NYRB Lit, the e-book series from New York Review Books, is pleased to announce the publication of Ravan and Eddie by Kiran Nagarkar and 1948 by Yoram Kaniuk. You may order 1948 and Ravan and Eddie from your favorite e-book retailer today. (We do not sell e-books from the NYRB site.)
1948
by Yoram Kaniuk
A new translation from the Hebrew by Anthony Berris
More than sixty years after fighting in Israel’s War of Independence, Yoram Kaniuk tries to remember what exactly did—and did not—happen when he was a soldier in the Palmach. 1948, winner of Israel’s prestigious Sapir Prize for Literature and now available in English for the first time, is the story of a younger man told by his older, wiser self, the self who realizes that wars are pointless, and that he and his friends were senseless to see glory in the prospect of dying young. It is also a painful, shocking, and tragically relevant homage to the importance of bearing witness to the follies of the past, even—or especially—when they are one’s own.
“The novel has a distinctive narrative style—thoughts of almost childlike simplicity come at a breathless pace—and the events Mr. Kaniuk describes are often emotionally searing (particularly since they are presumably based on real memories).” — Barton Swaim, The Wall Street Journal
Ravan and Eddie
By Kiran Nagarkar
Recently selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best novels about Mumbai, Ravan and Eddie is a comic masterpiece about two larger- and truer-than-life characters and their bawdy, Rabelaisian adventures in postcolonial India.
Ravan and Eddie are the unlikeliest of companions. For one thing, Ravan is Hindu, while Eddie is Catholic. For another, when Ravan was a baby and fell from a balcony, that fall had a dramatic, and very literal, impact on Eddie’s family. When you grow up in the crowded Mumbai chawls, you get to participate in your neighbors’ lives, whether you like it or not.
“Wicked, magical, hilarious, enduring. A masterpiece from one of world literature’s great cult writers.” — Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers