NYRBlog - The New York Review of Books

My Dog Tulip video on Amateur Thursdays

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:04:32 -0500

Amateur Thursdays has posted a video discussing J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip. Filmed here at the office of The New York Review of Books, artist William Wegman and acclaimed authors Stefan Merrill Block, Lisa Bornbach, and Susan Orlean gather to share their thoughts on the memoir, as well as a few details of their own pets and canine-inspired work.

My Dog Tulip is J.R. Ackerley’s memoir on his German shepherd, whom he described as the “ideal friend.” It is a bittersweet retrospective account of their sixteen-year companionship, as well as a profound and subtle meditation on the strangeness that lies at the heart of all relationships. In vivid and sometimes startling detail, Ackerley tells of Tulip’s often erratic behavior and very canine tastes, and of his own fumbling but determined efforts to ensure for her an existence of perfect happiness.

In 2009 My Dog Tulip was brought to life as an adult, animated film, with the voices of Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave and Isabella Rossellini. The film is now available on DVD.

Other J.R. Ackerley books, all from NYRB Classics:
We Think the World of You
Ackerley’s only novel, We Think the World of You tells the story of an unlikely love affair, following its course along its many surprising and heartbreaking twists and turns. The book was described by Ackerley himself as “a fairytale for adults.”

Hindoo Holiday
Hindoo Holiday is an intimate and very funny account of an exceedingly strange place, and one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century travel literature.

My Father and Myself
Ackerley’s pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self, making My Father and Myself a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book is a classic of twentieth-century memoir.

A Letter From Susan Bernofsky, Translator of Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:32:41 -0500

In 1905 Robert Walser packed his bags and left behind his native Switzerland for the bustling metropolis of Berlin. The fledgling author, twenty-seven years of age, had just published his first book of fiction, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (Fritz Kocher’s Essays), and moving to Berlin was the obvious next step for him to take in the pursuit of a proper literary career. Just a year before he had been supporting himself as an on-again-off-again bank clerk and copyist, but now he was looking to become a proper novelist, an endeavor that would require all his strength. When he arrived in the German capital, he moved into the apartment of his brother Karl, a painter, who had made the pilgrimage to Berlin the year before and quickly established himself as the foremost stage set designer of the age.

Walser soon discovered, however, that his brother’s high-society lifestyle was not to his liking. The fancy soirées they attended made him feel like a bumpkin, and he soon developed a reputation for uncouth conduct. Karl would receive invitations to dinner specifying he could bring Robert “only if he wasn’t too hungry.” It may well have been this gentrified arts scene in which artists and their patrons socialized together that made Walser decide to enroll, only a few months after his arrival, in Berlin’s Aristocratic Servants School. Here he studied the art of waiting on table, polishing shoes, and shaking out carpets. When he graduated, he took a job as an assistant butler at a count’s castle in Silesia, where he spent the better part of the winter. His publisher was instructed to send him letters only in unmarked envelopes, since he didn’t want his employers to know he was a writer.

He was a writer, though, and remained true to his craft. Over the next three years he would write and publish three novels: The Tanners, The Assistant, and Jakob von Gunten, as well as producing scores of short pieces for publication in magazines and newspapers. Berlin Stories collects all the short work Walser wrote in Berlin about Berlin, as well as a selection of later pieces in which he looks back on his life in the metropolis. These stories are the record of a city in the throes of modernity. Berlin was already a vast metropolis, one of the great cities of Europe. It got its first subway in 1902; thirty-five different streetcar lines converged at Potsdamer Platz; and automobiles zipped in and out among hackney carriages on its crowded streets.

If the city was on the move, so was Walser. He walked the streets collecting impressions. He was a fast writer, and liked to write about things in rapid motion. In “Aschinger” he describes a Berlin-style fast-food restaurant, and his walk stories—like “Good morning, Giantess!”—show us the city as a blur of glimpses. “In the Electric Tram” talks about learning how to sit when riding in this newfangled vehicle, and “Full” features a monologue by a disgruntled omnibus conductor.

“A metropolis,” Walser writes, “is a giant spiderweb of squares, streets, bridges, buildings, gardens, and wide, long avenues […], a wave-filled ocean that for the most part is still largely unknown to its own inhabitants, an impenetrable forest, an opulent, overgrown, huge, forgotten, or half-forgotten park, a thing that has been built up too extensively for it to ever again be oriented within itself.” A fire breaking out in the city produces a “thick, seemingly incessant rain of small, light sparks and embers [that] flies out of the dark air and down into the crowded street, sowing a crop of glowing snow.” The wonder that the city and its life inspired in him is evident in the vibrancy of his sentences, and I have taken pains to let the vividness of his impressions enliven the prose of my translation as well.

