NYRB NEWS

Happy Birthday to T. H. White

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May 29th is the birthday of Terence Hanbury White, author of twenty-six published works, including his famed sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King. NYRB is proud to have in its Classics series The Goshawk, a book in which White chronicles his attempts to train a hawk. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, published by The New York Review Children’s Collection, is the story of a ten-year-old girl who discovers a community of Lilliputians living on a deserted island at the far end of her estate. Maria’s discovery leads to a thrilling adventure in this novel of true literary ingenuity.

Two NYRB Classics Translators win Prize

On Thursday, May 24, the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation announced the winners of their 25th Annual Translation Prize for excellence in translations of French works into English published in 2011.

We are thrilled that Marina Harss, translator of Elizabeth Gille’s The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter, and Richard Howard, translator of Marc Fumaroli’s When The World Spoke French, and have been honored with this prestigious award in Fiction and Non-Fiction, respectively. Richard Howard will share this year’s prize in Non-Fiction with Arthur Goldhammer, for his translation of Alexis de Tocqueville.

Each winning translator will received a $10,000 cash prize funded by the Florence Gould Foundation; Richard Howard and Arthur Goldhammer will be splitting the prize money for the Non-Fiction category. All of the finalists and winners were honored at a special ceremony on Wednesday, May 23rd.

Michael Dirda on the stories of “a master of satirical science fiction.”

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In Thursday’s Washington Post, Michael Dirda wrote about the NYRB Classics title, Store of The Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley. Edited and introduced by Alex Abramovich and Jonathan Lethem, this collection of Sheckley’s stories was published earlier this month.

Celebrate Children’s Book Week!

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From May 7 to May 13th, we are celebrating Children’s Book Week, the longest running literacy initiative in the country. Children’s Book Week was established in 1919 with the belief that children’s literature and literacy have the power to change lives.

We encourage our young (and young at heart) readers to celebrate with one of the many excellent titles from The New York Review Children’s Collection. We recommend The Mousewife, illustrated by William Pène du Bois, whose birthday—May 9th—falls right in the middle of Children’s Book Week, or Bel Ria: Dog of War, by Sheila Burnford, who was born on May 11th in the year before Children’s Book Week began.

April showers bring May flowers—and May birthdays!

May Day wasn’t the only celebration at the beginning of this month—there are also four literary birthdays!

 

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Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was born May 5. This Danish philosopher was one of the masters of contemporary thought. He wrote about existentialism and twentieth-century theology alike, and the anthology of his work, The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, edited and with an introduction by W.H. Auden, is the perfect introduction to Kierkegaard.
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On May 6, it was Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), of Randall Jarell’s Book of Stories, an extraordinary anthology that is not only a collection of stories, but, with a celebrated introductory essay by Jarrell himself, an illumination of the art of storytelling.

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Then there’s Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), born May 8, widely regarded as the foremost man of letters of the twentieth century, and the author of Memoirs of Hecate County. Of all the books he wrote, Wilson proclaimed this work of fiction to be his favorite. One need only read these interlinked sublime and satirical stories, told with marvelous detail of the depravity of the American Dream, to understand why.

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Finally, there’s the great poet Charles Simic, who celebrates his birthday on May 9. The author of Dime-Store Alchemy, a reflection on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, and Confessions of a Poet Laureate, a New York Review e-book original.

 

Amsterdam Stories in the Bay Area and Boston

If you live in the Bay Area or in Boston, don’t miss translator Damion Searls discuss his translation of Amsterdam Stories by Nescio, a writer whose growing reputation and cult readership have marked him as a figure in world literature.

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City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco
Tuesday, May 8th at 7:00 pm
with translator Damion Searls and writer Peter Orner

 

 

City of Palo Alto Library — Downtown Branch
Wednesday, May 9th at 7:00 pm
with translator Damion Searls
Co-sponsored by Books Inc and Palo Alto City Library

 

Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, Berkeley
Thursday, May 10th at 7:30 pm
with translator Damion Searls and Jeroen Dewulf, Director of Dutch Studies Program, UC-Berkeley

 

Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge
Wednesday, May 23rd at 7:00 pm

NYRB is traveling to Bukovina—and we want you to come for the trip

“Czernopol—less an invented place than the distilled essence of a number of post-imperial Eastern European cities, including the author’s own birthplace — is a smug little latter-day Sodom, squalid and venal and defiantly backward, except in one crucial respect. ‘Laughter in Czernopol,’ the narrator tells us, ‘had been elevated to an art form, a folk art of unparalleled authenticity…well endowed with the most vivid references, not to mention all manner of innuendos.’ As you can perhaps imagine, this makes the town a lively place to visit.”—The New York Times Sunday Book Review

On May 6th, NYRB invites you to make that lively visit to Bukovina—Gregor von Rezzori‘s home, and the real-life inspiration for the fictional Czernopol. Bukovina is the simultaneously colorful and chaotic backdrop to Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography, and An Ermine in Czernopol. Michael Cunningham, Deborah Eisenberg, Daniel Kehlmann, and Edmund White will come together for this discussion, moderated by NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank, at the 2012 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, to travel through the magically whimsical and irrevocably lost Bukovina—and to take you there with them.

Sunday, May 6, 2012 at 1PM
Museum of Jewish Heritage
36 Battery Place
New York City

Tickets: $15/$10 PEN Members/NYRB readers/Museum members and students with valid ID.

Co-sponsored by Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, and New York Review of Books Classics

The Dud Avocado on “All Things Considered”

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In his April 12th “You Must Read This” segment, “Hellbent For Living: A Screwball Parisian Adventure,” Rosecrans Baldwin talks about Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado.