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 I Found 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.”