In a recent interview on BBC 4 morning radio show “Today,” acclaimed novelist Ian McEwan beamed about Stoner by John Williams.

The novel tells the story of the life of William Stoner—from his roots as the son of dirt-poor Midwestern farmers to his education and discovery of literature, from the disappointments of his professional life to his attempts to find love and solitude. McEwan called the book “a joyful discovery,” noting that “as soon as you start reading it you feel you’re in very, very good hands.”When asked whether this book—with its subtle plot and small protagonist—would make a good summer read, McEwan replied emphatically “I can’t convey well enough, this is the book to take. It will thrive in the hotel room and on the beach. It is a marvelous discovery for everyone who loves literature.”

Listen to the interview here.

To celebrate the publication of Turtle Diary, NYRB Classics and McNally Jackson have planned a July 8th tribute to Russell Hoban, author of many books for children and adults.

Ed Park, author of Personal Days and the introducer to Turtle Diary, John Wray, author of Lowboy, Brigid Hughes, editor of A Public Space, Damion Searls, translator of Robert Walser’s A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories, and Phoebe Hoban, daughter of Russell Hoban, will be participating.

The event will take place on July 8, at 7pm at the McNally Jackson Bookstore. For more information, click here.

Today we celebrate the birth of Helen Keller. Many of us are familiar with the basics of Keller’s biography—that childhood illness left her deaf and blind, that she worked with her teacher Anne Sullivan to acquire language—but she was also a prolific writer and a tireless activist, lending her support to the advancement of women and various socialist causes. Her intellectually daring memoir, The World I Live In, is available from NYRB Classics.

“While Helen Keller is better known for The Story of My Life, her later book, The World I Live In, is a warmer, more intimate and more beautiful work, one in which we encounter Helen Keller’s remarkable imagination, her originality, and her power as a literary artist. She comes alive here, vividly and idiosyncratically, more than in any other of her writings.”
—Oliver Sacks

Félix Fénéon (1861-1944) labored in anonymity in a French war office, but he was also a critic, publisher, journalist, anarchist, and “literary instigator.” His Novels in Three Lines originally appeared in the French newspaper Le Matin, and were culled from stories covered therein. They show his precision with language, his dry wit, and his calculated assessment of things. As translator and introducer Luc Sante writes, “His politics, his aesthetics, his curiosity and sympathy are all on view, albeit applied with tweezers and delineated with a single-hair brush.” We celebrate his birthday on June 22.

Also born on June 22 was the Dutch author Nescio, or Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh (1882-1961). Nescio—Latin for “I don’t know”—was a writer whose growing reputation and cult readership have marked him as a figure in world literature. His stories are inhabited by wastrels and charmers, the young and the no-longer-young, the bourgeois and the bohemian. He was a great stylist, capturing the mercantile city of Amsterdam and its bucolic surrounding countryside with equal vitality. NYRB has published the first English language edition of his work with Damion Searls’s translation of Amsterdam Stories, with an introduction by Joseph O’Neill.

On June 25 we celebrate the birth of Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938), who wrote the first patient’s-eye view of brain surgery. A Journey Round My Skull is a memoir of his brain tumor—the hallucinations it provoked and its treatment. What’s more, Karinthy manages to tell this story without being macabre or morbid. In his introduction to the book, Oliver Sacks calls it “a masterpiece,” and “one of the very best [medical memoirs].”