NYRB NEWS
“A Publisher as Salvager of Bygone Delights”
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.”
Praise for 'The Prince of Minor Writers'
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.
Event: Lawrence Kramer at Oblong Books & Music, Rhinbeck, NY on Wednesday, August 5th
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
‘Nothing More to Lose,' ‘The Woman Who Borrowed Memories,’ and 'The Mad and the Bad' on the American Literary Translators Association’s Poetry and Prose Longlists
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.
New York Review Books at The Small Press Flea
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.
Praise for ‘Talk’ and Upcoming Events with Linda Rosenkrantz
Publishing on July 7, Linda Rosenkrantz’s groundbreaking 1968 Talk is set over the course of a summer spent at the beach. The book offers all the pleasure and startling insight of eavesdropping on the witty and raw conversation between the most intimate of friends.
NYRB is pleased to receive praise for Talk from Anna Wiener writing for The New Republic:
“[A]n unconventional novel that is equal parts experimental literature, confessional memoir, and art project…Talk has re-entered the literary frame after an almost 50-year respite, and its attendant conflicts of art, love, friendship, and connection are still fresh.” —Anna Wiener, The New Republic
Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, and Kevin Nguyen, editorial director of The Oyster Review, both named Talk a “Top 10 Summer Books Pick” on NPR’s On Point:
“The wonderful New York Review Classics—everything that they publish is worthy of interest, I’m always curious to see what they’re coming out with…and in this case it’s a novel made up entirely of dialogue between two women best friends, Marsha and Emily, and a friend of theirs, Vincent—a close friend of Marsha’s, a gay guy—and its just about them yakking about being in their late-twenties…It’s fun, they talk about sex, psychoanalysis, LSD. It’s a real ‘60s book.” —Lorin Stein, on NPR’s On Point
“NYRB Classics [is] probably one of the best publishes out there…[Talk] reminded me a lot of Renata Adler’s Speedboat, which was also written in the 70s…It moves so quickly and so frankly that it still feels very modern.” —Kevin Nguyen, on NPR’s On Point
Join us for events with Linda Rosenkrantz this July:
Arcana: Books on the Arts Sunday, July 5, 4 p.m., 8675 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, CA
Skylight Books Friday, July 10, 7:30 p.m., 1818 N Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles
BookCourt Tuesday, July 14, 7 p.m., 163 Court St., Brooklyn, NY
BookHampton Sunday, July 19, 4 p.m., 41 Main Street, East Hampton, NY
Book signings to follow all of the above events.
The 23rd Annual Poets House Showcase Opening Reading with Elizabeth Willis
On Thursday, June 25, at 7 p.m., Elizabeth Willis will read from her NYRB Poets collection, Alive, for the opening reading of the 23rd Annual Poets House Showcase, which is part of this year’s River To River festival in New York City.
Poets House is located at 10 River Terrace, New York. The reading will take place in Kray Hall and is free and open to the public.
Praise for Sasha Abramsky’s ‘The House of Twenty Thousand Books’
In The House of Twenty Thousand Books, journalist Sasha Abramsky chronicles the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and works of Jewish history.
The House of Twenty Thousand Books will go on sale September 1, 2015. NYRB is pleased to receive the following praise for Abramsky’s forthcoming book:
“This is a fierce and beautiful book. It burns with a passion for ideas, the value of history, the need for argument. As a memoir of a grandfather it is sui generis. I loved it.” —Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes
“Memoir of Jewish intellectual life and universal history alike, told through a houseful of books, their eccentric collectors, and the rooms in which they dwelled…In this entertaining, deeply learned book, Sasha Abramsky adds materially to Chimen and Mimi’s 20,000 volumes. On another level, the book, like that grand library, is a narrative of the broad sweep of Jewish diaspora history…If you finish this brilliant, realized book thinking you need to own more books, you’re to be forgiven. A wonderful celebration of the mind, history, and love.” —Kirkus starred review
“Abramsky’s tale begins after his grandfather Chimen’s death, with his family faced with the daunting task of cleaning out a London house filled to bursting with books, many of them rare, on Marxism, socialism, and Judaica. Doing so stirred the desire to make sense of this literary and familial legacy, which Abramsky chronicles in a loving but clear-eyed manner.” —Publishers Weekly
Watch a book trailer for The House of Twenty Thousand Books here.