep-school days, and one of us is even the proud owner of an early rare work, Sent Out On The Tracks They Built: Sinophobia in Olympia, 1886, which she collaborated on with Sarah Dougher in a more rocking incarnation.
Read and interview with Nikki McClure here.
February 19, 2008
February 14, 2008
Catch all for 2.14.08
Take back Valentine's Day!: "Cut out a paper heart, mount it on a doily, make a collage, and mail it to someone you like." (from A Brief Message, a site that airs the opinions of designers in 200 words or less)
And then make sure that what you've taken back is cruelty free, fair trade, and organic (listen to Democracy Now's Valentine Day Special on corruption among cocoa growers and diamond traders)
Read a love story, but bear in mind:
"When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims—these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name."
(From Jeffrey Eugenides' introduction to his collection of love stories, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead which includes Eileen Chang's "Red Rose, White Rose," also found in her Love in a Fallen City. Don't know what unrequited love has to do with encouraging kids to write, but the book raises funds for 826 Chicago.)
Boycott Valentine's Day and celebrate Vallotton's Day along with Zyzzvya's blog and Félix Fénéon, who illustrates Mr. Eugenides' point again and again in his capsule "novels":
Matters of the heart. M. Simon, a café owner in Verquin, township of Béthune, married and the father of three, committed suicide.
Prematurely jealous, J. Boulon, of Parc-Saint-Maur, pumped a revolver shot in the thigh of his fiancée, Germaine S.
Discover a love that dares speak its name: that of a little girl for a demure black resident of Greenwich Village.
This picture is offered up by a Princess Latifah at the Datalounge who describes herself as still wanting "a jewel encrusted nose-flute" (like the one the Persian Madame Butterfly has) and says:
"Here's Miss Jenny in all her feline hotness. Is it any wonder a little, gay African-American girl fell in love with this beautiful creature?"
(Thanks Fran, for bringing this to our attention)
February 06, 2008
From the Editor: A few words about Victor Serge
What follows is the text of our most recent Classics newsletter. If you'd like to receive these twice-monthly offers, visit the subscription page.
Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years
A few words about Victor Serge, his too-long-delayed recognition as a great writer, and Unforgiving Years, Serge's last novel, completed before his death in 1946 but not published in the original French until 1971, and only now appearing in English translation. Serge's extraordinary life—as a youth, he was imprisoned in France for his anarchist connections; he fought in the Russian Revolution, only to denounce the Bolsheviks for their abuses of power; he was exiled by Stalin to Siberia, then miraculously released and deported from the USSR; he spent his last years as an increasingly lonely prophet of the anti-Communist left—all this has led to the neglect of Serge's no less extraordinary accomplishment as a novelist. He is one of the greatest of twentieth-century political novelists, and his work more than holds its own—I'd even say overshadows—that of contemporaries like Andre Malraux and Ignazio Silone, not to mention such fading Cold War relics as 1984 and Darkness at Noon.
Serge's neglect can be attributed to various things: not only the fact that he was always and everywhere an outsider, but also, somewhat paradoxically, to his work's being imbued, even in the face of horror, with an irrepressible, almost incorrigible, vitality. Serge writes about people caught in the tightening vice of an unforgivingly political world, but he never succumbs to the belief that this is the only world there is—that politics is, much less should be, the be-all and end-all of existence—any more than he supposes that there is any way of simply opting out, hands clean, of the political world. He contemplates political realities unflinchingly, without allowing them to intimidate his imagination. He retains an expansive sense of possibility, a commitment to the boundless—one that finds particular expression in his love of the natural world. In The Case of Comrade Tulayev (reissued as an NYRB Classic with an introduction that is one of Susan Sontag's most ambitious and thoughtful late statements), an old Bolshevik returns from the Gulag to Moscow by sled—he is being summoned, he has no doubt, to his death—and Serge gives this trip an altogether unexpected turn, transforming it into an astonishing, beautifully specific meditation on the night sky and the immensity of the Russian taiga. The world, Serge never doubts, is bigger than what human beings make of it. There is a saving horizon beyond our ends and means.
