A Different Stripe

Henry James and the loquacity of incomprehension

A "review" of Henry James's Outcry by "Uncle" Walt Mason, published in The Bookman, February 1912.

Henry James’s later books are always falling into the hands of persons for whom they were not intended, and it is always a necessity of these simple natures to blame him for what they cannot understand. Probably no novelist ever lived who could stimulate an uncongenial reader to such loquacity of incomprehension. The results are generally rather sad, but the following clipping from the New York Globe sums up the whole man-in-the-street point of view briefly, conclusively, and with engaging candour:

I have read your latest story, Henry James; it contains no actions gory, Henry James; there is nothing there to shock; no man hits another’s block; all your people stand and talk, Henry James. Oh, they talk too long, I ween, Henry James; and I can’t guess what they mean, Henry James; each one anxiously conceals all emotion that he feels, each one’s head is full of wheels, Henry James. Oh, your ladies and your gents, Henry James; nothing sane have they in mind, nothing but their social grind, and they stand and talk us blind, Henry James. I like narratives of folks, Henry James, who are toiling in their yokes, Henry James; men who saw and dig and pound, men who plough the fertile ground, men who make the wheels go round, Henry James. All your little fiddling lords, Henry James, with their endless stram of words, Henry James, are not worth one sweating jay who is toiling day by day, sawing work or bailing hay, Henry James.

A new translation of Collodi's Pinocchio

 

top: front cover featuring Pinocchio by Tim Rollins and K.O.S.; back cover

middle: title page (and facing) with two illustrations by Attilio Mussino (1911)

bottom: final pages showing another Mussino illustration (spoiler: Pinocchio becomes a "proper little boy")

from: The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, newly translated by Geoffrey Brock, introduction by Umberto Eco, afterword by Rebecca West, available November 2008

Menand on Trilling, Sorokin on the queue, Charles Taylor on us

The September 29th issue of The New Yorker includes a profile of Lionel Trilling by Louis Menand that is a much-expanded version of the introduction he wrote for our edition of The Liberal Imagination.

Words Without Borders reprints Vladimir Sorokin's witty and nostalgic afterword to his novel The Queue. Is there a word for poignant remembrances of the Soviet Union as nice as the one coined for East German nostalgia, ostalgie?

Charles Taylor wrote a love letter to NYRB Classics in the LA Times last week. Ok, he also mentions some other publishers too, like Europa Editions, Hard Case Crime, and Persephone who've recognized the failure of the marketplace to give real readers what they're looking for. If you don't have time to read the full piece, we suggest scanning its section headers: "Part of this Little Club," "Faulting Modern Fiction," "Threat to Establishment"—they don't exactly capture the article, but they're amusing.

The LA Times piece quotes Peter Miller of Freebird Books in Brooklyn, NY, remarking that "he displays the NYRB series near his register because 'you feel as if you're part of this little club that NYRB has curated for you.'"—which reminds us that we never linked to a roundup of Miller's NYRB favorites, complete with a photograph of Freebird's Classics shelf. And—would you look at that!—it turns out that John Wyndham's Chrysalids is the store's November book club pick. Thanks Freebirds!

A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.

Shane at the enotes books blog points us to The Chronicle of Higher Education's useful and proper gloss on publishing terms. We herewith submit an alternative list, a sort of Devil's Dictionary of the publishing world, "Tom's Glossary of Book Publishing Terms."

From the Chronicle:
Blurbs: Spy magazine used to have a column called "Logrolling in Our Time": In pairs of reciprocal blurbs, authors would puff each other's books. Don't ask your mother for a blurb (unless she's a famous author in your field). Blurbs can help buyers to situate your work by seeing the intellectual company you keep.

According to Tom:
Blurb: A brief noise that embarrasses everyone.

Chronicle:
Publication date: A date, six to eight weeks after the bound book is available, before which news media are not supposed to review the book (to allow it time to get from the warehouse into the stores). Often, with scholarly books, the official pub date comes and goes accompanied by radio silence.

Tom:
Publication date: A sliding holiday based on the phases of the moon.

And so on.

Photo of a printer's devil from the photostream of One Lucky Guy

Remember Angus Wilson?

Terry Teachout does and has some very nice things to say about Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and other books in the series in a recent "Contentions" column on the Commentary web site. He makes Wilson's novel sound like a natural companion to Lionel Trilling's non-fiction Liberal Imagination.

"Of special interest is the cold eye that Angus Wilson casts on humanism in all its mid-century varieties. Neither conservative nor (so far as I know) religious, Wilson was nonetheless acutely aware of the inadequacies of the secular creed to which most of his fellow liberals adhered, and skewered them with the sharpest of sticks."

The title of the novel, by the way, comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass  :

"All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. 'I see somebody now!' she exclaimed at last. 'But he's coming very slowly—and what curious attitudes he goes into!' (For the Messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)"

Which is why that curious messenger illustrates our edition of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

 

Brooklyn Book Festival 2008

Image from Shawn I. via Flickr

If you're going to the third annual Brooklyn Book Fest held in downtown Brooklyn this weekend, be sure to stop by booths 9 & 10. NYRB and The Little Bookroom will be there with special sales on many many books from the whole range of imprints, and there will be a great rate on subscriptions on The New York Review of Books—which is just about to turn 45!

New York Review essayists Joan Didion, Mark Danner, Ronald Dworkin, and Darryl Pinckney will be on hand (at St. Francis Auditorium) to discuss the book The Consequences to Come: American Power after Bush at 5:30. The event is free, but tickets are required.

Also don't forget to have a look at the Reading the World display at the Words without Borders table—a selection of some of the best international literature being published in the US these days.

What to wear when you're reading The Summer Book

This shirt was bought for its print's resemblance to the lone seagull on the upper left corner of Tove Jansson's illustration for the cover of The Summer Book (click on the photo to enlarge it).

Elsewhere...

Esperanza Spaulding's recommendation of the book was so nice, we have to quote it in full:

"I just read a beautiful little novel by the writer Tove Jansson titled The Summer Book. The stories she creates are probably the most eloquent and subtle portraits of nature, human nature and love ever written. Once I picked the book up I couldn't put it down until the last pages—I even indulged in reading some chapters two or three times! I highly recommend it to anyone stuck in a big city this summer."

and Kenny Brechner of Devaney, Doak & Garrett Booksellers in Farmington, Maine, says that "Not ever reading Jansson would be like not ever trying ice cream"—can you come up with a better definition of a life not worth living?

Newly Weird Jeff Vandermeer lists the Summer Book as one of his all-time favorites.

J. Robert Lennon explains why "the biggest surprise about [the book] is how radical it is" in his very entertaining blog, Ward Six. His co-blogger, Rhiann Ellis is also a fan.

And the Caustic Cover Critic shows us some of the other cover illustrations Jansson did for her own books, along with her interpretations of some classics like The Hobbit and Alice in Wonderland.

 

Books as Housewares

The always informative Lifehacker posted an item today about a designer who turns old books into "gorgeous and unique vases and coffee tables." And, readers have responded, in a fiery discussion. My favorite comment is "you can also burn them for heat".

Obviously there's room for NYRB to move into this new book-as-houseware trend, and so I'm introducing these two prototypes:

While these attractive classics have hangers on the back for wall mounting, at 5 X 8", you can also put them in a jacket pocket as a portable timepiece.

Again, this is just a prototype, we haven't begun mass production, and it can take a long time to work out timepiece rights. But, as they say, watch this space.

The right to write

Publishers Weekly reports today on the Right to Write, a group organized around issues of fair use—a matter on which much too little is known by the general population (and which is in danger of disappearing). It has some heavy-hitters backing it up:

"Among the groups supporting Right to Write are Stanford University Law School’s Fair Use Project and Harvard Law School’s Citizen Media Law Projects. 'We are seeing far too many important works being scuttled because of baseless legal threats directed at creative artist by copyright holders who object to the use or criticism of their work,' said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School."

So far, the site seems to be in an embryonic stage, but you can sign up for their newsletter to stay updated as it develops.

More:
A judge holds up the concept of  fair use (in the case of Universal Music requesting that a home-movie of a toddler with Prince singing faintly in the background).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Wonderful O(bama)

Not to be confused (please!) with another book of the same title, James Thurber's follow up to The Thirteen Clocks, The Wonderful O, which looks like this:

and is being re-released by The New York Review Children's Collection next year.