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 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

New York Review Books is pleased to announce the September 4th publication of The Water Theatre by Lindsay Clarke, the first title in NYRB Lit, a new e-book series devoted to publishing contemporary literary fiction and narrative non-fiction from around the world. All of the books in the series have been published to great acclaim in their own countries and we’re happy to be able to make these titles available to US readers. NYRB Lit titles are available from most e-book retailers.

From Library Journal‘s starred review of The Water Theatre:
“Clarke’s astounding novel, set in England, Africa, and Italy, defies categories. Part political screed, part epic love story with some mystical fantasy added to the soup, his writing style is as crisp and straightforward as his subject matter is complicated and nuanced. This Whitbread Prize–winning author should find an appreciative new audience with this digital incarnation.”

Praise from the UK press:
“Lindsay Clarke’s complex, involving novel The Water Theatre is every bit as good as his stunning debut, The Chymical Wedding…. This is a richly involving and rewarding work.” —Erica Wagner, Best Books of the Year, The Times

“Bold, tenacious characters and vivid, distinct landscapes give The Water Theatre a strong hold on the imagination as Clarke skillfully draws out the betrayals searing his characters’ lives.” —The Financial Times

“It is a rare pleasure and surprise to read a new book whose prose is so rich and emotionally resonant… Lindsay Clarke has an enviable command of character, time, and place. He is almost Lawrentian in his ability to depict both the power and beauty of landscape, and tender or tragically fraught emotional relationships… This is a significant and ambitious work by a master of his craft.” —The Independent

If you’d like to know more about the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, read Leo Carey’s “A Critic At Large” column in the August 27 issue of The New Yorker (subscription required).

NYRB Classics is publisher of five of Zweig’s works: the novellas Chess Story, Journey Into the Past, and Confusion; his only full length novel, Beware of Pity; and his unfinished novel, The Post-Office Girl.

During the 1930s, Zweig was one of the best-selling writers in Europe, and was among the most translated German-language writers before World War II. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife.

June too soon.
July stand by.
August look out you must.
September remember.
October all over.
—Old Mariner’s Rhyme

Good riddance to hurricane season, we’ll all be glad when its over and done, but in the meantime if you find yourself ill at ease, why not hunker down and pick up a novel from NYRB Classics? After stowing the masts and battening down the hatches, check out these two hurricane-infused novels, A High Wind in Jamaica and In Hazard, both by Richard Hughes. However…. Hopefully we all manage to stay dry this hurricane season.