On Monday, September 23rd, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern will give a talk about their new book, No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State, at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington D.C. The event starts at 7 pm.

On Tuesday, September 24th, they will present the book at the Goethe-Institut Washington. To register for this event, visit the Goethe-Institut website. The event starts at 6:30 pm.

Both events are free of charge.

NYRB and McNally Jackson are teaming up to present a new reading series. This month features a celebration of Kingsley Amis and the new releases One Fat Englishman and Girl, 20.

On Sunday, September 22, at 6pm, join NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank, Katie Roiphe (author of In Praise of Messy Lives), Lucas Wittman (literary editor of The Daily Beast), Christian Lorentzen (editor at the London Review of Books), and Michael Moynihan (reporter atNewsweek/The Daily Beast) for what promises to be an incandescent conversation on one of the masters of modern fiction.

A Schoolboy’s Diary—a new collection of short stories by Robert Walser—is being celebrated in New York this month.

On Tuesday, September 10, at 7pm, 192 Books hosts a discussion of the book between translator Damion Searls and experimental poet Mina Pam Dick (author of I Am the Robert Walser).

Then, on Friday, September 27, also at 7pm, Ben Lerner (who wrote the book’s introduction) and Damion Searls will celebrate the book in conversation at BookCourt.

Nicholas Lezard of The Guardian says that “everyone who reads Walser falls in love with him.” See why.

A new 50th anniversary restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), the director’s look at a crumbling marriage, will play at Film Forum for a two-week engagement starting on September 6. The movie stars Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, and Jack Palance.

Phillip Lopate will introduce the 7:45 PM show on Friday, September 6, at a special event co-sponsored by The New York Review of Books. The NYRB Classics edition of Moravia’s novel will be on sale at Film Forum during the run. Film Forum is located at 209 West Houston Street in New York City.

In Love and My Face for the World to See, books by Alfred Hayes that were just released in the NYRB Classics series, received significant reviews this week.

In The New York Observer, Michael H. Miller calls In Love “one of the greatest, bleakest breakup stories ever told.” He notes Hayes’s ability to write a relationship—particularly the end of a relationship—in so psychologically astute a way as to make it palpable half a century later.

In The Guardian (UK) Nicholas Lezard also calls attention, in his review of My Face for the World to See, to the way Hayes can write timeless interpersonal situations. He offers high praise indeed:

What makes this book last (once again, I have to salute NYRB for fishing out from obscurity yet another masterpiece) is the glimpse it gives us of the sort of person who goes to Hollywood in order to become famous—her face for all the world to see—only to find herself slipping closer and closer to despair and degradation. The madness of the woman here is so plausibly depicted it chills; she has constructed a world to account for her failure, and reality is only a paper-thin membrane which could dissolve at any moment.

Check out these lasting novels for yourself!

Georges Simenon’s extensive body of work has inspired many films. These romans durs (“hard novels”—akin to what we would call a psychological thriller) have the right stuff for it: gritty settings, psychological tension, questionable morality, and sex.

Cine-Simenon will run for two weeks (Thursday, August 8, through Wednesday, August 21) at the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. Four of the fourteen films in the series are based on NYRB Classics:

• Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, August 9 (the film is called Three Rooms in Manhattan)
• The Engagement, August 11 and 17 (Monsieur Hire is the film’s title)
• The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, August 12 and 21
• Red Lights, August 16 and 19

For more information about Cine-Simenon, click here.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s collection of essays—Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture—has been shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Awarded each year by a panel of judges, the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award honors work that “exemplifies the dignity and esteem that the essay form imparts to literature.”

This year’s judges are Sven Birkerts, Robert Gottlieb, and Mark Kramer. The final winners and runners-up will be announced later this summer and will be honored at the 2013 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on Monday, October 21, 2013, at CUNY Graduate Center’s Proshansky Auditorium in New York City.

It is with great sadness that NYRB marks the passing of the gifted illustrator Marc Simont.

Born in Paris, Simont studied drawing with his father (also an illustrator) and at schools in France and the United States. Over the course of his illustrious career he worked on over 100 children’s books, including The Backward Day, The Wonderful O, and The 13 Clocks (all available from The New York Review Children’s Collection).

He was the recipient of a Caldecott Medal (for A Tree is Nice), two Caldecott Honors (The Happy Day and The Stray Dog), and—in recognition of his work as an occasional political cartoonist—the Grambs Aronson Award for Cartooning With a Conscience.

Margalit Fox of The New York Times described his work as “embodying both airy lightness and crackling energy.” We will miss that lightness and energy—and return to his work for its vivacity, intimacy, and charm.