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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.