NYRB NEWS
Attention Francophiles: Bastille Day is (almost) here!
There is further cause to celebrate Bastille Day as NYRB now has several French history titles with another due this fall. Additionally, Richard Howard was this year’s co-recipient of the French-American Foundation & Florence Gould Foundation Translation Award for When the World Spoke French by Marc Fumaroli.
Nancy Mitford’s dazzling histories—The Sun King, Madame de Pompadour, and Voltaire In Love (October 2012)—cover the court life of Louis the 14th; unveil the personal life of Louis the 15th’s famous mistress; and yield an Enlightenment era love affair between two of France’s greatest minds. Moving into the Napoleonic era, Philippe-Paul de Ségur’s Defeat gives a firsthand account of Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia. Novels in Three Lines is a scandalously witty account of everyday life in 1906 France, by critic and anarchist Félix Fénéon. And, last on the timeline, but certainly not least, Richard Cobb’s street level view of France from the mid-thirties to the early fifties in his Paris and Elsewhere.
Happy 4th of July from NYRB!
In 1830, Daniel Webster cried out, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” However, by 1855, as disunion seemed imminent, there were eighty-nine places taking their name from “Union,” while “Liberty” had just thirty-seven (poor “Freedom” was the namesake of just thirteen, and those were mostly in the north). Further, “In 1862 Union touched one hundred ten. Liberty had added only seven; Freedom only one.”
If you were to add up all of the Liberty’s, Freedom’s, and Independence’s, they would not equal the Union’s.
However, there’s no Union Day, which we suspect Independence takes as some small consolation.
Whether you choose to celebrate liberty, freedom, justice (which apparently is a very unpopular choice of place name), or even union (you’d hardly be the first) tomorrow, we hope you’ll do it with Names on the Land and NYRB in mind.
Summer is here—and so are these literary birthdays!
Summer’s officially arrived, and there’s no better way to welcome it than to acknowledge these late June and early July literary birthdays!
June 28 is the birthday of Luigi Pirandello, who was born in Sicily in 1867. A poet, writer of stories, a playwright, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was an inspiration to writers as varied as Eugène Lonesco and T.S. Eliot. His The Late Mattia Pascal is the story of a man who is declared dead in his boring provincial town, and takes it as an opportunity to move on to another, only to find, in the pages of Pirandello’s black humor, that changing towns does not mean he can change himself.
Then comes July 1 and the birthday of Jean Stafford. Born in 1915, Stafford was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American short story writer and novelist. The Mountain Lion is the story of two siblings who find that the love they have built for each other in their dreary childhood home is challenged when they visit their uncle at his ranch in Colorado. The book was hailed by The New York Times as “one of the best novels about adolescence in American literature.”
Fun Summer Reading for Kids
Children can spend summer vacations at the beach, playing in the the backyard, or visiting family and friends, but they can also spend summer traipsing through time, talking to animals, and traveling to far off lands—all without venturing beyond the covers of a book from The New York Review Children’s Collection.
These 20 titles, for kids of all ages, are available at 30% off through July 6, 2012.
Click here to view the list and order.
More June literary birthdays…
On June 15, we celebrate Maria Dermoût (1888-1962). Born on a sugar plantation in the Dutch East Indies and educated in Holland, Dermoût returned to the Indies and captured this exotic experience with remarkable realism in her novel The Ten Thousand Things.
The hugely influential French philosopher, novelist, playwright, and pampheleteer Jean-Paul Sartre was born on June 21, 1905; we’re celebrating by announcing the November 2012 publication of We Have Only This Life to Live, a new collection that draws from Sartre’s entire Collected Essays as well as his unpublished work.
Victor Serge’s ‘Memoirs of a Revolutionary’ praised in ‘The Guardian’
You can get your copy of Memoirs of a Revolutionary here. NYRB Classics publishes other titles—Conquered City, Unforgiving Years, and The Case of Comrade Tulayev—by Victor Serge, too.
Early June Birthdays
June has many literary birthdays; in just the first few days of the month, NYRB celebrates the lives and works of three very different authors.
We start off the month with John Masefield, who was born June 1, 1878. Masefield served in the British Navy, but deserted ship, swearing “to be a writer, come what might.” This dream became reality, and two of his children’s books—The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, both of which chronicle the adventures of the plucky orphan boy Kay Harker—are published by The New York Review Children’s Collection.
June 1 is also the birthday of Dante Alighieri, born in Florence in 1265. NYRB Classics publishes three titles by or about the great poet: The New Life, translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Ciaran Carson’s translation of The Inferno of Dante Alighieri; and Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World, a brilliant and provocative examination of the works of today’s birthday boy.
June 5 marks the birthday of Ivy Compton-Burnett (1892-1969), who wrote over fifteen novels about the upper classes of the late Victorian period. The novels are constructed almost entirely of seemingly banal dialogue that eventually reveals, beneath its surface, the truths of human nature and profound insights into human relationships. Among her works, NYRB Classics publishes A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant.
New Reading Group Guides
Just in time for summer book club decisions, we have added three new reading group guides.
Two of the guides are for our recently released books by the twentieth-century English novelist Elizabeth Taylor. Angel is the story of a young woman whose fantasy of being rich and famous comes true when her novels, much to everyone’s surprise, are a success. Now that she has tasted the good life, Angel has no intention of letting anyone stand in her way. A Game of Hide and Seek is a finely rendered tale of the youthful love as well as of the quiet melancholy of an adulthood that too often does not surprise enough.
The third guide is for Walkabout, by James Vance Marshall. In the words of Time Magazine, Walkabout is “…a haunting little idyll in the same vein as A High Wind in Jamaica…[it] tells of two children, a boy and a girl, sole survivors of a plane crash in the Australian bush. Their fragile veneer of modern culture clashes with the primitive soul of a boy who is making his tribal ‘walkabout.’”
These reading group guides, as well as guides to another 35 NYRB titles, are available in our resources section. We have many books that make for excellent summer reads and book club choices.