When and Where:
Friday, November 13th at 7:30pm
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton Street (at South Portland Street)
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 246-0200

What:
A reading and reception in celebration of 10 Years of NYRB Classics and the opening of Greenlight Bookstore.

With Brooklynites--and NYRB Classics introducers--L.J. Davis on A Meaningful Life, Jhumpa Lahiri on The Cost of Living, and Matt Weiland on Names on the Land. Introduction by NYRB Classics editor (and Brooklyn resident) Edwin Frank.

Later this month we will officially publish one of the most involved (and thrilling) undertakings of our first decade: an abridgment of Henry David Thoreau's nearly two-million-word, 14-volume Journal into a portable 700-page single volume. Whenever a book is presented in an altered format, there are multitudes of  questions that accompany every step in the editorial process. Translator, editor, and novelist Damion Searls has had abridgments and selections on his mind for much of the past few years (see his recent work, ; or the Whale) and was guided in his selection by a very particular ethos, which he describes both in his introduction to the book, and in the informal Q&A that follows.

You can pre-order ORDER The Journal by Henry David Thoreau at 25% the list price at www.nyrb.com.

Instead of my last semester in college, I took a year off and spent the first half, January to June, living in a cheap sublet house—$150 a month I think—in Waterville, Maine. I picked Waterville because someone I knew in college was from there, and he helped me find a place to stay. On my first visit to this friend's home, before I decided to move to Maine, I saw on a table in his house a little letterpress edition of Thoreau's essay "Wild Apples," and thought it was just brilliant.

I was a philosophy major and had studied with Stanley Cavell, whose works, incredibly, include the century's best essay on Shakespeare, the best essays on Wittgenstein, the best book on Hollywood screwball comedies, and the best book on Thoreau: The Senses of Walden. So along with all the other books I read up in Maine, I read Walden, I think for the first time but I'm not sure any more. It was late to encounter him, and I wasn't in school, but I had a guide to open up some of the depths of the book. It was fantastic.

When did you first encounter the Journal? How did the idea to edit an abridged edition, rather than a selection come about? And can you talk a little about how this edition differs from previous presentations of the Journal (apart from the complete, 14-vol. edition)?

I ran across the paperback 14-volume edition at Black Oak Books in Berkeley, California and bought it for $75. It was just an impulse. For years I would dip into it in small doses, read an anniversary entry from the same date as that day or flip around. He's an incredibly relaxing writer. I love his lists, his names of plants. He is such a good writer that his lists are great.

And this aspect of the Journal wasn't available to people. There have been selections from the Journal, but they all feel like grab-bags of the good bits, not the way reading the Journal really feels. Especially with Thoreau, snippets can feel sententious or bossy or crabby, and the Journal isn't. You have to leave in the "boring bits"—because first of all, they're not boring, and second of all, they're what make the excerptable snippets as great as they are. There was no edition both big enough and holistically enough edited to capture the feel of the thing.

Thoreau said it himself: "I do not know but that thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the selected ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life, and are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched. . . . Perhaps I shall never find so good a setting for my thoughts as I shall have taken them out of. The crystal never sparkles more brightly than in the cavern" (1/27/1852 and 1/28/1852, with the great Thoreau pun on "far-fetched": things you get from somewhere else are inherently less plausible than things from close to home).

I also thought we needed a contemporary edition that portrayed Thoreau as a complex emotional man, a committed writer, and a subtle philosophical thinker, without condescending to his scientific, ecological interests—the Thoreau we've learned to read from Virginia Woolf, Stanley Cavell, Rachel Carson, John Ashbery.

What will readers—even those familiar with Thoreau's work—find most surprising in the edition?

How pleasurable it is to read Thoreau even when he's not making a particular point. In his books and essays he's usually trying to argue something, and he writes with the tone of someone absolutely sure of himself. This confidence is a big part of the thrill of reading him, but also why some people don't like him. I think the self-doubt occasionally on display in the Journal, like the book's looseness and openness, gives Thoreau, perhaps paradoxically, even greater integrity.

Speaking of self-questioning, the Journal has great questions in general. Why are mountains pointy? Why are the shadows on snow blue? Why do rivers wind back and forth? The ones he doesn't answer are sometimes the most poetic.

And there's just the scale of the thing. When you hear that Thoreau spent his life taking walks around Concord, it's hard not to think that that's ultimately kind of a waste, or at least pretty boring. Emerson already said that in his eulogy for Thoreau; even Thoreau had his moments of wondering. Well you read the Journal and it's all so full, he wrote a longish essay about the events of the day, day after day, month after 80- or 100- or 120-page month, and not to be dutiful but because it was interesting. In my intro I quote a comment by Hans Richter about Kurt Schwitters that applies to the Thoreau on display in the Journal: his life was more full of incident each day than the entire Trojan War.

What is your favorite entry from the NYRB edition?

I don't know that it's my favorite, but I put the entry of December 25, 1851, in my query letter to NYRB, to argue that a new edition of Thoreau's Journal was needed:

. . . It would be a truer discipline for the writer to take the least film of thought that floats in the twilight sky of his mind for his theme, about which he has scarcely one idea (that would be teaching his ideas how to shoot), faintest intimations, shadowiest subjects, make a lecture on this, by assiduity and attention get perchance two views of the same, increase a little the stock of knowledge, clear a new field instead of manuring the old. . . . We seek too soon to ally the perceptions of the mind to the experience of the hand, to prove our gossamer truths practical, to show their connection with our every-day life (better show their distance from our every-day life), to relate them to the cider-mill and the banking institution. . . . Do not seek expressions, seek thoughts to be expressed. . . .

I also discuss a couple other favorite moments in my introduction, including maybe my favorite line: "The bluebird carries the sky on his back."

Is there anything you had to cut for space but that you wish you had been able to retain?

Most of the book! There's basically 6,000+ more great pages where the NYRB edition came from. My first pass through the 14 volumes of the full Journal, making check marks or question marks in the margins and not worrying about the page count, ended up with about 1,200 pages of Yes and another 1,200 of Maybe.

I had wanted to keep more full entries, but ended up needing to shorten most of them. But I'm glad that the full entries that remain are indicated (with dates in all caps), so readers can browse for them. I also kept a year's worth of months more full than the rest, with a list of them in the introduction, so readers can see more fully what April or August or October meant to Thoreau. That means there's a 180-page book tucked inside the 670-page edition.

You've also edited an abridgment, or inverted abridgment, of Moby-Dick called ; or The Whale—an edition that includes only the words edited out of the Orion Books abridgment Moby-Dick in Half the Time. Could you imagine a similar project for the Journal? What would the resulting book be like?

Well the resulting book would be 6,300 pages long, since the NYRB edition is only about a tenth of the whole. So I don't think an inverted abridgment would work. Unless we took the first version I sent to the publisher, about 1,150 pages long, and subtracted the final, 700-page version.... I don't think that would be as interesting as ; or The Whale. But there are all sorts of other ways to use the Journal as a source for other writing. John Cage wrote several major texts and pieces using the Journal; I think a book made up of all the questions in the NYRB Journal would be great, like Neruda's Book of Questions.

One of the points you make in your Introduction to this edition is that The Journal should be looked at as more than a log: that it is a book, as significant a work as any Thoreau intended for publication.

Yes, Thoreau's journal started out as a notebook among others but after his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was such a commercial failure, he reoriented his ideas about authorship, writerly vocation, and the meaning of publication. He later published Walden but the Journal was his great book, his "Book of Concord," the one he quite consciously worked on as a systematic "calendar" of the ecology of his world. As I say in the intro, it was "an investigation of dailyness, seasons, and the relationship between self and nature—a hybrid and incompletable book but a book in its own right nonetheless, with an ecology all its own."

I think Thoreau's great insight, and his poetic method too, was to perceive the interaction of different systems: how the seasons affect water levels, how animals propagate seeds, how one growth of forest trees succeeds the previous one, how the lake affects the shore or the river the riverbanks, and most centrally how the life he led shaped Henry David Thoreau and vice versa. Very early on (page 7 in this edition), he says:

The hardest material obeys the same law with the most fluid. Trees are but rivers of sap and woody fibre flowing from the atmosphere and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as their roots flow upward to the surface. And in the heavens there are rivers of stars and milky ways. There are rivers of rock on the surface and rivers of ore in the bowels of the earth. And thoughts flow and circulate, and seasons lapse as tributaries of the current year.

Later he puts it more forcefully:

I was impressed as it were by the intelligence of the brook, which for ages in the wildest regions, before science is born, knows so well the level of the ground and through whatever woods or other obstacles finds its way. Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship round the globe? (5/17/1854)

These parallels animate everything, so that for Thoreau the whole world is intelligent and alive, and that is what makes his writing so alive and so moving:

I planted six seeds sent from the Patent Office and labelled, I think, "Poitrine jaune grosse" (large yellow pumpkin (or squash?)). Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighs 123 1/2 lbs. the other bore four, [weighing 186 1/4]. Who would have believed that there was 310 pounds of poitrine jaune grosse in that corner of our garden? Yet that little seed found it. (9/28/1857)

The same is true for his Journal. The whole thing lives and breathes as an ecosystem of its own.

Here Mr. Crace presents a satirical, meta-critical summary of Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel of a hapless missionary who after 3 years of residence on a remote Pacific island, has managed to convert only one heathen—or has he?

Listen to The Digested Classic, Mr. Fortune's Maggot

This edition of Mr. Fortune's Maggot includes "The Salutation"—in which we discover what becomes of Mr. Fortune.

By the way, the word "maggot" here does not refer to an creepy crawly creature, but is a synonym for "whim." Sylvia Townsend Warner's formulation, however, recalls a musical naming convention. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Music explains the word was "used by 16th- and 17th-cent. composers in titles of instrumental pieces, often country dances, e.g. ‘My Lady Winwoods Maggot.’"

[Krzhizhanovky's] works beautifully parade their influences, Russian and otherwise, and share affinities with those of other authors inside and out of his medium. The stories collected in Memories of the Future happily jaunt into Borgesian irrealities, with John Collier’s whimsical poeticism and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s humor. [read the entire post]

You can read a more detailed essay about Krzhizhanovsky by Christopher Byrd at The Barnes and Noble Review and next Sunday's New York Times Book Review will feature a full-page assessment of the book.

Oct. 22 [1837].
“What are you doing now?” he* asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry to-day.

So begins Henry David Thoreau's Journal, one of the major projects of the naturalist's career, and one that would eventually comprise nearly one two million words.

The abridged Journal of Henry David Thoreau will be available through www.nyrb.com in early November.

More excerpts from the Journal:
June 10th, 1857
June 15th, 1852
August 11th, 1858

*In his introduction to The Journal, editor Damion Searls remarks, "The 'he' in this first entry is undoubtedly Emerson."

First up: A celebration of Tim Robinson, author of The Stones of Aran and his personal, historical, mythical maps of Aran. The complete text of the review can be found at Views from the Barracks.

The fractured limestone landscapes of Western Ireland, and in particular, Connemara, the Aran Islands and the Burren are the subject of Robinson's cartographic and literary output.  A Yorkshire-born, Cambridge-educated mathematician, Robinson brings to his task linguistic diligence, an inquisitive spirit, and the capacity to translate and communicate the abstract into his maps and writings and make it  wonderful. Last year, my partner Ro and I explored the islands of Inis Meán and Inis Oirr, clambering over dry-stone walls, walking down ancient boreens accompanied by Tim Robinson's increasingly dog-eared map.  Monochrome, with the greyness of the landscape itself, and covered with hints and gifts, here a dolmen, there a blow-hole. And, on one memorable afternoon in the spring sun sat on the stones of an ancient fortress with the sea a distant but insistent drone and found the music of a flute that brought the first cuckoo to an eerie duet.

This is fractal cartography that describes the intersection of geology, human activity, the ascent of the human spirit in myth-making and story-telling and the ever-present sea.  The maps guide the traveller to look harder, listen longer and take time to absorb his/her surroundings. [cont.]

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 7PM
October Winedown with Edwin Frank
Harvard Book Store
Cambridge

Over the last decade NYRB Classics has selected over two hundred titles ranging through fiction, memoir, criticism, and reportage to shed light on authors and titles that may otherwise have fallen through the cracks. Edwin Frank, editor of the series, will discuss some of the 250 titles that NYRB Classics has revived, as the press celebrates its tenth anniversary. Wine will be served.

Click here for additional information.

Saturday, October 24, 2009 from 10AM-6PM
Boston Book Festival
Copley Square
Boston

Stop by our booth at the first annual Boston Book Festival. Pick up a complimentary copy of the latest issue of The New York Review of Books and have a look at the titles in the NYRB Classics series. Plus, be sure to attend an event or two!

Click here for additional information.

I found The Kingdom of Carbonel in the St. Louis County Public Library when I was about ten years old. I didn't know that there was an earlier book. I didn't know what had happened to Rosemary and John in Carbonel: The King of the Cats. I knew nothing about life in England in the 1950s, either. I was growing up in a brand new suburb in Missouri, one not unlike the hastily built towns spreading like ribbons across Carbonel's world.

