NYRB NEWS
Stephen Greenblatt at Harvard Book Store
On Wednesday, April 23, at 7 p.m., National Book Award winner and Harvard University professor Stephen Greenblatt will discuss Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge.
There is no doubt that Shakespeare read Montaigne—though how extensively remains a matter of debate—and that the translation he read was that of John Florio, a fascinating polymath, man-about-town, and dazzlingly inventive writer himself.
Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt, features an adroitly modernized text, an essay in which Greenblatt discusses both the resemblances and real tensions between Montaigne’s and Shakespeare’s visions of the world, and Platt’s introduction to the life and times of the extraordinary Florio.
For more information, visit our calendar.
Peter Brooks and Linda Asher at Labyrinth Books
On Tuesday, April 15, at 6 p.m., join Peter Brooks, the book’s editor, and translator Linda Asher for a reading and discussion of the NYRB Classics title, The Human Comedy: Selected Stories, at Labyrinth Books in Princeton.
Characters from every corner of society and all walks of life—lords and ladies, businessmen and military men, poor clerks, unforgiving moneylenders, aspiring politicians, artists, actresses, swindlers, misers, parasites, sexual adventurers, crackpots, and more—move through the pages of The Human Comedy, Balzac’s magnum opus, an interlinked chronicle of modernity in all its splendor and squalor. This NYRB edition collects nine newly translated works of The Human Comedy’s short fiction.
For more information, visit the Labyrinth Books website.
Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern at Carnegie Council
On Wednesday, March 26, at 5:30 p.m., Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern will discuss their book, No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, New York.
During the twelve years of the Third Reich, very few Germans took the risk of actively opposing Hitler’s tyranny and terror, and fewer still did so to protect the sanctity of law and faith. In No Ordinary Men, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern focus on two remarkable, courageous men who did, the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his close friend and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi.
Carnegie Council is located at Merrill House, 170 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10065. The event is $25 for non-members, and free of charge for students with a valid ID and for Carnegie New Leaders. This special offer is limited to a small number of seats—first come first served—and registration in advance is required. Registration is available on the Council’s website.
An Evening of Catalan Literature and Translation at McNally Jackson
On Tuesday, March 25, at 7 p.m., join NYRB Classics for a celebration of Catalan literature, including Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook, and the return of The Bridge at McNally Jackson. Series curators Sal Robinson and Bill Martin will host an evening of translation from the Catalan, featuring Mary Ann Newman, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and translator of The Gray Notebook, Peter Bush.
The Gray Notebook is a diary chronicling the life of a twenty-one-year old Josep Pla from March 1918 to November 1919. Readers accompany Pla through the tumultuous city streets of Barcelona in an era of social unrest, through the apathetic completion of his law degree, to the local cafés brimming with unforgettable characters—all scenes recorded with a lucidity and exactitude unique to Pla. Pla carefully records the playful and witty remarks of the literary circles in his small and big cities, the wildly cynical remarks of his friends in the beachside town of Palafrugell, and the antics of the pretentious group of writers and intellectuals on the streets of Barcelona.
An NYRB Classics Original and translated into English for the first time by Peter Bush, Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook is a masterpiece of modern literature.
McNally Jackson is located at 52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012. For more information, visit the McNally Jackson website.
Praise for Patrick Leigh Fermor’s ‘The Broken Road’
NYRB is thrilled to receive excellent reviews in The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal for Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, the third and long-awaited volume of Leigh Fermor’s epic trek across Europe.
In The New York Times Book Review, Robert F. Worth wrote:
“…an unforgettable book, full of strange encounters with a prewar Balkan cast of counts, prostitutes, peasants, priests and castrati. The great pleasure of all, as usual, is Leigh Fermor’s own infectious, Rabelaisian hunger for knowledge of almost every kind…. For anyone who has tried to document a journey, reading him is a humbling and thoroughly inspiring experience.”
And in The Wall Street Journal, Robert D. Kaplan wrote:
“Fermor’s books, nearly all of them chronicles of his journeys across Europe and the former Ottoman Near East, demonstrate how travel writing, to be legitimate, must act as a vehicle to liberate geography, history, art and culture from their desiccated academic moorings. Fermor combined style with elaborate erudition on nearly every page…Rarely was his description of a landscape not pitch-perfect.”
NYRB Classics is the US publisher of books written by Patrick Leigh Fermor, including A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, the first two volumes of Leigh Fermor’s legendary adventure.
Daniel Mendelsohn at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C.
On Tuesday, March 11, at 7 p.m., join National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Award finalist Daniel Mendelsohn for a reading and discussion his latest essay collection, now in paperback, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.
Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture brings together twenty-four of Mendelsohn’s essays, covering a wide range of subjects. Mendelsohn, trained as a classicist and the author of two internationally best-selling memoirs, moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters to trenchant takes on pop spectacles—none more explosively controversial than his dissection of Mad Men.
Politics and Prose Bookstore is located at 5015 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20008. For more information, visit Politics and Prose’s website.
Wes Anderson cites Stefan Zweig as inspiration for ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’
In various interviews, as well as in the closing credits of the film, Wes Anderson cites the works of Austrian novelist, poet, and translator Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) as the inspiration for his latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. In the Hollywood Reporter article, Anderson was quoted joking that the film is “more or less plagiarism” of Zweig’s work, and saying, “I think people in Europe are surprised [Americans] don’t know this writer.”
The Grand Budapest Hotel, which kicked off the Berlin Film Festival, opens on March 7.
NYRB Classics has several titles by Zweig: Chess Story, Confusion, Journey Into the Past, The Post-Office Girl, and Beware of Pity.
On May 6, Other Press will publish George Prochnik’s biography of Zweig, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World.
‘In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist’ is a National Jewish Book Awards finalist
NYRB is thrilled to announce that Ruchama King Feuerman’s In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist has been selected as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards in Fiction.
Set in Jerusalem, In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist is the story of a former Lower East Side haberdasher, now an assistant to an elderly rabbi; Mustafa, a physically deformed Arab janitor who works on the Temple Mount; and the beautiful Tamar, a young American woman searching for a righteous man.
Deemed “The best novel I read all year” by Barton Swaim ofThe Wall Street Journal, In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist was first published as an NYRB Lit series eBook, and will be available in paperback in March 2014.