Finally, Berlin was also a city of the theater for Walser, something he experienced both as an audience member and through his brother’s work and friends. The young author had started out dreaming of becoming an actor, even auditioning once for the celebrated Josef Kainz (who pronounced the teenage enthusiast devoid of thespian talent). Throughout his life Walser maintained his love of the stage and wrote a great deal about performances in Berlin, including both high art (“On the Russian Ballet”) and low (“Cowshed”). My favorite of his theater texts here is the one entitled “An Actor,” devoted to a lion in Berlin’s Zoological Garden; this actor is a cousin to Rilke’s famous panther.

Walser left Berlin in 1912, never to come back. His Berlin Stories offer a wonderful kaleidoscopic portrait of this city that both entranced and overwhelmed him, a mixed response that made its way into these stories—at times he describes the advent of modernism’s technologies as almost hostile. For him, city life is best perceived not from the back seat of an automobile but by walking the streets, whether first thing in the morning or late at night. These stories are records of a quite particular time and place, but also of a very unusual sensibility, one whose quizzical shaping gaze presents the city as a terra incognita of intoxicating possibility.

Best Wishes,

Susan Bernofsky

James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:34:50 -0500

On their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide, two children, an eight-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl, are the sole survivors of a plane crash in the beautiful but harsh Australian outback. Fear pervades the novel, and is introduced in the very first sentence: “It was silent and dark, and the children were afraid.” With no food or clear sense of direction, they are forced to confront “the basic realities of life,” from which they had been shielded back home in Charleston, South Carolina. They encounter an Aboriginal boy who represents the complete opposite of their coddled existence and he teaches them how to survive. But can he be trusted?

Etched in arresting detail, Marshall’s adventure tale is also a parable, meditating upon the collision of civilizations and cultures and the greater themes of nature, spiritual redemption, selfless love, and mortality. Walkabout has been compared to Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal, Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, and William Henry Hudson’s Green Mansions.

Walkabout, first published in 1959, was not well known until the release of Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film, though Roeg’s adaptation was a striking departure from the book. For more about the differences between the film and the book, read Lee Siegel’s introduction (pdf).

Also at a limited-time 25% discount

The Mountain Lion
By Jean Stafford
Afterword by Kathryn Davis
“It’s a terrific book, witty and smart as Stafford always was, and kind in its treatment of these two strangely irresistible children.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

A High Wind in Jamaica
By Richard Hughes
Introduction by Francine Prose
A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.

Rock Crystal
By Adalbert Stifter
Introduction by W.H. Auden
Translated from the German by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore
Stifter’s rapturous and enigmatic tale of village life begins with a small anecdote—one Christmas eve, a brother and sister lose their way amid snowdrifts while crossing the Alps—and opens onto vast questions of faith and destiny.

The first NYRB Classic of 2012

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 08:24:21 -0500

Happy 2012. We are pleased to announce that the first NYRB Classic of the year is the first complete English translation of Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol, with an introduction by Daniel Kehlmann. An Ermine in Czernopol, along with Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, are available at a limited-time 25% off. Buy all three volumes and receive 40% off their combined retail prices.

An Ermine in Czernopol

By Gregor von Rezzori
Introduction by Daniel Kehlmann
A new translation from the German by Philip Boehm

“The city lies somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe and is named Czernopol,” Gregor von Rezzori writes in the prelude to this major early novel, the first part of a trilogy based on the author’s childhood that would grow to include some of his finest work: the scintillating memoir The Snows of Yesteryear and the trickily titled novel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.

In An Ermine in Czernopol, the author summons the disorderly and unpredictable energies of a town where everything in the world is seemingly mixed up together. The novel centers on the curious tragicomic fate of Tildy, an erstwhile officer in the army of the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian empire. Rezzori surrounds Tildy with a host of fantastic characters, each with an unbelievable story, to engage the reader in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears.

Read Daniel Kehlmann’s introduction

“Twelve Months of Reading” in The Wall Street Journal

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:54:37 -0500

The Wall Street Journal asked 50 “friends” to recommend books that they enjoyed over the past year. Three NYRB Classics are included on that list:

Charles Mann chose Bruce Duffy’s The World As It: “Hands-down, the novel I liked most was The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy….a fictional telling of the interactions between the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. That makes it sound terrible, doesn’t it? All I can say is that it plunged me into an intensely realized other world populated by characters who seemed as alive in my mind as any fictional characters I can remember.”

