Glen Baxter, born in Leeds in 1944, trained at the Leeds College of Art. He then moved to London, where he worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum before teaching at Goldsmiths College. In addition to his several books—including The Impending Gleam, The Billiard Table Murders, Blizzards of Tweed, and, with New York Review Comics, Almost Completely Baxter—Baxter's work appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Elle, Vogue, Le Monde, The Observer, and The Independent on Sunday. Baxter is survived by his wife, Carole, and their five children, Zoe, Harry, Jo, Giles, and Gaby. Read Baxter's obituary in The Times (UK) here.

Yoshiharu Tsuge, best known for his surrealist illustrations, was a legendary and hugely influential figure in the world of manga. Born in Tokyo in 1937, Tsuge got his start in the 1950s working in the rental comics industry that was popular in impoverished postwar Japan, but gained significant recognition with his work published in the avant-garde comics magazine Garo in the 1960s. In 1975, Tsuge married the actress and illustrator Maki Fujiwara, who died in 1999 at 58 years old. Tsuge is survived by his son, Shosuke Tsuge. New York Review Comics publishes Tsuge's The Man Without Talent, the first of his books to be translated to English. Read Tsuge's obituary in Comics Beat here.

Glen Baxter portrait by Antonio Parente. Yoshiharu Tsuge portrait by Inaba Kunihiko.

“Minna Zallman Proctor’s vigorous retranslation from Italian of Cesare Pavese’s singular yet multiplicitous The Leucothea Dialogues stands out from a superb shortlist as a brilliant meditation on, as well as in, translation... [Proctor] makes the book come alive for readers today. Her introduction is especially remarkable for soaring beyond the usual necessary context about author and book into its own mythological register." — PEN Translation Prize Judges

The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction shortlist will be announced April 21, and the winner will be named on June 2 at a grand prize at a ceremony in Toronto. The winner will awarded $150,000.

See the full list here

Anna and Tom, the “creative professionals” at the center of Latronico’s trenchant novel, move to a flat in Berlin’s hippest neighborhood sometime during Angela Merkel’s second term, when the city became the de facto capital of Europe. As a portrait of the cool kids who flocked to Berlin in that period, the book — beautifully translated by Sophie Hughes — amounts to a biting and incisive satire of the expat scene.

— New York Times Book Review, 100 Notable Books of 2025

Perfection was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature earlier this year.

This year's judges—Hans Christian Andersen Medal-winning illustrator Peter Sís, children’s author Tracey Baptiste, and children’s librarian Amber Moller—praised Dragon Flower for it's brilliant illustrations, recalling traditional Chinese Folk art and accentuating the protagonist's determination, intensity, and courage as the story unfolds.

Writes Tracey Baptiste on behalf of the panel, "Chen’s color palette, style and even his depictions of the young heroine, Mae, and the dragon’s eyes feel like a modern extension of classic paintings. Green, blue and brilliant red help Mae and her antagonist stand out against more muted backgrounds, highlighting the action, adventure and danger at the story’s core, while black brushstrokes recall Chinese calligraphy."

For the judges' full statement on Dragon Flower and the complete list of winners, see the official announcement from the New York Times.

The nominating committee—a group including filmmakers Wes Anderson and Lena Dunham, New York Times columnist and Columbia University professor John McWhorter, and AIR MAIL co-editor Graydon Carter, among others—was tasked with selecting two young and 'Wolfean' authors, one of fiction and one of reportage. The prize is sponsored by Montblanc and is accompanied by a $10,000 honorarium to put toward furthering the writers’ craft.

The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam tells a story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration, borrowing an innovative literary form from Gertrude Stein's 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. 

