NYRB is saddened to announce that Pierre Ryckmans, known by the pen name Simon Leys, died on Monday, August 11, 2014.

Pierre Ryckmans was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. Leys’s writing has appeared inThe New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, and other periodicals. Among his books are Chinese Shadows, The Death of Napoleon (forthcoming from NYRB Classics), Other People’s Thoughts, and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In 1996 he delivered the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Boyer lectures. He won many awards, including the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Femina, the Prix Guizot, and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction.

Read The Sydney Morning Herald’s obituary for Leys here and Ian Buruma’s comprehensive essay on Leys’ work in his article on The Hall of Uselessness for The New York Review of Books here.

NYRB Classics will publish Leys’ translation of Simone Weil’s On the Abolition of All Political Parties this September.

On Monday, September 8, at 7 p.m., the McNally Jackson International Literature Book Club will discuss Skylark by Dezso Kosztolányi. The group meets in the Cooking section of the store, and Sarah McNally will lead the discussion.

For more information, visit the McNally Jackson website.

On Monday, August 25, at 7 p.m., Daniel Mendelsohn will be in conversation with Adrian Goldsworthy about the new NYRB Classic Augustus by John Williams, author of Stoner, and Goldsworthy’s new biography, Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor, published by Yale University Press.

For more information, visit the McNally Jackson website or join the Facebook event.

NYRB Classics is pleased to announce that Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull & Nikolai Formozov, has won the 2014 PEN Translation Prize.

Each year, the PEN Translation Prize is awarded for a book-length translation of prose into English. This year’s Translation Prize judges were Ann Goldstein, Becka McKay, and Katherine Silver. Here is an excerpt from the judges’ citation:

“Fantastical, hallucinatory, and wildly imaginative, the book is rich in linguistic playfulness—part metafiction, part exploration into the farthest reaches and minutest details of reality…Joanne Turnbull, in collaboration with Nikolai Formozov, has produced a compellingly readable translation that is also inventive, that improvises when necessary and consistently insinuates a strangeness and beauty of other worlds, both literary and real…With her notes and her translation, [Turnbull] effectively offers us Krzhizanovsky’s genius—unrecognized and suppressed during his lifetime—rather than drawing attention to herself and her own considerable resourcefulness and artistry. This is a rare and welcome conjunction of a literary text that allows the art of translation to shine and a translator who has brilliantly met the challenge.”

To read the rest of the judges’ citation, visit the PEN website.

NYRB Classics is thrilled to receive an excellent review of Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear in the July 20, 2014 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Here is an excerpt from Thomas Keneally’s review of Fear, and to read the rest click here.

“All the phases of this particularly horrid war, phases that we have become accustomed to from later writing, are recounted here in a remarkable voice…And, in this prizewinning translation by Malcolm Imrie, his writing still has a ferocious power…Chevallier’s narrative remains radioactive with pure terror, frightening in a way later accounts don’t quite manage. It’s hard to believe, given the powerful, almost American casualness of his voice, that this is its first American appearance. His tone is so inveigling and so amiable as he inducts us like witnesses into that great European madness with which the past century began, decades before most who will read this translation were born. It’s also hard to believe, once we’re deeply engaged with the book, that Chevallier is dealing with events that are nearly a hundred years in the past, deploying prose that’s almost as old. We are lucky his voice came through.” —Thomas Keneally, The New York Times Book Review