It might be more correct to refer to Carbonel's worlds, for there were two: The everyday world of England, where schools broke up rather than letting out, where war widows had a hard time making ends meet and twig brooms and patched cauldrons were sold in street markets; where the change from braids and sandals to ponytails and flats signaled a girl's growing up and suddenly refusing "to play anything sensible"—a fate that at the time I was very keen to avoid, however it might present itself. To Barbara Sleigh's British readers at least, that was the mundane world. The second world would have been as astonishing to them as it was to me, for this was the world of Cat Country, which appears when darkness falls and all the straight lines of wall and house redraw themselves into wilderness, there streams run with milk that has had herring boiled in it and every chimney pot is a tree or bush. C.S. Lewis talks about a sensation that he calls "Joy," which can be derived from many sources, but which I experienced reading fantasy. Lewis connects it with the divine, but I don't go so far; I merely record it. The moment when Cat Country first made itself known in The Kingdom of Carbonel gave me that flash of wonder, of entering into a larger world. Books that do this are to be cherished. 

After all this, you'll be thinking that the Carbonel books are quaint, old-fashioned things, good for training aspiring writers but perhaps not much good for actually reading. But that's all wrong. They are excellent stories, imbued with wonder and practicality in equal measure, dry humor, and a clear-eyed and sometimes sardonic love of cats. They have a healthy interest in food and a ruthless interest in the logical working-out of the implications of magic. Luckily, since Rosemary is still in the pigtails-and sandals stage, the gender-role differences are not as pronounced as they might be. Both children get into trouble and make mistakes, but they also both get to be competent and clever, they get to try to reverse the trouble they've caused others, however inadvertently. They even feel sorry for the people who mean them ill. And in The Kingdom of Carbonel, Rosemary gets to do the ultimate good deed, by giving up something she loves very much for something else she loves very much.

These books have moved me to laughter and tears, as a child, and again as I write this, even though I am just recalling rather than rereading them. I'm very, very glad that they will be in print in the United States.

In a recent post on Asylum, John Self reviews Vivant Denon's novella, Point de Lendemain, which we recently published in Lydia Davis's translation as No Tomorrow. He, however, had only the Penguin Syren edition, which was translated by David Coward, to quote from. We were struck by the difference between the two translations, particularly in the very first line of the story. Now, David Coward has a Scott Moncrieff prize to his name, so we think he won't mind a friendly comparison between the two translations.

First up, the first sentence, which is is among the best of any work we've published (right up there with Hartley's "The past is a foreign country, etc. etc"):

I was desperately in love with the Comtesse de —— ; I was twenty years old and I was naive. She deceived me, I got angry, she left me. I was naive, I missed her. I was twenty years old, she forgave me, and, because I was twenty years old, because I was naive—still deceived, but no longer abandoned—I thought myself to be the best-loved lover, and therefore the happiest of men.

The Syren:

I doted on the Countess ______; I was twenty, and I was naive; she deceived me, I was incensed; she deserted me. I was naive, I missed her; I was twenty, she forgave me; and because I was twenty, was naive, and, though still deceived, no longer deserted, I believed that lover was never more loved than I and I was therefore the happiest man alive.

J’aimais éperdument la comtesse de ——; j’avais vingt ans, et j’étais ingénu; elle me trompa, je me fâchai, elle me quitta. J’étais ingénu, je la regrettai; j’avais vingt ans, elle me pardonna; et comme j’avais vingt ans, que j’étais ingénu, toujours trompé, mais plus quitté, je me croyais l’amant le mieux aimé, partant le plus heureux des hommes.

Exhibit 2 contains, at least in Coward's translation, an eye-catching phrase, one that's become a catchword for a certain type of literature. Can you spot it? It doesn't figure in the Lydia Davis translation:

When lovers are too ardent, they are less refined. Racing toward climax, they overlook the preliminary pleasures: they tear at a knot, shred a piece of gauze. Lust leaves its traces everywhere, and soon the idol resembles a victim. 

The Syren:

Unbridled passion murders niceness of feeling. We run toward pleasure and ride roughshod over the delights which precede it. A ribbon is snapped, a bodice is ripped: desire leaves its mark in its wake and soon the idol of our heart looks uncommonly like its victim.

The original:

Trop ardent, on est moins délicat. On court à la jouissance en confondant tous les délices qui la précèdent: on arrache un nœud, on déchire une gaze: partout la volupté marque sa trace, et bientôt l’idole ressemble à la victime.

We leave it to the reader to decide which edition he'd rather spend time with. Of course, the Syren edition is no longer in print, and the brand spanking new NYRB edition comes with an engaging introduction by Princeton professor Peter Brooks (an introduction that almost makes us wish we were back in school, just to take a class with the man, who must be an astonishing lecturer) as well as the complete French text.

We can't tease John Self too much, because we'd never even heard of the Syren classic series before he pointed it out (much less gone about collecting them obsessively, as he has). As he rightly says, Syren was doing the art of the novella in the mid-90s, well before Pushkin and Melville House began their own like-minded projects.