Last week, NYRB Classics was delighted to accept the 2014 Read Russia Prize for Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Autobiography of a Corpse on behalf of translator Joanne Turnbull. Awarded each spring, the Read Russia Prize celebrates the best English translations of Russian literature.

An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, and Happy Moscow by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, were also nominated for the prize. An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler, made the shortlist.

We are pleased to announce that four titles published by New York Review Books are on the long list for the 2014 PEN Literary Awards.

Martin Filler’s second volume of Makers of Modern Architecture has been nominated for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Nominated for the PEN Translation Prize are three NYRB Classics:

• An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman and translated by Elizabeth and Robert Chandler
• Transit by Anna Seghers and translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo
• Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozo

The PEN shortlist will be announced on June 17 and the 2014 PEN Literary Award winners will be named on July 30.

On Tuesday, May 20 at 7:00 pm, Daniel Mendelsohn will discuss his collection Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture with editor and author Choire Sicha at BookCourt in Brooklyn.

Mendelsohn has earned acclaim over the last decade in his writings for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. He has been called “one of the greatest critics of our time” by Poets & Writers. Waiting for Barbarians highlights Mendelsohn’s ability to range across cultural and historical topics, from the film Avatar, to Susan Sontag’s journals, demonstrating Mendelsohn’s “sweep as a cultural critic is as impressive as his depth.”

For more information about the event, visit our calendar.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.