Congratulations to Margaret Jull Costa, who was recently honored with a commendation by the judges of the Premio Valle Inclán prize for translation from the Spanish for her translation of Tristana by Benito Peréz Galdós. The judges wrote: "An excellent, modernising translation of a light, slightly mocking novel - a classic - once filmed by Buñuel."

This is the fourth time that Jull Costa has been commended for her translation work by the Premio Valle Inclán prize panel and she has been awarded the prize three times.

We're pleased to share an excerpt from Publishers Weekly's review of Jean Giono's Hill, which NYRB Classics will reissue in a new translation by Paul Eprile, with an introduction by David Abram, in April 2016:

"In this 1929 classic, an elegiac ode to Provence, Giono tells a simple tale of peasants living in a valley...Giono describes every element of the surrounding French landscape in luscious detail, but it is the hill that physically and spiritually dominates the land. Giono delights in watching his characters interact and go about their business of drinking wine, making up stories, and contemplating normal human unhappiness...The ultimate gift of Giono’s short novel is that it allows the reader to travel back to a distant, almost primitive time in rural France."

Read the rest of the review here. 

In the January 28, 2016 issue of The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk, named Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes as one of the last great books she has read. Here's Macdonald on the book, published by NYRB Classics:

"It tells the story of a woman who rejects the life that society has fixed for her in favor of freedom and the most unexpected of alliances. It completely blindsided me: Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness." 

Read the rest of Helen Macdonald's "By the Book" interview here. 

Last month, Max Larkin interviewed Fat City author Leonard Gardner on Radio Open Source. Their conversation covered the similarities between boxing and writing, what makes a boxer, and more. Of Fat City, Larkin says:

“There’s something special about Fat City… It’s a book about boxing on its surface, but it’s a book that seems to sum up a whole world of American literature before it. Steinbeck’s books of field work—Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle—it seems to capture a little bit of Hemingway, and the Hemingway hero… It’s got a lot of noir to it, a lot of hard-boiled fatalistic California stories, but there's also a little anticipation of Rocky. It’s not about champion boxing, it’s just about boxing as a way to get out the drudgery of Stockton, California. About trying to be somebody."

Listen to the full interview here. 

We're pleased to announce that Sasha Abramsky's The House of Twenty Thousand Books has made the Longlist of the Jewish Quarterly’s Wingate Prize. The Wingate Prize is the only UK literary prize to honor a nonfiction or fiction book that "translates the idea of Jewishness to the general reader." The shortlist will be announced in February. For more information, visit the Jewish Quarterly's website. 

Abramsky's memoir of his extraordinary polymath grandfather also received an honorable mention from the judges of the Sophie Brody Medal, awarded by the Reference and Users Association, a division of the American Library Association. Read more on ALA's website. 

We are thrilled to announce that The New York Times Book Review chose Magda Szabó's novel, The Door, translated by Len Rix, as one of their picks for "The 10 Best Books of 2015." The editors wrote of the book, "this supple translation shows how a story about two women in 20th-century Hungary can resonate in a very different time and place. With a mix of dark humor and an almost uncanny sense of the absurd, [Szabó] traces the treacherous course of a country’s history, and the tragic course of a life." To see the full list, visit The New York Times Book Review website here.