NYRB

Niki: The Story of a Dog

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By Tibor Déry.

The war is over and Hungary's Communist government is full of promise and projects. But when Mr. Ansca is disappeared, his wife's only comfort is her mongrel, Niki. "Mr. Déry brings a kind of cunning naïveté that records (or imagines) with utmost seriousness all the tremors of Niki's soul."—The New York Times

Summer Will Show

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Townsend Warner brings 19th-century Paris to pungent life in this thrilling novel of a proper Victorian aristocrat's political and emotional awakening among the barricades. "Her best book."—Sarah Waters

The Kingdom of Carbonel

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By Barbara Sleigh.

It's good cats versus bad in a thrilling battle for the future of the enchanted land of Cat Country. "The children are lively, the grown-ups (including the witch) colorful and the mingling of magic and reality is most effective." —The New York Times

The Old Man and Me

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By Elaine Dundy.

In Elaine Dundy's follow-up to her best-selling The Dud Avocado, a young American named Honey Flood arrives in London with the goal of seducing its brightest literary star. "A witty black comedy of errors."—Gore Vidal

The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By Masanobu Fukuoka.

Call it "Zen and the Art of Farming" or a "Little Green Book," Fukuoka's short volume about gardening, eating, and the limits of human knowledge is as startling today as it was 30 years ago. "...one of the founding documents of the alternative food movement, and indispensable to anyone hoping to understand the future of food and agriculture." —Michael Pollan

The Complete Fiction

Tue, 05 May 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By Francis Wyndham.

Wyndham is one of Britain's greatest living story writers, and a legendary editor. "He brings to his work an eye for the absolutely essential and a haunting sense of what lives are made up of—not the peaks and troughs...but the more elusive continuities and absences, ephemeral obsessions, a sense of permanently deferred expectation and hilarious consequences."—Interview

The Mousewife

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By Rumer Godden.

Rumer Godden's beautiful tale of a downtrodden mouse and her friendship with a caged dove is based on a story by Dorothy Wordsworth. William Pène du Bois's elegant pen-and-ink drawings complement this meditation on love and freedom.

The Foundation Pit

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By Andrey Platonov.

A new translation, the first to be based on the authoritative Russian text, of Platonov's most political novel, in which the people struggle to build a workers' paradise, but succeed in creating only the immense hole of its foundation. "A Russian Waiting for Godot crossed with Lewis Carroll and Maxim Gorky."—Irish Times

Season of Migration to the North

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By Tayeb Salih.

"The prose has a grave beauty. It's the story of a man who returns to his native Sudan after being educated in England, then encounters the first Sudanese to get an English education. The near-formal elegance in the writing contrasts with the sly anti-colonial world view of the book, and this makes it even more interesting." —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun

The Wonderful O

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By James Thurber.

A thoroughly uproarious Thurberian experiment with language and a warning to those who would try to tame it. Two pirates conquer an island and attempt to purge it of the odious letter O. Cnfusin reigns, and chas—until the islanders decide to get their vowel back.

Short Letter, Long Farewell

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By Peter Handke.

American myth and American reality come to a head in Handke's spare and dreamlike 1972 novel, in which a young Austrian alternately pursues and flees his ex-wife, culminating in a Hollywood ending.

Slow Homecoming

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:00:00 -0500

By Peter Handke.

A trilogy in which Handke, putting aside the nerve-racked style of his early work for a new simplicity, meditates on exile, art, and the nature of the bonds between parent and child.