Ferdinand Mount chose Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado: “For those who missed Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado (1958) the first time round, I recommend the recent reissue from New York Review Books. The adventures of Sally Jay Gorce in postwar Paris have lost none of their zany zap after 50 years.”

Ahmed Rashid chose Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows:
“…a masterpiece of suffering, showing how Stalin laid the seeds for Hitler. New York Review Books has done sterling service by publishing Grossman’s books again in English after they had been out of print for many years. They include his masterpiece, Life and Fate an 800-page tome of World War II and the siege of Stalingrad. All his books were banned by Stalin.”

Russell Hoban, 1925-2011

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:11:25 -0500

We are sad to announce the death of Russell Hoban, who passed away this Tuesday, December 13, at the age of eighty-six. Hoban gained the most acclaim for his post-apocalyptic masterpiece Ridley Walker, but was also a highly prolific children’s book author and illustrator.

Many of Hoban’s stories for young readers were written after he married Lillian Aberman; they were based upon his own family life (he and Lillian had four children). Lillian drew pictures for the books, which include the Francis the Badger series, The Little Brute Family, Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, and The Mouse and his Child. Last spring we are proud to have reissued one of Hoban’s most heartwarming classics, The Sorely Trying Day. Hailed by The Los Angeles Times as a “timely antidote to stress,” this is an outrageously funny tale about the domestic chaos that a father encounters upon his return from a “sorely trying day” at work.

Hoban was an exceptionally imaginative writer who was able to delight children and adults alike with his humor and wit. His stories are timeless and will certainly be read and re-read by many generations to come.

Have Yourself a Retro Little Christmas

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:37:54 -0500

On Wednesday, the New York Times highlighted several children’s Christmas classics that are returning to booksellers’ shelves this season, offering an escape for the materialism of the 21st century holiday season within their pleasant pages—among them, Palmer Brown’s Something for Christmas, republished by The New York Review Children’s Collection. Something for Christmas is the story of a young mouse who is searching for something to give his mother for Christmas, until he realizes that he’s had the gift all along.

Something for Christmas is a timeless treasure, and its sentimental, simple charm makes it the perfect gift for now grown retro children and their own children, too. Be sure to check out the entire NYRB Children’s Collection, full of charming classics waiting to become family favorites. Everyone could use a little retro something for Christmas.

A Letter from the Editor

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:23:45 -0500

The Sindbad whose adventures the great Hungarian writer Gyula Krúdy recounts has very little to do with the dauntless character whose name, we are told, the Hungarian Sindbad picked out himself from the Arabian Nights, his favorite book. He could even be accused of passing under false pretences. Yes, this Sindbad is incorrigibly restless, frequently in a tight spot, and not a little wily, but he is hardly a man of action and in no sense a hero. He is not young but ageless, wandering grayhaired in a green hat across the Hungarian plains or turning up in a Carpathian mountain village when not haunting the streets of Buda and Pest.

As to Sindbad’s adventures, they are exclusively amatory. He loves women indiscriminately and pursues them indefatigably, women who often are in no less hot pursuit of him, not least because he is as fickle in love as he is passionately persuasive. And yet if Sindbad is both a lover and a liar (“When precisely did the lies begin?” he wonders at one point; there is, at all events, no end to them), he is hardly a Don Juan. He doesn’t seek to conquer and possess but to find a place in a woman’s thoughts and dreams, to exist there in a state of ongoing suspense before his or her affections drift away to attach themselves to some other object of desire. (Of course he complains bitterly and quite unreasonably about women’s faithlessness.)

Sindbad and his paramours are often seen languishing broken-hearted or on their way to drown their sorrows in the Danube, and at times it appears that these adventures are doomed to end badly and sadly for all concerned. And yet it isn’t so. Everything in these stories is a matter of regret, but in the end somehow nothing is. Everything happened long ago and is now over and lost for good, while at the same time everything comes back and goes on. (“I have never completely forgotten you,” Sindbad reassures an old flame, who responds, “You really should have given up lying by now.”) Love is nothing if not unreal, and what is a good story if not a good lie? It seems altogether appropriate that most of what happens to Sindbad in these stories happens when he is already dead, while in one he exists for several pages as a sprig of mistletoe.

