This month, on November 27, the NYRB Classics Bookclub at Books are Magic in Brooklyn will be discussing Dorothy Baker's novel Cassandra at the Wedding. David Jelinek, an art teacher and scholar of Baker's work, will be moderating. Jelinek's admiration for Baker's writing goes beyond scholarship, however. Her novels changed his life. Jelinek was kind enough to write a bit about his experience. Just click through for more:

I owe a lot to the NYRB Classics, not the least of which is my marriage to Denise. She and I met ten years ago in the lunchroom of the school where we both teach; we were also married, though obviously not to one another. We shared favorite authors: Proust and Wilde. In the summer of our first year teaching together, the school conveniently asked us both to chaperone students on a European expedition, and the Fates seated us together on the airplane over. At the time, I was reading Stephan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl. Denise asked if she could read along from my copy. I said yes. On the way back, we did the same with Cassandra at the Wedding. Neither novel is particularly happy, but sometimes hope is born from inopportune circumstances, such as being married to the wrong person. We kept reading.

I admired Dorothy Baker’s writings so much that I bought her other three novels; this required some Internet sleuthing and bidding, as the books were out of print. Baker’s short stories were even more of a struggle to find, as they appear in defunct magazines, lost literary collections and university archives. (Admittedly, the excuse of having to travel to Stanford and Berkeley was none too taxing.) I wrote to NYRB to get Baker’s first novel, Young Man with a Horn, republished and cried a little when it was.

Cassandra is Baker’s masterpiece. It reads like an American version of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona without so much of the Sturm und Drang. Yes, there’s drama, but it uncoils slowly, just as Cassandra journeys to the family ranch or gets drunk during the course of a day. There’s a bit of O’Neill here: “Long Day’s Drive into the Hills”. But there’s wonderfully humorous scenes as well.

The book is dedicated, in memoriam, to the painter David Park. Baker and he were good friends, and Park drew the trumpet that appears on the original cover of Young Man. A playful inscription to him reads, “To David, without whom this book could never have been wrote.” Dorothy was “one of the wittiest people ever,” her daughter Joan emailed, “Sort of a Dorothy Parker type.” David Park’s compositions now grace the NYRB covers of both Baker novels.

With the ability to look at a subject from differing perspectives, Park’s early paintings and Cassandra are influenced by Cubism. Add identical twins, Cassandra and Judith, who co-narrate the story, and the view becomes kaleidoscopic, a fly looking at its own reflection. Early in the novel, Cassandra gazes in the bar mirror and is unsure who is reflected: Cass, Cassie, Judith, Jude or Judy. Indeed, the two women even have alternating names.

It’s a tale told from varying voices narrating the same events, much like Kurosawa’s Rashomon, but also like a duet. The twins share a piano; Dorothy and David were also musical. “One of my fondest memories is David banging out jazz on the piano with my mother belting out the lyrics. What they lacked in talent, they compensated for in volume!” Young Man is loosely based on the life of composer and cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, a native of Davenport, Iowa. Oddly enough, I found myself in Davenport a few years back, asked to officiate at the wedding of Denise’s sister (not that I’m an expert on marriage). My second priority was to locate Bix’s home. Standing outside it, I felt a rush similar to when I held a photograph of Dorothy from Stanford’s library archive.

Darryl Pinckney, editor of The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, will be participating in a few events to mark the publication of this collection. Come out and celebrate the work of this remarkable essayist.

Tuesday, October 17, 7pm
Barnard Hall, Sulzberger Parlor, 3009 Broadway, NYC
With Susan Minot and Saskia Hamilton

Wednesday, October 18, 7:30pm
Brooklyn Public Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn
With Margo Jefferson, Stephanie Danler, and Ian Buruma

Wednesday, November 1, 7pm
Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 W 21st St, NYC
With Sigrid Nunez, co-presented by 192 Books

Sunday, November 19, 11am
92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Ave, NYC

Paul Eprile, translator of Jean Giono's Melville—and, previously, Giono's Hill—will be doing a few events to mark the US publication of Melville. We hope to see you at one of them.

A Reading of Melville
Tuesday, October 17, 8pm
City of Asylum, 40 W North Ave, Pittsburgh

Translating Jean Giono: A Conversation
with Alyson Waters and Emmanuelle Artel
Monday, October 23, 7pm
La Maison Française of New York University, 16 Washington Mews, New York

A Discussion of Jean Giono 
with Edmund White
Tuesday, October 24, 7pm
192 Books, 192 10th Ave, New York

We were excited to find our new book The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, included on Lit Hub's list of "15 Books You Should Read this October." Lit Hub features editor Jess Bergman writes, "[T]his cross-section of Hardwick’s 50-year career renders questions of whether criticism can be art obsolete: Taking in her complicated, flyaway sentences...you know you couldn’t possibly be looking at anything else." 

If you're getting a head start on holiday shopping, take a look at Publishers Weekly's 2017 Holiday Gift Guide, which includes Chris Raschka's The Doorman's Repose. 

On the weekend of September 16th and 17th, NYRB will have booths at the Brooklyn Book Festival and the Brooklyn Book Festival Children's Day. 

The Brooklyn Book Festival Children's Day will be held at MetroTech Commons on Saturday, September 16th, from 10-4. We will have a selection of our children's books available at discounted prices. Also, join us for events with Maira Kalman and Chris Raschka:

At 11am, an event with Maira Kalman, author of Max Makes a Million and Hey Willy, See the Pyramids, will be held at the Picture Book Stage at MetroTech Commons.

At 1pm, Chris Raschka will read from his book The Doorman's Repose and children will be invited to draw and decorate packages that they imagine could be delivered to the doorman's building. The event will be held at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, 6 Metro Tech Center, 4th floor.

At 3pm, Chris Rascka will join Katy Wu, Liniers, Gregg Schigiel, George O’Connor, Misa Saburi, Alix Delinois and Ruth Chan for "Illustrator Smackdown!," a dramatic and hilarious live action drawing competition. 

The Brooklyn Book Festival will be held on Sunday, September 17th, from 10-6:30, at Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza, 209 Joralemon Street. Find us at booth numbers 409 and 410, where we will have discounted books and free issues of The New York Review of Books. 

We are very pleased to announce that two books from our imprints have been shortlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award, which is awarded by The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).

Berlin-Hamlet (NYRB Poets), by Szilárd Borbély, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, has been nominated in the poetry category. The judges write, "Ottilie Mulzet’s translations render Borbély’s voice and grief palpable and the striking beauty of his poems real."

Zama (NYRB Classics), by Antonio di Benedetto, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen, has been nominated in the prose category. The judges write, "Esther Allen’s superb translation captures the remarkable atmosphere and existential anguish of di Benedetto’s masterwork."

Congratulations to both of our stellar translators on this honor. The winners will be announced this October.

 

On Wednesday, August 16, at 6:30pm, Megan Abbott, who wrote the afterword to Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place, will be in conversation with Sarah Weinman at The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren Street, New York.

Congratulations to William Max Nelson, author of the essay "Five Ways of Being a Painting," which has won the 2017 Notting Hill Essay Prize. The judges awarded Nelson's essay for its “its curious mix of the philosophical and the personal, the argumentative and the ruminative, that makes it a real essay.”

The biennial Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize is open to all essays written in English of between 2,000 and 8,000 words, on any subject. The first prize is £20,000 and five runners up each receive £1,000, making it the richest non-fiction prize in the world. Essays by runners-up Laura Esther Wolfson, Garret Keizer, Karen Holmberg, Patrick McGuinness, Dasha Shkurpela are included in the volume.