We are pleased to announce the publication of four new NYRB Classics this month, all available at a limited-time 30% discount.
Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist, Erich Kästner’s novel about 1930s Berlin. The Stammering Century, Gilbert Seldes’s history of 19th century American religious movements and their leaders. Voltaire in Love, Nancy Mitford’s account of the great philosopher and his relationship with Madame du Châtalet. Happy Moscow, a volume of new translations of several works by Andrey Platonov, including the novel which gives the book its title.
Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist
Erich Kästner
Introduction by Rodney Livingstone
Translated by Cyrus Brooks
Set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, Kästner’s moralist is Jakob Fabian, a young man with an excellent education but permanently condemned to a low-paid job. As much party animals as they are political dissidents, Fabian and his friends become bitter if dulled witnesses of Germany’s moral disintegration as the Nazis begin their rise to power.
Going to the Dogs by Erich Kästner is the November Selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club. If you join the Book Club by November 15th, we’ll start your membership with Kästner’s novel.
The Stammering Century
by Gilbert Seldes
Introduction by Greil Marcus
Gilbert Seldes’s The Stammering Century is an historical account of the religious movements, cults, and manias that swept through an expanding America in the nineteenth century. It is also a gripping tale of the dreamers, rogues, frauds, sectarians, madmen, and geniuses who were the leaders of these movements.
“One of the most perceptive and entertaining studies of the American spirit in the nineteenth century.” —Richard Hofstadter
Voltaire in Love
by Nancy Mitford
Introduction by Adam Gopnik
Nancy Mitford’s account of Voltaire’s fifteen-year relationship with the renowned mathematician and scientist Madame du Châtelet, known as Émilie, is a spirited romp in the company of two extraordinary individuals as well as an erudite and gossipy guide to French high society during the Enlightenment.
“Mitford writes with a profound sympathy for the 17th and 18th century, and Voltaire in Love caps her career as the nonpareil popular biographer of that era.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
Happy Moscow
Andrey Platonov
Newly translated and introduced by Robert Chandler
Moscow Chestnova is a bold, beautiful, and glamorous parachutist, but after her ambitions to be part of the Soviet elite are thwarted when a freak accident propels her flaming from the sky, a new, stranger life begins. She drifts from man to man, through dance halls and all-night diners, exploring the great city whose name she bears, looking for happiness.
Unpublishable during Platonov’s lifetime, Happy Moscow first appeared in Russian only in 1991. This new edition contains not only a revised translation of Happy Moscow but several related works: a screenplay, a prescient essay about ecological catastrophe, and two short stories in which the same characters reappear and the reader sees the mind of an extraordinary writer at work.