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!
I love your books. I like the excitment of discovering authors I've never heard of or read before. When Book Court in Brooklyn had a buy 2 get 1 free deal recently I thought I'd gone to heaven, except that I'd either purchased or read library copies of most of what they had on offer. At that time, I got Names on the Land; Renoir, My Father; and the Maqroll omnibus. Keep 'em coming. (P.S., I got over the red-tailed hawk on the cover of Baker's sublime The Peregrine.)
Posted by: m.thew | September 23, 2008 at 09:48 PM