NYRB NEWS
NYRB Classics Author Mavis Gallant Passes Away at 91
NYRB is saddened by the death of Mavis Gallant, beloved author of the NYRB Classics Paris Stories, Varieties of Exile, and The Cost of Living, this past week.
Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal and worked as a journalist at the Montreal Standard before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing fiction. After traveling extensively she settled in Paris, where she lived until the end of her life. She was the recipient of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story and the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement.
Mavis Gallant will be remembered as an enduring and legendary author, a contributor to The New Yorker for close to fifty years, and as a writer whose work brims with innovation, insight, heartbreak, mystery, and wit.
Mix and Mingle with NYRB at the Elliott Bay Book Company
On Saturday, March 1, at 4 p.m., NYRB will join Archipelago and New Directions for a literary press mingle at The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 Tenth Avenue, Seattle.
Part of AWP week, the event will be a low-key conversation about books with editors, publishers, and publicists from the three presses. Books from each press will be for sale, including highlighted titles: William H. Gass’s On Being Blue from NYRB Classics, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book One from Archipelago, and Emily Dickinson’s Gorgeous Nothings from New Directions. Refreshments will be provided.
For more information, visit The Elliott Bay Book Company’s website.
NYRB at the 2014 AWP Conference in Seattle
New York Review Books and The New York Review of Books will be at the 2014 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, February 26 through March 1, in Seattle. A selection of fiction and nonfiction, including William H. Gass’s On Being Blue , Renata Adler’s novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark, as well as titles from the NYRB Poets series, including Pierre Reverdy and A.K. Ramanujan’s The Interior Landscape: Classical Tamil Love Poems, will be available at discounted prices. Also, attendees can pick up a free copy of the latest issue of The New York Review of Books.
We will be located at booth 308 in the Washington State Convention Center and hope that all those attending the AWP Conference will stop by.
Praise for ‘Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure’ and ‘1941: The Year that Keeps Returning’
We are thrilled to receive praise from The New Yorker for Artemis Cooper’s Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure and from The Guardianfor Slavko Goldstein’s 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning.
Richard J. Evans writes in The Guardian:
“…[Goldstein’s] book does not focus solely on the sufferings of the victims, or treat their persecutors, torturers and murderers as anonymous, faceless or inhuman….In one personal history after another, the murderers appear as human beings, and in many cases as morally ambivalent rather than one-dimensionally evil. The police chief who helped Goldstein escape was also responsible for sending many to their death at the horrific concentration camp in Jasenovac – and was far from exceptional in this regard. It is this book’s achievement to give genocide a human face.”
In the January 27 issue of The New Yorker:
“Cooper’s biography is affectionate but not uncritical, and she ably meets the challenge of adding further intrigue to journeys and adventures, such as his kidnapping of a Nazi general on the island of Crete in 1944, that her subject has already recounted so well. Elusive and often coy, the Fermor who emerges from these pages seems so authentic that when he dies, at ninety-six, the reader feels the loss keenly.”
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 volumes that tell of his journey by foot across 1930s Europe. The final volume of the trilogy, The Broken Road, will be published in March 2014.
New York Review Books on Best of 2013 Lists
New York Review Books is excited to announce several of its titles have been featured on best of lists for 2013. Some of these include:
- The Box of Delights in Flavorwire’s “10 of the Best Holiday Books You Probably Haven’t Read”
- Now Open the Box in The Guardian‘s “Best Picture Books for Children”
- Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure in the New York Times‘s “100 Notable Books of 2013”
- Speedboat and Pitch Dark by Renata Adler are featured in the AV Club’s “Unsung Gems of 2013”
- Speedboat again, and Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps in Verso’s “Books of the Year”
- Over at the Millions, David Gilbert, Alice McDermott, and Dani Shapiro raved about their favorite NYRB Classics they read this year
- Lucas Wittmann at The Daily Beast picked Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, The Old Devils, and Speedboat
- Commonweal picked Speedboat, Pitch Dark, and Waiting for Barbarians as part of their best of 2013 list
More Success for Author John Williams
We are excited to announce that John Williams’s Stoner has been selected as Waterstones’s Book of the Year in the UK.
Now an international bestseller in several countries, this once overlooked classic has been championed by Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, and Colum McCann, among many others.
NYRB Classics reissued Stoner in 2006 and we are thrilled that the rest of the world has noticed this extraordinary novel.
Williams’s highly acclaimed Butcher’s Crossing, also in the NYRB Classics series, was just published in Holland and is already on the Dutch bestseller list.
A ‘New York Times’ Notable Book of 2013
We’re pleased to announce that Artemis Cooper’s biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, has been chosen by The New York Times as a Notable Book of 2013. In his review in The New York Times, Christopher Benfey wrote Cooper “has written an affectionately intimate, informative and forgiving biography.”
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 volumes that tell of his journey by foot across 1930s Europe. The final volume of the trilogy, The Broken Road, will be published in March 2014.
Slavko Goldstein at the Harvard Coop
On Thursday, November 14, Slavko Goldstein will talk about his new book, 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning, the astounding account of the fateful year when his father was arrested and taken away by Croatian fascists. Goldstein’s account blends his family’s history with the larger history of Yugoslavia during World War II.
The Harvard Coop is located at 1400 Massachusetts Ave in Cambridge, Mass. The event is from 7–8pm. For more information, visit the Coop’s website.