Unforgiving Years displays the same reach and the same richness, whether describing the rainy labyrinthine streets of a demoralized pre–World War II Paris, the siege of Leningrad, or the surreal ruins of a bombed-out German city on the verge of being overrun by the Allies. (It is a measure of Serge's imaginative range and sympathy that he should be the author of one of the first—and to this day one one of the most striking—literary descriptions of the German experience of defeat.) The last scenes are laid in Mexico, where those left standing are reunited in a landscape that is at once lush and severe, a prolific new world that, however, is still overshadowed by the old one, a place where the abiding truths of nature and the passing struggles of history converge in an uncanny perspective. The book has an epic scope—it is a picture of a planet in convulsion—without foregoing the detail of everyday life or a sense of the moment. It is a spy story and a war story and (several) love stories, gripping and terrifying, passionate and thoughtful, while the men and women in it—they include secret agents, true believers, philosophers, artists, and assassins—are at once larger than life and powerfully alive.
I'm happy that this wonderful book should at last be seeing the light of the day in English as an NYRB Classic. I hope that it will introduce new readers to a major modern writer—who, as it just happens, was also a hero of our time.
Edwin Frank, Editor
P.S. One additional reason for Serge's neglect may be that, though he wrote in French, at heart he was a Russian novelist. His parents were Russian radicals in exile from the Tsarist regime. Serge himself was, as mentioned above, deeply involved in the Russian Revolution. If you're interested in Serge you might well want to look at these other NYRB Classics, too.
The offers below do expire so order soon...
Unforgiving Years
By Victor Serge
Translated and with an introduction by Richard Greeman
Retail: $15.95
Special Offer: $11.96
(25% off)
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
By Victor Serge
Introduction by Susan Sontag
Translated by Willard R. Trask
Retail: $14.95
Special Offer: $11.21
(25% off)
Life & Fate
Vasily Grossman
Retail price: $22.95
Special Offer: $17.21 (25% off)
Envy
Yuri Olesha
Retail price: $12.95
Special Offer: $9.71 (25% off)
Soul
Andrey Platonov
Retail price: $15.95
Special Offer: $11.96 (25% off)
Ice
Vladimir Sorokin
Retail price: $23.95
Special Offer: $16.77 (30% off)
White Walls
Tatyana Tolstaya
Retail price: $16.95
Special Offer: $12.71(25% off)
The Slynx
Tatyana Tolstaya
Retail price: $14.95
Special Offer: $11.21 (25% off)
February 04, 2008
Big at the AWP, David Jones
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.
Jones enlisted in the army at the age of 19
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
February 01, 2008
The "What's in a Name" reading challenge
For those of you stumped over just what to read for the "What's in a Name" challenge, we have some suggestions.
A book with a color in its title
Assuming the word "color" counts
White Walls
Black Sun
The Colour Out of Space
Red Lights
A book with an animal in its title
Hawks figure prominently
The Peregrine
The Pilgrim Hawk
The Goshawk
Memed, My Hawk
The Tiger in the House
The Stuffed Owl
The Glass Bees
The Fox in the Attic
My Dog Tulip
A book with a first name in its title
Eliminating biographies
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes
The Late Mattia Pascal
Memed, My Hawk
Cassandra at the Wedding
Mary Olivier: A Life
The World of Odysseus
René Leys
Mawrdew Czgowchwz
The Life of Henry Brulard
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Hadrian the Seventh
Alfred and Guinevere
Lolly Willowes
Jakob von Gunten
Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself
A book with a place in its title
Butcher's Crossing
That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana
Memoirs of Montparnasse
The Singapore Grip and The Siege of Krishnapur,
Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn
Apartment in Athens
Paris and Elsewhere
Three Bedrooms in Manhattan
The Towers of Trebizond
Peking Story
Memoirs of Hecate County
To the Finland Station
Paris Stories
Letters from Russia
The New York Stories of Edith Wharton
The New York Stories of Henry James
A book with a weather event in its title
A "weather event"? Looks like two might qualify
A High Wind in Jamaica
Indian Summer
A book with a plant in its title
The Root and the Flower
Wheat That Springeth Green
Witch Grass
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