Krúdy’s stories, at all events, don’t set out to describe events so much as they seek to set a mood. The mood is melancholy, languorous, worldly-wise, teasingly romantic, funny, sometimes silly. Certainly it is all Krúdy’s own. The stories are exercises in seduction. “What did Sindbad like,” “An Overnight Stay” begins. “He liked snowdrifts and women’s legs… He liked hands, hair, women’s names, voices and caresses. He liked to appear in young girls’ dreams, to court fallen women at masked balls… He liked lies, illusions, fictions and imagination.” Krúdy can strike that note, but he can also display an unsettling clarity of observation, describing “a child sitting on a low stool, apprehensively, almost fearfully watching the garden yawning with autumn” or a teacher of mathematics whose “face always smelled of cold water.”

It seems a curious coincidence that the Sindbad stories were mostly written and published in the course of World War I, when they were a great success, making Krúdy’s name and even making him some money. (Krúdy, even more of a wastrel than Sindbad, soon lost it all.) Otherworldly as Sindbad’s adventures are, one supposes they may have offered readers a refuge from the mind-boggling brutalities of the war, and yet I wonder whether they aren’t better seen as a response to the war than an escape from it. A response, in fact, not only to the war but to the explosion of modernization that preceded it (and in some sense led up to it) in the course of which Budapest became for a time the fastest-growing city in the world. The old Hungary that Sindbad haunts is an archaic world, long since destroyed by modernity, and yet it also stands as a haunting reminder that the modern world is no less condemned to destruction. And the modern world, sadly, will never have had a moment to enjoy the wasted nights and days and deliciously unproductive pastimes that lie at the heart of, as Krúdy puts it, “Sindbad’s not altogether pointless and occasionally amusing existence.” Sindbad, with his endless loves and lies, has all the time in the world, and perhaps he is as intrepid a hero, and as artful a survivor, as his Arabian namesake. Krúdy’s Sindbad stories, beautifully translated by George Szirtes, find a way to outpace the forced march of what passes for life in the modern world.

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

December Event for Alice James: A Biography

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:30:37 -0500

To mark the recent re-issue of Jean Strouse’s Bancroft Prize-winning biography of Alice James, Strouse will be discussing the James family with Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review at The New York Public Library on December 7th.

As Colm Tóibín declares in the preface of the re-issue, “Jean Strouse’s biography succeeds in giving Alice James her full due.” Alice was the tragically overlooked younger sister of William and Henry James; she possessed a fiery intelligence that was at odds with her claustrophobic life and societal norms. Written in a unique Jamesian style, Strouse’s biography presents a breathtaking account of Alice’s tortured existence, capturing her indomitable energy and heroic moments—as well as the bizarre dynamics of the entire James family.

December 7 at 7pm
The New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, South Court Auditorium
(5th Avenue at 42nd Street)

Free and Open to the Public, but RSVP required.
Click here for more information and to reserve seats.

Stefan Zweig

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:32:40 -0500

On the 130th anniversary of Stefan Zweig‘s birth, we would like to pay tribute to this great Austrian writer and draw your attention to the four books we published in the NYRB Classics series: Chess Story, Journey into the Past, The Post-Office Girl, and Beware of Pity. In spring 2012 we will publish Zweig’s novella Confusion.

During the 1930s, Zweig was one of the best-selling writers in Europe and was among the most translated German-language writers before the Second World War. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where, in 1942, he committed suicide with his wife.

In Chess Story, a mysterious stranger advises travelers on a ship from New York to Buenos Aires on how to beat the arrogant and unfriendly world champion of chess at what is quite literally his own game; in Journey into the Past, a man tries to rekindle a love that time and distance had snuffed out; in The Post-Office Girl, a young woman is introduced to and cast out of a world of wealth, only to find that she is driven by the desire to make meaning out of meaninglessness; and, in Beware of Pity, a minor blunder ruins a man’s life as he succumbs to guilt and, ultimately, tragedy. In each of these works, Zweig writes tales that are as harrowing and haunting as they are thrillingly compelling.

“In Zweig’s fiction, someone in the story, in a way everyone, has a terrible secret. Secrets are integral to adventure stories [and] the experience of reading Zweig is not so much of entering the world of the story as of plunging inward and dreaming the story.”— Rachel Cohen, Bookforum

“Admired by readers as diverse as Freud, Einstein, Toscanini, Thomas Mann and Herman Goering.” — Edwin McDowell, The New York Times

“Zweig belongs with three very different masters who each perfected the challenging art of the short story and the novella: Maupassant, Turgenev and Chekhov.” — Paul Bailey

Congratulations to Stephen Greenblatt, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:38:42 -0500

This week, the National Book Awards bestowed the 2011 prize for nonfiction to Stephen Greenblatt for his masterful work, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Greenblatt is a distinguished scholar who has previously published many outstanding works on English literature, including the bestselling Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.

