A Different Stripe

Robert Walser event and other PEN World Voices goings-on

On Saturday, May 3rd, come find out why Jeffrey Eugenides, Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Krüger, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Susan Bernofsky find miniaturist and microsciptologist  Robert Walser one of the most compelling of 20th-century writers.

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Get a taste of Walser's brand of sad-sack humor at N+1

The New Novel
translated by Damion Searls

"Exceptionally estimable, good, nice, dear people they all were but they all, unluckily, kept asking me about the new novel, and that was excruciating.

"Whenever I met an estimable friend on the street, he said and asked: 'How's your new novel coming? Countless avid readers are rejoicing in advance and are already eager to see your new novel. You were nice enough to let on that you're writing a new novel, were you not? I hope it'll be out soon, the new novel.' " [more]

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Other NYRB Classics contributors at the festival

Edwin Frank  (NYRB Classics editorial director)
Francisco Goldman (introduction to The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll)
A.M. Homes (introduction to The Diary of a Rapist)
Fanny Howe (introductions to Mouchette and the forthcoming Rock Crystal)
Janet Malcolm (author of In the Freud Archives)
Albert Mobilio (introduction to The Wine-Dark Sea)
Michael Ondaatje (introduction to Paris Stories)
Francine Prose (introductions to A High Wind in Jamaica and A House and Its Head)
Charles Simic (author of Dime-Store Alchemy and introduction to The Late Mattia Pascal)
Matt Weiland (introduction to the soon-to-be-released Names on the Land)

The Booker of Bookers

2009 will  be the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize (the first awardee was P.H. Newby's Something to Answer For). To drum up interest in the award, and because the only thing better that a best-of list is a best-of-the-best list, there will be a "Best of the Booker" prize given to one of the 41 former winners. As the Man Booker site notes, this isn't the first time such a prize has been distributed, in 1993 Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was deemed the best by a panel of judges.

Democracy has swept the world, and what worked 1993 surely won't work for the Web 2.0 generation, so this time, the panel of experts is selecting only the six finalists for the "Best of the Booker" prize. The public will be making the final choice.

ABE.com is holding its very own, early poll. So if you'd like to vote for NYRB's lone Booker winner, head over to its Booker page, and put your support behind J.G. Farrell's Siege of Krishnapur.

Fairly used

Alasdair Gray is perhaps not as well known in the US as he should be, though not for lack of Gavin Grant's trying, nor, for that matter his own enlightened beliefs about disseminating excerpts of his work:

About authors' property rights I am a Socialist who thinks nobody should pay for quoting less than 200 words. Nearly everyone who wants to use my illustrations and words — sometimes whole stories — is allowed to have them free if they are not a financially successful publishing firm. I think it a pity that the law has extended dead authors' copyrights from 50 to 70 years. I thought of adding a clause to my will making the copyrights of my books free for all, but my wife is much younger than me and depends on my income, so I did not do it. [link to the post from which this is taken]

We frequently receive requests for permission to quote from books we publish—often in non-commercial publications or scholarly works. Since we do not control such reproduction rights, we cannot deny or grant permission. Instead I sometimes try to sketch out a brief description of the doctrine of fair use: a doctrine that seems to be in danger of dying out from disuse.   It's not something made up by Lawrence Lessig and his pals at Stanford, you can read about it at the US Copyright Office. The University of Texas site also includes a helpful discussion.

"A surging novel of torment and desire"

Those of you who have read Paul Theroux's essay on The Widow by Georges Simenon—either as the introduction to the NYRB edition of the book, or when it appeared in the TLS—might have wished that it had come with a visual footnote to this sentence:

[The Widow] was even resurrected as a 1950s pulp fiction paperback with a come-on tag line (“A surging novel of torment and desire”) and a lurid cover: busty peasant girl pouting in a barn, her skirt hiked over her knees, while a hunky guy lurks at the door – price twenty-five cents.

Well, here you have it. And as a bonus, we bring you the back cover's illustrated dramatis personae: "THE PEASANT WOMAN, THE EX-CONVICT, THE TEEN-AGE GIRL" and the plot synopsis that, while not strictly misrepresenting the facts of the book, gets its tone all wrong: "...Tati knew that only the most devious devices could hold a man with fatally twisted emotions"!

The TLS article bore the title "The existential hack"—which doesn't seem to have been snapped up yet as the title of a freelance writer's blog, register it while you can.

Freeman. Dyson.

Radiolab's bioengineering episode (So Called) Life mentioned New York Review of Books contributor and "frog prince of physics" Freeman Dyson numerous times . . . and in a stern voice reminiscent of action movie trailers, or perhaps, a headlining heavy metal band (if you download the epsiode, fast forward to 33:45). Such intonations seem entirely appropriate for the author of The Scientist as Rebel.

Update: Here is the sound clip . . . Download freeman_dyson.mp3

Update the II: Here is a remix of the sound clip Download freeman_dyson_remix.mp3 . . .

Patrick McGrath interview

John Self has a nice brief interview with Patrick McGrath at Asylum. McGrath discusses the development of the storyline of his new novel, Trauma, why you shouldn't refer to his work as "gothic," and being an ex-patriot British writer living in New York.

McGrath is the editor of our forthcoming collection of Daphne du Maurier stories, Don't Look Now, coming out this October.

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.

The Manhattan Street Corners project

Photograph © Richard Howe

Richard Howe, who came to digital photography fairly late in his career as an artist, has nonetheless  done what no other photographer has had the temerity to do before: photograph each and every of the 10,937 street corners on the island of Manhattan. On his website you can view all of the pictures he took of 10th Avenue from 13th Street to 218th street. But to get a real feel of the project, I recommend having a look at the "101 Street Corners Sampler."

What you might first notice from flipping through these galleries is how comfortingly pedestrian the streets of New York really look: here are old women shopping, bunches of teenagers coming home from school, block after block of undistinguished buildings. There is little Times Square razzle-dazzle in evidence, this is a city of people going about daily life. But then you come across a photograph of something like the vacant building at the corner of  Spring and Mulberry Elizabeth streets that served as a spectacular showcase for graffiti artists and realize that the in New York the mundane is pretty wonderful. As Richard says in his introduction to the project,

Each of Manhattan’s street corners is a life-world of its own, representing the common experience of the daily lives that cross it; taken together, they represent the collective experience of the island’s streets and sidewalks, the larger life-world of Manhattan’s greatest public commons.

The whole collection will be available in 2009 and you can buy individual prints now—in fact, the Library of Congress has four in its permanent collection.

Of all 10,937 photographs available, I chose the one at the top of the post because it makes a nice introduction to NYRB's new  location—that's right, we've just moved to Greenwich Village. We're not actually located in the White Horse Tavern, but we aren't too far away.

Before we packed up the old place, I took a picture of one of my favorite relics of the old, old office. I had a feeling that this desk organizer, which likely dated from the 60s, wouldn't survive the move. It features a sticker that reads (or read) what I'm guessing is "Berrigan for Pope." But which Berrigan? Daniel? Phil? Perhaps a dual papacy?

Will T.S. Eliot ever forgive us for this post?

Read as penance—or listen.