An exhibition of AI-assisted artwork by Vladimir Sorokin, BLUE LARD #cancelrussianculture, is on view until May 4, 2024 at the WhiteBox art space in New York City. Based around the writer’s notorious novel Blue Lard, recently translated into English by Max Lawton in a new NYRB Classics edition, the artwork depicts clones of famous Russian writers—from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to Akhmatova—in various tableaux with the titular blue lard.

A conversation between NYRB editor Edwin Frank and the writer Scott Sherman, titled “How the Story Turns Out,” was published this week in the magazine The Point. Among other subjects, they discuss literature in translation, MFA programs, contemporary book reviewing, the survival of the novel, and the early years and inner workings of the NYRB Classics series, including the books that “got away.”

The finalists for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been announced, and two NYRB titles are on the list: Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed (New York Review Books) in the Fiction category and Chantal Montellier’s Social Fiction (New York Review Comics; trans. Geoffrey Brock) in the Graphic Novel/Comics category.

David G. Compton, who wrote the NYRB Classic The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe under the name D. G. Compton, died in November 2023 at the age of 93, as The Guardian reports.

The Vielmetter gallery in Los Angeles is currently hosting a solo exhibition of paintings by Celia Paul, artist and author of the New York Review Books memoirs Self-Portrait and Letters to Gwen John. Titled Life Painting, the show features Paul’s portraits, landscapes, and floral still-lifes, and will run through early March.

The end of the year always brings in a torrent of best-of lists, and in 2023, NYRB titles appeared on several of them. The books selected for praise came from across all of our imprints. Congratulations to the authors, illustrators, and translators for the recognition of their hard work!

Brian Dillon’s Affinities: On Art and Fascination (New York Review Books) and Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life (NYRB Classics), both of which were released this past spring, have landed on The Washington Post’s roundup of “50 notable works of nonfiction” published in 2023.

On October 20, a new film adaptation of John Williams’s novel Butcher’s Crossing, published by NYRB Classics in 2007, will be released in select movie theaters across the U.S. Directed by Gabe Polsky, the film stars Nicolas Cage as the frontiersman Miller and Fred Hechinger as Will Andrews, the young man who drops out of Harvard to discover himself in the wilderness, eventually joining Miller’s pack of buffalo hunters.