In May 2012, NYRB Classics will publish Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and Urne-Burial, edited and introduced by Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff. Thomas Browne was an English Renaissance author and physician who wrote about both Christian spirituality and medicine. Religio Medici, is an assessment of his relationships with both his medical profession and his Christian faith. Browne also wrote about philosophy, as one can read in Urne-Burial, a meditation on mortality. Greenblatt and Targoff’s extensive introduction and rich annotations will surely further illuminate what is already an enlightening read.

Happy Birthday to Daniel Pinkwater!

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:45:45 -0500

Today we celebrate the 70th birthday of the incomparable writer and illustrator Daniel Pinkwater, author of about one hundred books as unique and funny as he is, by calling attention to his personal favorite book, Lizard Music, the story of Victor, a boy who, in exploring the nearby city of Hogboro while his parents are away, meets the Chicken Man, who is keen on the lizard (yes, lizard) musicians who appear on Victor’s television after the broadcast of the late-late movie. Victor and the Chicken Man travel to the lizards’ floating island, where the strange is fantastic and inspired—all adjectives that could be used to describe Pinkwater himself.

“No author has ever captured the great fun of being weird, growing up as a happy mutant, unfettered by convention, as well as Pinkwater has. When I was a kid, Pinkwater novels like Lizard Music…made me intensely proud to be a little off-center and weird…The NYRB edition of Lizard Music is beautiful…It’s one of those books that, in the right hands at the right time, can change your life for the better and forever.”—Cory Doctorow

“Pinkwater is the uniquest. And so are his books.”—Neil Gaiman

“Lizard Music is…funny, properly paranoid, shot through with bad puns and sweet absurdities, and all about a baffled kid intent on tracking reality (as slippery as lizards) in a media-spooked milieu.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A writer for smart kids…Pinkwater writes for, and about, people who are not ashamed to look at life a little differently.” —Wired

Veterans’ Day

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:05:45 -0500

Published in 1947, The Gallery was one of the earliest works of post WWII fiction. It was a critically-acclaimed bestseller and was a trailblazer for books like Catch-22 to follow. Set in occupied Naples in 1944—where author John Horne Burns had been commissioned as an army intelligence officer to investigate crimes committed by U.S. troops—the book captures the shock the war dealt to the preconceptions and ideals of the victorious Americans. It also provides one of the first unblinking looks at gay life in the military.

Though Burns died at the young age of thirty-six, depriving American literature of his promise, he left us a truly original portrait of war. Paul Fussell writes in his introduction to the novel, “For one magical creative moment, in The Gallery he revealed an impressive command of setting and character as well as intense moral feelings about the worst war in history and its power to corrupt soldiers and civilians alike.”

November Events for Songs of Kabir

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:23:36 -0400

Poet, editor, and University of Allahabad professor Arvind Krishna Mehrotra will be reading from his dazzling new translation of Kabir’s poetry at two events in New York City. Following the attempts of Ezra Pound and Robert Bly, he has revitalized the work of this legendary North Indian bhakti poet, which explodes with passion, satire, metaphysical ideas, and upside-down language. Kabir often boldly addresses the reader, as in the opening to KG 60:

Friend,
You had one life,
And you blew it.

Mehrotra’s translation has been hailed by Eliot Weinberger as “simultaneously a work of long scholarship and a jazz performance of the Kabir tradition.”

November 2, 7pm:
McNally Jackson (52 Prince Street)
Arvind Mehrotra and Jason Grunebaum

November 3, 7pm:
Poets House (10 River Terrace at Murray Street)
25th Anniversary Program

Visit the NYRB Calendar for details.

October Events for Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 08:11:11 -0400

Join John Summers, editor of Masscult and Midcult: Essays Again the American Grain, for a series of discussions about Dwight Macdonald.

Dwight Macdonald

October 12th:
James Wolcott and John Summers at McNally Jackson Books, NYC

October 14th:
J.C. Gabel and John Summers at Stop Smiling Storefront, Chicago

October 20th:
Louis Menand and John Summers at Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge

October 22nd:
Andrew Ferguson, Chris Lehmann, and John Summers at Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington DC

Visit the NYRB Calendar for details.