New York Times writer John Williams recently interviewed Linda Rosenkrantz, author of the NYRB Classic Talk, for the Arts Beat section about the process of writing her groundbreaking novel. In this feature, Williams asks Rosenkrantz about the initial inspiration behind Talk, for which the author transcribed hours of recorded, candid conversations between her friends and then edited the 1,500 pages of raw material into the book it is today. Rosenkrantz shares with Williams about the many rejection letters she first received for the book, the reaction of friends to the final—and very provocative—product, and what Rosenkrantz thinks of today's candid depictions of female friendship from Girls to Broad City.

Read the entire interview here.

Fat City is Leonard Gardner's novel of defiance and struggle, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. Set in Stockton, California, it is the book of which Joan Didion said, "Gardner has got it exactly right."

On Wednesday, September 9, at 7 p.m., Gardner will discuss Fat City with Peter Orner at Book Passage, Corte Madera (51 Tamal Vista Blvd). Click here for details. 

Gardner will be in conversation with noir writer Eddie Muller at City Lights Books in San Francisco (261 Columbus Ave) on Thursday, September 17, at 7 p.m. For more information, visit the City Lights website. 

Gardner will discuss Fat City at the Brookline Booksmith (279 Harvard Street) on Monday, November 2, at 7 p.m. 

On Friday, November 20, Film Forum’s 7 p.m. screening of John Huston’s film adaptation of Fat City will be followed by a Q&A (201 West Houston Street, New York).

We were pleased to see Larry Rohter’s profile of New York Review Books in a recent Saturday Arts section of The New York Times. Rohter describes NYRB’s editorial principles as providing a necessary counterpoint to prevailing tendencies in publishing: “New York Review Books was founded in 1999, when the mainstream American publishing houses [began] paying less attention to their back catalogs, sometimes allowing the rights to books that weren’t selling well to lapse, and also cutting back on literature in translation.”

Rohter commends NYRB Classics’s revival of “ignored or forgotten works,” including The Prank, Chekhov’s censor-suppressed debut collection of stories, and Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps, available in its unexpurgated form for the first time since its original release in 1865.

“From the beginning, it was our intention to be resolutely eclectic,” NYRB Editorial Director Edwin Frank is quoted as saying. “We were picking low-hanging fruit, only no one knew the fruit was out there, hanging from the branches.”

We're thrilled to receive praise for the NYRB Classics Original The Prince of Minor Writers, a new collection of Max Beerbohm's writings, edited and with an introduction by Phillip Lopate. 

Adam Gopnik, who began reading Beerbohm in high school and has "since read, I think, pretty much every line he ever published," wrote in The New Yorker, "The essayist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm was one of the great figures of the late Victorian and Edwardian era in London...People who love reading will always love reading Max, because he mocked so wisely, and read so well."

In The New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote, "As curmudgeons go, Beerbohm was a gentle and self-effacing one. There are very funny broadsides here against walking, against the cult of children, against writing boring letters and against literary toadyism...an intimate kind of warmth does blossom beneath the surface of many of these pieces; he is a man with a full and rippling heart." 

NYRB Classics also publishes Beerbohm's Seven Men, with an introduction by John Updike. 

Join Lawrence Kramer, editor of the NYRB Poets collection, Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition, as he speaks on the great American bard's Civil War poems—their history, their sonic elements, and their importance to the American literary landscape in general at Oblong Books & Music in Rhienbeck, NY. Q&A and book signing to follow. Information below and at the Oblong Books & Music website here.

When: Wednesday, August 5th, 7 p.m.

Where: Oblong Books & Music, 7422 Montgomery Street, Rhinebeck, NY, 12572 (845) 876-0500

NYRB is delighted to announce that Najwan Darwish’s poetry collection Nothing More to Lose is longlisted for the 2015 ALTA National Translation Award in Poetry, and Tove Jansson’s The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories and Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Mad and the Bad are on the longlist for the 2015 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose.

The National Translation Award is the oldest award for a work of literary translation, and the only award based on an evaluation of the translation in addition to the original language text.

Visit ALTA’s website to learn more about the award and association.

On Saturday, August 1, visit New York Review Books at The Small Press Flea, hosted by BOMB Magazine and the Brooklyn Public Library. We’ll be there from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with discounted books and free issues of The New York Review of Books (limited supply).

The Small Press Flea will be held at the Brooklyn Public Library, Central Branch, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn. For more information, visit BOMB Magazine’s website and The Small Press Flea Facebook page.