“Though her family was solidly middle class, Mafalda didn’t let that fool her into thinking that everything was fine in her unequal society. She was too sharp for that, too observant . . . She worries about the kinds of things that many parents want to protect their children from even noticing—poverty and war and repression . . . The expansive, bighearted politics of Quino’s strip feel out of step with this terrifying moment, but, then again, that may be precisely why now is the right time to return to its heroine.” —Daniel Alarcón, The New Yorker

“For many immigrants like me, Mafalda is a core memory, a mindset, a Latin American cultural icon. And in a country once again led by a president allergic to dissent, nuance, and the truth, what would Mafalda say to Trump? Whatever it might be, it would be sharp and right on time.”—Marcela García, The Boston Globe

More praise for Mafalda

In addition to family-focused offerings, the exhibition will feature a robust lineup of adult programming that explores Jansson’s literary, artistic, and cultural legacy, including her adult novels and short stories, many of which are today published in English by New York Review Books. 

Tuesday, April 22, 6:30pm ET
New York Public Library, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
with Maya C. Popa
FREE EVENT
Register here

Thursday, April 24, 7pm ET
Reads & Co., 234 Bridge St., Phoenixville, PA
FREE EVENT
Register here

Friday, April 25, in the evening
and Saturday, April 26, in the afternoon
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Recitations and songs with musicians Shahzad Ismaily
and Warren Trae Crudup
TICKETED EVENT
Get tickets for the Friday event here
Get tickets for the Saturday event here

Sunday, April 27
Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival
Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY
FREE EVENT
More info here

Sunday, May 4, 8pm ET
Joe's Pub, Public Theater NYC
with musician Shahzad Ismaily and friends
TICKETED EVENT
Get tickets here

Monday, May 5, 8pm
Blacksmith House Poetry Series
Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Cambridge, MA
with Fanny Howe
FREE EVENT
More info here

Tuesday, May 6, 6pm ET
Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, MA
FREE EVENT
RSVP here

Thursday, May 8, 7pm ET
Riffraff Bookstore, Providence, RI
FREE EVENT
More info here

Friday, May 9, 7pm
Montague Retreat Center, Northampton, MA
with musical guests James Bird and Loudingirra Özdemi
TICKETED EVENT
Get tickets here

Thursday, May 15
Pittsburgh Jazz Poetry Festival
City of Asylum Bookstore, Pittsburgh, PA
More information to come

May 12, 19, and 26, 2:30pm ET
Online seminar with
The Academy of American Poets
Register here

Photograph credit © Beowulf Sheehan

As the poet, novelist, and jury panelist Ha Jin writes, "[Mourning a Breast] is a genre bender in the tradition of W.G. Sebald, but also a pioneering work of fiction about the body and disease. Ingenious in conception, free and imaginative in execution, the book challenges the conventional form of the novel." 

The winner, to be announced next month, will recieve a $10,000 prize.

The International Booker Prize, which is awarded annually, celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern on Tuesday, May 20. 

Deftly translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes, Perfection was published in the US by NYRB in March 2025 and is Latronico's English language debut.

Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917–1944) was born in Kyiv, grew up in Rivne, and lived and died—killed by Nazi forces at the age of 27—in Poland. Her poetic sensibility was shaped by her simultaneous exposure to and ability to traverse Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Polish literatures, languages, and cultural contexts. (She was also a practicing translator, rendering Ukrainian and Russian avant-garde poetry into Polish.) She has emerged in recent years into Anglophone scholarship and into translation and is also being rediscovered by Polish and Ukrainian scholars and poetry-lovers as a crucial modernist Eastern European figure. Alissa Valles’s translations from Ginczanka’s Polish are bold and restrained in equal measure, conveying the poet’s sizzling verses while reflecting the formal variety of her work. The excellent translations are further enhanced by a smart, informative introduction that should satisfy the scholarly reader as well as the poetry fan: through insightful contrasts with the Romantic poetic tradition, Valles outlines the ways Ginczanka’s voice is still alive in contemporary Poland.

To see the rest of the Book Prize winners, click here.

For her translation of Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery, Jenny McPhee won the John Florio Prize, a biennial award for translations of Italian works into English.

