NYRB NEWS
Happy Birthday to Helen Keller
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
NYRB celebrates early summer birthdays
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].”
Yoram Kaniuk, 1930–2013
It is with great sadness that NYRB notes the death of celebrated Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk. One of the Dor Tashach—the “1948 generation” of writers who came of age during birth of the State of Israel—Kaniuk was fearless about taking on controversial issues. In his early career, his style ran contrary to those of his peers; rather than embracing realism, he reveled in a stream-of-consciousness more akin to surrealism. He valued self-criticism over self-righteousness.
1948, published in the NYRB Lit e-book series, is an autobiographical novel in which he tries to remember what did—and did not—happen during his time as a teenage soldier in the Palmach. 1948 won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award.
Happy Birthday to authors published by The New York Review Children’s Collection
June 11 was the birthday of Betty Jean Lifton, author of Taka-chan and I: A Dog’s Journey to Japan by Runcible. This remarkable book, with photographs by the great japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe, tells the story of Runcible the Weimaraner, who digs a tunnel from Cape Cod to Japan, where the mets a young girl and helps her defeat a dragon. In addition to writing for children, Lifton was a dedicated advocate for adoption reform.
On June 14 we celebrate the birthday of Penelope Farmer, the author of Charlotte Sometimes. The book—a striking tale of time travel and coming of age—is vivid and alluring, mixing a fantastical premise with attention to authentic emotions. Farmer, an author of books for adults and children, is a recipient of a Carnegie Medal commendation.
NYRB celebrates two literary birthdays in May!
May 20th marks the birthday of Honoré de Balzac, the inventor of the modern realistic novel. With his keen eye for detail and his unflinching assessment of character, Balzac has been considered a literary forbearer of Flaubert, Proust, and James. NYRB Classics offers one of Balzac’s most celebrated tales, The Unknown Masterpiece, and will be publishing a collection of newly translated stories from The Human Comedy in January 2014.
On May 22nd we celebrate the birthday of the multitalented Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). Doyle graduated from Edinburgh University with a medical degree in 1881 and worked both in a conventional private practice, and as a ship’s doctor. Best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle also wrote historical fiction including the epic tales in The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard. The NYRB Classics edition includes an introduction by George MacDonald Fraser.
NYRB Poets Event at Unnameable Books
Unnameable Books and NYRB Poets will celebrate the publication of Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think with translators Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich. In addition, Eugene Ostashevsky will present The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, Part I, his new chapbook with the artist Eugene Timerman. The reading, which will be followed by a reception, will take place at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn on Friday, May 17, at 7pm.
Mostly overlooked during his lifetime, Vvedensky is now recognized as one of the most influential poets and thinkers of 20th-century Russia. From the closing statement at Pussy Riot’s August 2012 trial:
“Pussy Riot are Vvedensky’s disciples and his heirs. … His principle of ‘bad rhythm’ is our own. He wrote: ‘It happens that two rhythms will come into your head, a good one and a bad one and I choose the bad one. It will be the right one.’ …It is believed that the OBERIU dissidents are dead, but they live on. They are persecuted but they do not die.”—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
An Invitation for Me to Think is the first collection of Vvedensky’s work to appear in English.
For more information about the event, click here.
A discussion of the genre novels of Kingsley Amis at the Half King
On Monday, May 6th writers Lev Grossman, Nathaniel Adams, and Jen Vafidis will discuss Kingsley Amis’s newly reissued works of genre fiction, the science fiction/alternative world novel The Alteration and the ghost story The Green Man. Join us at 7pm at the Half King Bar & Restaurant at 505 W 23rd Street in New York City.
More NYC events celebrating Alexander Vvedensky
The Russian Avant-Garde Goes Underground at Poets House
On Saturday, April 20th at 2pm, to celebrate the release of Vvednesky’s An Invitation for Me to Think, Poets House with the Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia will host a colloquium and reading on the Russian Avant-Garde, featuring Anthony Anemone, Polina Barskova, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Peter Scotto, Bela Shayevich, and Matvei Yankelevich.
The colloquium starts at 2pm, followed by a reading at 4:30pm
For more information, please click here.
Russian Underground Poetry from OBERIU to Moscow Conceptualism at The Poetry Project
On Monday, April 22nd at 8pm, the Poetry Project will celebrate the publication of Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think. Vvedensky (1904-1941), one of the founders of OBERIU, the last Russian avant-garde group, is currently recognized as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.
Readers include Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich, translators of An Invitation for Me to Think, and Bela Shayevich and Ainsley Morse, translators of I Live I See: The Poems of Vsevolod Nekrasov.
For more information, please click here.