NYRB NEWS
Vladimir Sorokin and Intizar Husain nominated for Man Booker International Prize 2013
The finalists for the coveted Man Booker International Prize 2013 have been announced. We are delighted that two NYRB Classics authors are among them: Intizar Husain and Vladimir Sorokin.
Sorokin, who was born in Russia in 1955, is the author of The Queue and The Ice Trilogy, both available as NYRB Classics, and Days of the Oprichnik. Trained as an engineer for the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, Sorokin turned to writing and became a major presence in Moscow’s literary underground in the 1980s. Banned in the Soviet Union, his work has since been translated into more than twenty languages and awarded several prestigious prizes, including the Andrei Biely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature in 2001. Sorokin lives in Moscow.
Intizar Husain (b. 1925) is a journalist, short-story writer, and novelist, widely considered the most significant living fiction writer in Urdu. He is the author of the story collections Leaves, The Seventh Door, A Chronicle of the Peacocks, and An Unwritten Epic. Basti, a novel in which the psychic history of Pakistan is traced through the story of a single man, was published as an NYRB Classic in December. Pankaj Mishra called it “a haunting modernist echo chamber of voices from Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic traditions.” Husain currently lives in Lahore, Pakistan.
Also nominated for the Man Booker International Prize is Lydia Davis, whose translation of Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow is also available from NYRB Classics.
William McPherson’s ‘Testing the Current’ Lauded in ‘The Atlantic;’ McPherson to Speak in Washington, DC
“Duly recognized as a flawless literary achievement when it was published in 1984, this superb, long-out-of-print first novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic McPherson has finally been reissued,” begins The Atlantic’s review of NYRB Classics most recent release, Testing the Current.
If you are in the DC area on January 26th, don’t miss your chance to hear from author William McPherson at Politics and Prose Bookstore at 6PM, where he will discuss Testing the Current with Michael Dirda, author and book columnist for The Washington Post.
For more information, please visit the event website here.
Date & Time: January 26, 2013, 6PM
Politics and Prose Bookstore
5015 Connecticut Ave, NW
Washington, DC
(202) 364-1919
Daniel Mendelsohn’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ an NBCC Finalist
Today the National Book Critics Circle announced its book award finalists for the publishing year of 2012. Among the nominees for the best book of Criticism is Waiting for the Barbarians by Daniel Mendelsohn.
In this acclaimed collection, Mendelsohn brings together twenty-four of his recent essays on a wide range of subjects, from Avatar to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and from the Titanic to Susan Sontag’s Journals.
Trained as a classicist, Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Greek myth in the Spider-Man musical, Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectacles—none more explosively controversial than his dissection of Mad Men.
“Our most irresistible literary critic…Much of the fun of reading Mendelsohn is his sense of play, his irreverence and unpredictability, his frank emotional responses…He forces the [essay] form in directions Francis Bacon never imagined.” —The New York Times Book Review
“a scrumptious stylist…He writes better movie criticism than most movie critics, better theatre criticism than most theatre critics and better literary criticism than just about anyone…practically every sentence of this book [is] an eye-opener.” —The Observer (UK)
“Mendelsohn’s work is absolutely vital in both senses of the word—it breaths with an exciting intelligence often absent in similar but stodgier writing, and it should be required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” —The Daily Beast
New NYRB Lit e-books, ‘Ravan and Eddie’ and ‘1948’
NYRB Lit, the e-book series from New York Review Books, is pleased to announce the publication of Ravan and Eddie by Kiran Nagarkar and 1948 by Yoram Kaniuk. You may order 1948 and Ravan and Eddie from your favorite e-book retailer today. (We do not sell e-books from the NYRB site.)
1948
by Yoram Kaniuk
A new translation from the Hebrew by Anthony Berris
More than sixty years after fighting in Israel’s War of Independence, Yoram Kaniuk tries to remember what exactly did—and did not—happen when he was a soldier in the Palmach. 1948, winner of Israel’s prestigious Sapir Prize for Literature and now available in English for the first time, is the story of a younger man told by his older, wiser self, the self who realizes that wars are pointless, and that he and his friends were senseless to see glory in the prospect of dying young. It is also a painful, shocking, and tragically relevant homage to the importance of bearing witness to the follies of the past, even—or especially—when they are one’s own.
“The novel has a distinctive narrative style—thoughts of almost childlike simplicity come at a breathless pace—and the events Mr. Kaniuk describes are often emotionally searing (particularly since they are presumably based on real memories).” — Barton Swaim, The Wall Street Journal
Ravan and Eddie
By Kiran Nagarkar
Recently selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best novels about Mumbai, Ravan and Eddie is a comic masterpiece about two larger- and truer-than-life characters and their bawdy, Rabelaisian adventures in postcolonial India.
Ravan and Eddie are the unlikeliest of companions. For one thing, Ravan is Hindu, while Eddie is Catholic. For another, when Ravan was a baby and fell from a balcony, that fall had a dramatic, and very literal, impact on Eddie’s family. When you grow up in the crowded Mumbai chawls, you get to participate in your neighbors’ lives, whether you like it or not.