For their joint translation of Álvaro Mutis’s Maqroll’s Prayer and Other Poems, Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, and Alastair Reid won the Premio Valle Inclán, an annual award for translations of Spanish works into English.

Congratulations to the translators! To read more about the Society of Authors translation prizes, click here.

Self-Portrait is, in part, about Paul’s former relationship with the renowned (and notably older) painter Lucien Freud. As Knausgård writes, Paul has continued to reflect on her time with Freud through her artwork, even going so far as to reproduce one of Freud’s paintings—a painting that she herself modeled for—in her own luminous style:

“This is what I see in Paul’s ‘Ghost of a Girl with an Egg’ (2022), which is not just an obvious reference to Lucian Freud’s “Naked Girl with Egg,” from four decades earlier—it is a copy of it, with an extremely complex relationship among painter and model and painting. . . . When Paul paints the same motif more than forty years later, the pose is the same, the egg is the same, but the light is nocturnal, the colors pale, clouded. The body is white and ghostly, quite without the original painting’s brutal attention to reality. While the gaze in Freud’s painting is fairly neutral, the gaze in Paul’s painting is not. It appears, rather, to be charged—with what, it is up to the viewer to determine, but in my eyes the gaze is filled with distaste, a kind of withheld dismay. . . . We see Paul’s gaze seeing Freud’s gaze on her. And not only is the gaze doubled, and the roles reversed from model to painter, but Paul is also painting as Freud here, she is retracing his steps with her brush, becoming him—she is a ghost model, he is a ghost painter. The result is frightening, as it must be when the boundaries between usually distinct entities—past and present, art and reality, power and powerlessness—become unclear.”

To read the rest of the profile, click here.

Front of envelope one:

Back of envelope one:

Front of envelope two:

Back of envelope two (blank):

Front of envelope three:

Back of envelope three:

A letter dated August 15, 1974:

You can read their picks below:

“I’m currently required to read Marie Dorléans’s Our Fort pretty much every night at my children’s bedtime. That can lead a person to dislike some otherwise good books. But Our Fort is such a lush little world. Dorléans’s images—a touch Hasui Kawase, a touch Edward Gorey—and the way she conjures up the freewheeling but highly ritualized perceptions of children ('We’ll go to the fort, past the barking dog and the flock of sheep, to drink dandelion tea, every day,' and we’ll read the same book every night) make the book a pleasure to return to.

Kathryn Davis’s Versailles—recently reissued in pink by Graywolf Press—has lately been the grown-up version of Our Fort on my bedside table. It’s about Marie Antoinette, but it isn’t a historical novel. Half of it is narrated by Marie Antoinette and the other half is narrated by Kathryn Davis. To sound like an algorithm: If you liked Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, you’ll like Versailles. And if you didn’t like Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, you’ll still like Versailles.” —Alex A.

“Reading Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion this spring brought to mind some of my other favorite American writers—Joy Williams, Denis Johnson, Flannery O’Connor—and the tragically humorous, spiritually isolated characters that inhabit their work. The Mountain Lion’s central siblings, Molly and Ralph, at first unite in a shared world of imagination and loneliness and blunt disdain, but by the novel’s end, they’ve lost each other irretrievably. I love their nosebleeds and thick glasses, their absolute lack of social grace, and their goofball jokes. And Stafford’s prose is just terrific: ‘On either side ran clear small ditches, making a mouth-like sound.’

I’ve sampled only a small fraction of John McPhee’s work, but I hope to have read it all one day. The Crofter and the Laird, his account of living for a short time on the Scottish island of Colonsay, the land of his ancestors, was a particular pleasure for me this year. McPhee writes what I’d call clown car books—often deceptively slim but packed with surprise and delight.” —Alex R.

