In a December 17, 2010, entry on The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, writer Blake Eskin said that Vasily Grossman’s NYRB Classic Everything Flows was a book that really “got under his skin.” Two NYRB titles recently appeared in The New Yorker’s printed pages, and we’re confident that in their own unique ways, they’re equally books that will long stay with you.
In his Critic at Large article, “Heroine Addict,” Daniel Mendelsohn delves into the writings of one of the most celebrated nineteenth-century German men of letters, Theodor Fontane, and declares his novel, Irretrievable, “a small masterwork.” Centered around a married couple slowly drifting apart, and recently published by NYRB Classics, this “curiously gentle tragedy” highlights what Thomas Man called Fontane’s ability to see “at least two sides of everything to life.” It is an unforgettable, profoundly humane, and empathetic reckoning with the blindness of love.
As the recent film adaptation of J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip suggests, sometimes love really is a bitch. In “A Dog’s Life,” Joan Acocella lunges into the life of this exquisitely candid writer to examine how Ackerley attained not only his greatest subject, but also the happiest years of his life, through the companionship of a German shepherd named Queenie.