“Wicked, magical, hilarious, enduring. A masterpiece from one of world literature’s great cult writers.” — Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Deadline for NYRB Holiday Sale regular shipping rates extended
We know many people do their online shopping on the weekend so we’ve extended our regular shipping rates deadline by 48 hours to midnight on Sunday, December 9.
Have a look at the NYRB Holiday Sale page—up to 40% off—and place your order before Sunday.
Best Books of the Year
‘Tis the season for gift guides and “best books of the year” lists. We won’t ask if you’ve been naughty or nice, but are confident that someone, if not yourself, deserves one of these books that have made the seasonal lists:
Berlin Stories, chosen by Nicholas Lezard at The Guardian: “A collection of vignettes written as if by some kind of innocent angel, or holy fool. His celebration of the ordinary is like seeing things for the first time, and for his almost mindless optimism not to irritate but to charm shows a sincere genius. Everyone who reads him falls in love with him. Even Kafka did.”
Wolf Story, chosen Dan Kois in Slate: “This ridiculously charming book is about a wolf, and a chicken, and a farmer, but really it’s about an exasperated, loving father in midcentury New York telling his very opinionated son a story.”
Pinocchio, chosen by Julia Eccleshare in The Guardian: “The classic story of the little wooden puppet who longs to become human has lost none of its humour and pathos. Pinocchio is best known for his most unfortunate characteristic – every time he lies, his nose grows longer and longer. The moral is never far from the surface, but the touching father-son relationship between Pinocchio and his maker, the poor woodcarver Geppetto, is just as important. Fulvio Testa’s illustrations capture the jaunty tone of the storytelling.”
Waiting for Barbarians, chosen by the editors of Kirkus Reviews: “Another top-notch collection of previously published criticism from Mendelsohn.”
Andrey Platonov, Erich Kästner, Nancy Mitford, Gilbert Seldes
We are pleased to announce the publication of four new NYRB Classics this month, all available at a limited-time 30% discount.
Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist, Erich Kästner’s novel about 1930s Berlin. The Stammering Century, Gilbert Seldes’s history of 19th century American religious movements and their leaders. Voltaire in Love, Nancy Mitford’s account of the great philosopher and his relationship with Madame du Châtalet. Happy Moscow, a volume of new translations of several works by Andrey Platonov, including the novel which gives the book its title.
Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist
Erich Kästner
Introduction by Rodney Livingstone
Translated by Cyrus Brooks
Set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, Kästner’s moralist is Jakob Fabian, a young man with an excellent education but permanently condemned to a low-paid job. As much party animals as they are political dissidents, Fabian and his friends become bitter if dulled witnesses of Germany’s moral disintegration as the Nazis begin their rise to power.
Going to the Dogs by Erich Kästner is the November Selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club. If you join the Book Club by November 15th, we’ll start your membership with Kästner’s novel.
The Stammering Century
by Gilbert Seldes
Introduction by Greil Marcus
Gilbert Seldes’s The Stammering Century is an historical account of the religious movements, cults, and manias that swept through an expanding America in the nineteenth century. It is also a gripping tale of the dreamers, rogues, frauds, sectarians, madmen, and geniuses who were the leaders of these movements.
“One of the most perceptive and entertaining studies of the American spirit in the nineteenth century.” —Richard Hofstadter
Voltaire in Love
by Nancy Mitford
Introduction by Adam Gopnik
Nancy Mitford’s account of Voltaire’s fifteen-year relationship with the renowned mathematician and scientist Madame du Châtelet, known as Émilie, is a spirited romp in the company of two extraordinary individuals as well as an erudite and gossipy guide to French high society during the Enlightenment.
“Mitford writes with a profound sympathy for the 17th and 18th century, and Voltaire in Love caps her career as the nonpareil popular biographer of that era.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
Happy Moscow
Andrey Platonov
Newly translated and introduced by Robert Chandler
Moscow Chestnova is a bold, beautiful, and glamorous parachutist, but after her ambitions to be part of the Soviet elite are thwarted when a freak accident propels her flaming from the sky, a new, stranger life begins. She drifts from man to man, through dance halls and all-night diners, exploring the great city whose name she bears, looking for happiness.
Unpublishable during Platonov’s lifetime, Happy Moscow first appeared in Russian only in 1991. This new edition contains not only a revised translation of Happy Moscow but several related works: a screenplay, a prescient essay about ecological catastrophe, and two short stories in which the same characters reappear and the reader sees the mind of an extraordinary writer at work.
John Banville on Georges Simenon’s ‘Act of Passion’
John Banville includes Act of Passion by Georges Simenon in his selection of “novels of young love and the perilous flush of infatuation” in the “Five Best” column in The Wall Street Journal.
“The narrator of Simenon’s novel, Charles Alavoine….is middle-aged and twice married, with a couple of young daughters, but has never known real love until he encounters a young woman, Martine, at the railway station..He takes Martine home, to work as a nurse in his surgery. Their affair continues and intensifies under the noses of Charles’s ice-queen wife, Armande, and his aged mother. Another novelist might have made out of this ménage à quatre an enjoyably naughty little fiction, but the people in Simenon’s romans durs (“hard novels”), as he called his non-Maigret novels, are driven and helpless, and Act of Passion ends, as it must, in tragedy. Has there ever been a more penetrating account of love’s destructive power?” — John Banville, The Wall Street Journal