“This is cheating a bit since the book isn't officially 'out' yet, but I read the galley for our forthcoming reissue of Tove Jansson's Sun City and loved it. The book is set in St. Petersburg, FL, which happens to be my hometown. Jansson visited St. Petersburg and other parts of Florida while traveling the United States with her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä. The novel follows the lives of several aging residents of a local retirement home, revealing their dreams, prejudices, petty rivalries, and secret crushes. There are two younger characters, the home’s young and beautiful live-in housekeeper and her boyfriend, a Jesus freak-type who works on the HMS Bounty, the ship used in the MGM classic Mutiny on the Bounty, which is docked in Tampa Bay (and which was a major local attraction when I was growing up in then-sleepy St. Pete). The book is darkly funny, unsentimental but full of heart, and I recognized the St. Petersburg of my childhood in it, even though it was written a long time before I was born.

I read two novels by the Dutch author Willem Frederik Hermans, An Untouched House and A Guardian Angel Recalls, both of which have stuck with me in ways that other books have not this year. They are dark, almost brutal in the level of moral despair they capture—both are about Dutch life during World War II—but the writing is beautiful, and despite the hellish settings, I could not stop reading either, practically swallowing them whole.”—Abigail D.

“This is never an easy question to answer, but my favorite read this year was The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Mirra Ginsburg. Ever the maximalist, I cannot help but fall in love with a novel that layers bizarre plotlines and strange characters like fashion influencers layer necklines. It is a satirical, uproarious social commentary. It is a touching romance. It is a philosophical musing on virtue and artistic responsibility. Even better, it concerns a talking cat and an uncomfortably understandable Satan. Jesus is relegated to somewhere in the secondary plot line. I read it by the pool over the summer, freshly graduated from college, searching for a new set of questions to bother myself with. I found a happy abundance in this novel, one of which is: Should I now read Faust?” —Abby G.

“My great reading experience for much of the last year was volume 1 of Marx's Capital, taken on not to brush up on ‘Marxist thought,’ expounded, disputed, travestied, and perverted all too liberally, but as the extraordinary feat of writing that it is. Like the great medieval cathedrals, if in a rather different way, it takes in the whole of reality—heaven, earth, sinning and toiling humanity—and does so with a similar mix of the eccentric, the fantastic, the dogmatic, the astonishing, and the monumental. It is economics and anti-economics, philosophy and a parody of philosophy, a work of reportage, a polemic, a prophecy. Novelists looking to find a way to describe the convulsive global reality of our own time could do worse than consider the example of Marx. Paul Reitter’s intrepid new translation makes it possible to think about Capital anew and as a new kind of book.

 Of the Classics published this year, the most resonant to me was Cristina Campo’s book of essays, The Unforgivable. She would have condemned every word of the previous paragraph.” —Edwin F.

“Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel (originally published in 1940) opens with a prologue by his friend, collaborator, and mentor Jorge Luis Borges, who, with an eye-roll at prevailing literary attitudes, asks readers to think a bit harder about plot. To count as ‘serious,’ said the modernist orthodoxy of the day, novels should discard with plot and focus exclusively on their characters’ inner lives. But The Invention of Morel, Borges insists, is perfect counter-evidence, a rebuke to the knee-jerk preference of psychology to plot. Plot isn’t dead, it’s stronger than ever before. And he’s right; the thrust of The Invention of Morel, the potency of the philosophical questions it raises, owes precisely to its sequencing of information—how, and through what order of events and impressions, it leaves readers alone with their confusion at inexplicable phenomena before letting them in on the big secret. But, to be sure, many of the book’s philosophical problems are psychological ones, too. What’s the difference between knowing a person and knowing an image of a person? What’s the depth of our psychic connection to others, and what happens when that connection is no longer reciprocal, but strictly one-way? In what sense does the other even exist? These questions can’t be separated from their articulation through the book’s plot, which is great news for readers because ‘to classify [the plot] as perfect,’ writes Borges at the close of his prologue, ‘is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole.’” —Justin S.

“My favorite NYRB Classic of the year is John McGahern’s The Pornographer, though Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard must be mentioned as a book like no other.

The Pornographer is about a Dubliner who pays his way writing smut for a magazine. Our protagonist/pornographer is a cold fish except for weekly visits to the hospital to see his dying aunt, smuggling her bottles of brandy. Still, he can’t escape the pull of desire and enters a short relationship with the slightly older Josephine, who he picks up at a dance hall. Josephine has had sex only once before and she’s ready for a proper life with someone else. She won’t get it with the Pornographer. McGahern writes like the best of the Irish. There’s plenty of autobiographical and Irish Catholic context in the background of this 1976 novel (cf. Anne Enright’s introduction) but it can be read today with online dating in mind. It’s a hard world out there.

The non-work reading revelation for me this year has been the poetry of Eugenio Montale. I read Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, and The Storm and Other Things in William Arrowsmith’s translations, with the Italian on the left side. It’s beautiful stuff, ranging from descriptions of his childhood on the Ligurian coast, students days sitting in cafés in Florence, depression and pessimism over Fascism, two muses—Clizia and Volpe ('Fox'), who inspire very different emotions and thoughts—local nature, birds, food, and poetry, particularly Dante. I won’t go on, but if you have some time to read deeply, you won’t waste it with Montale.” —Nick D.

• For the John Florio Prize: Jenny McPhee's translation from the Italian of Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante (NYRB Classics)
• For the Premio Valle Inclán: Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman and Alastair Reid's translation from the Spanish of Maqroll's Prayer and Other Poems by Álvaro Mutis (NYRB Poets)
• For the Scott Moncrieff Prize: Joyce Zonana's translation from the French of The Child and the River by Henri Bosco (NYRB Classics)

The eight prizes will be awarded at the 2024 Translation Prizes ceremony, held on February 12, 2025.

The Post's Jacob Brogan praises Blurry's "matryoshka" structure, which "knits together tales of discreet lives... [Blurry] cuts through the fog of our alienated era, inviting us to acknowledge the sometimes subtle connections that bind us to one another." Of Spiral, Brogan writes that "this is work that hums at the base of your skull, and it spreads through you like a deep and deliberate breath."

Both Spiral and Other Stories and Blurry are available now from booksellers and the NYRB website.

Critchley writes in the article:

“With mysticism, we’re offered a path: an itinerary from woe to well, from things being ill to things being better. We can be lifted from woe, pain, melancholy, and doubt into the sense of being saved. With mysticism, being saved means being saved from ourselves—from the hell that each of us carries within. We can push ourselves aside. I don’t believe that there is a place called hell where souls burn for eternity in damnation. But I do think the idea that we are hell, that we carry that pain and suffering within us, makes sense. To be saved is to push that self aside, to push that ego aside, and open to something else.”

To read the rest of the article and learn more about the Next Big Idea Club, click here.

This year’s winner was announced at the Awards Ceremony held on October 26 during ALTA’s 47th annual conference, ALTA47: Voices in Translation, in Milwaukee, WI. In their remarks, this year's judges praised McPhee's virtuosic rendering of a formidable text:

"At last, Jenny McPhee has beautifully restored this decadent, sprawling novel by a giant of Italian literature. An infamously pared-down version was all we had of the novel in English until now, perhaps since Morante’s impressive range of voices, tones, and forms requires its own kind of sorcery—difficult to achieve at all, let alone in a book of this scope and length. Yet McPhee renders the baroque glitter of Morante’s language and the muscle beneath its dry, smooth coils. The rhythm of her translation dances—backwards and in heels, without a misstep—across nearly eight hundred pages, through melodrama, romance, poetry, picaresque humor and psychological suspense. Thanks to McPhee, Lies and Sorcery now has the English version it deserves."

Jenny McPhee is a translator and the author of the novels The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and A Man of No Moon. She is the director of the Center for Applied Liberal Arts at New York University and lives in New York.

NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank writes, “The Norm is the most notorious book of a writer who has never fought shy of notoriety. In it, a whole society feeds on a substance discreetly known as the norm. Sorokin develops the theme with his usual unnerving virtuosity.”

This will be the fourth translation of Sorokin’s work by Max Lawton, following up on the success of Blue Lard, Red Pyramid: Selected Stories, and Telluria. NYRB Classics also publishes Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy in a translation by Jamey Gambrell and Sally Laird’s translation of The Queue.

To read more about Edgü and his life and career, you can read his obituary in Türkiye’s Hürriyet Daily News.

Reviewer A.O. Scott writes of the book:

“You don’t have to know anything about quantum theory to start reading this book, a deeply researched, exquisitely imagined group portrait of tormented geniuses. By the end, you’ll know enough to be terrified. Labatut is interested in how the pursuit of scientific certainty can lead to, or arise from, states of extreme psychological and spiritual upheaval. His characters — Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, among others — discover a universe that defies rational comprehension. After them, ‘scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.’ That may sound abstract, but in Labatut’s hands the story of quantum physics is violent, suspenseful and finally heartbreaking.”

To view the rest of the list, which will be published over the course of this week, click here.

The winner of the prize will be announced on the annual Oxford Translation Day, which will take place on Saturday, 15 June, at St Anne’s College. Read more here.

His 2002 novel The Book of Illusions played a part in the history of the Classics series as well. One section of the book finds the protagonist in the woods of Vermont, translating François-René de Chateaubriand’s multi-volume Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, which Auster initially proposed that we publish. It has since been translated by Alex Andriesse, now an associate editor at New York Review Books, who, in the woods of Western Massachusetts, had been inspired to undertake the project out of an abiding affection for The Book of Illusions. The symmetry was almost worthy of the work of Paul Auster.

Auster contributed several essays to The New York Review of Books in the 1970s, and a retrospective review of his oeuvre by Michael Dirda appeared in the magazine in 2008.

As Dirda wrote:

“Ultimately, Auster reminds us that each of us looks at existence through story-colored lenses. The world we inhabit is literally shaped by Story. We all have our ‘life stories,’ and these govern how we see ourselves and others, how we interpret events and memories and expectations. When our saviors and teachers speak to us about the greatest truths, whether of religion or philosophy, they always speak to us in parables. When artists, or ordinary people, talk about what truly matters, they start and end by telling stories, wonderful, amazing stories—like those in the works of Paul Auster.”

Writer and critic Maya Jaggi, one of the judges on this year’s panel, said this of the finalists:

“From a formidable shortlist of books – all 10 of which we commend highly to readers – three finalists emerged as our unanimous frontrunners for this year’s prize. Attila Bartis’s The End, translated by Judith Sollosy, is a devastatingly frank portrait of an artist under pressure in post-communist Hungary and the ravages of a soul in a police state. The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales, Ferit Edgü’s novella and short stories translated by Aron Aji, bear witness with poetry and horror to a nightmarish history of state violence in eastern Türkiye and an often forgotten people. Barcodes ingeniously structured tales by Krisztina Tóth, translated by Peter Sherwood, explore myriad forms of boundary crossing – between childhood and maturity, ‘goulash communism’ and capitalism, life and death.
 My fellow judges and I admired the power and originality of all three authors in pushing fictional form – whether Bartis’s novel-in-snapshots, Edgü’s prose-poems, or Tóth’s interlinked short stories – along with the engaging truth of their narratives, and the suppleness and consistency of the translations. While the fiction of Bartis and Edgü throws up comparisons with photography – an art form both writers practise – Edgü and Tóth marry poetry with prose. All astonish and will be startling discoveries for many readers around the world.”

The €20,000 prize will be split equally between the author and translator. The authors and translators of the two runner-up books will also receive €2,000 each.

The winners and runners-up will be announced on June 13 at an awards ceremony at the EBRD’s headquarters in London. If you’re in London, you can register to attend here.