NYRB NEWS
The first NYRB Classic of 2012
Happy 2012. We are pleased to announce that the first NYRB Classic of the year is the first complete English translation of Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol, with an introduction by Daniel Kehlmann. An Ermine in Czernopol, along with Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, are available at a limited-time 25% off.
An Ermine in Czernopol
By Gregor von RezzoriIntroduction by Daniel Kehlmann
A new translation from the German by Philip Boehm
“The city lies somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe and is named Czernopol,” Gregor von Rezzori writes in the prelude to this major early novel, the first part of a trilogy based on the author’s childhood that would grow to include some of his finest work: the scintillating memoir The Snows of Yesteryear and the trickily titled novel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.
In An Ermine in Czernopol, the author summons the disorderly and unpredictable energies of a town where everything in the world is seemingly mixed up together. The novel centers on the curious tragicomic fate of Tildy, an erstwhile officer in the army of the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian empire. Rezzori surrounds Tildy with a host of fantastic characters, each with an unbelievable story, to engage the reader in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears.
Read Daniel Kehlmann’s introduction
James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout
On their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide, two children, an eight-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl, are the sole survivors of a plane crash in the beautiful but harsh Australian outback. Fear pervades the novel, and is introduced in the very first sentence: “It was silent and dark, and the children were afraid.” With no food or clear sense of direction, they are forced to confront “the basic realities of life,” from which they had been shielded back home in Charleston, South Carolina. They encounter an Aboriginal boy who represents the complete opposite of their coddled existence and he teaches them how to survive. But can he be trusted?
Etched in arresting detail, Marshall’s adventure tale is also a parable, meditating upon the collision of civilizations and cultures and the greater themes of nature, spiritual redemption, selfless love, and mortality. Walkabout has been compared to Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal, Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, and William Henry Hudson’s Green Mansions.
Walkabout, first published in 1959, was not well known until the release of Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film, though Roeg’s adaptation was a striking departure from the book. For more about the differences between the film and the book, read Lee Siegel’s introduction (pdf).
Also at a limited-time 25% discount
The Mountain Lion
By Jean Stafford
Afterword by Kathryn Davis
“It’s a terrific book, witty and smart as Stafford always was, and kind in its treatment of these two strangely irresistible children.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
A High Wind in Jamaica
By Richard Hughes
Introduction by Francine Prose
A tale of seduction and betrayal, of accommodation and manipulation, of weird humor and unforeseen violence, this classic of twentieth-century literature is above all an extraordinary reckoning with the secret reasons and otherworldly realities of childhood.
Rock Crystal
By Adalbert Stifter
Introduction by W.H. Auden
Translated from the German by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore
Stifter’s rapturous and enigmatic tale of village life begins with a small anecdote—one Christmas eve, a brother and sister lose their way amid snowdrifts while crossing the Alps—and opens onto vast questions of faith and destiny.
“Twelve Months of Reading” in The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal asked 50 “friends” to recommend books that they enjoyed over the past year. Three NYRB Classics are included on that list:
Charles Mann chose Bruce Duffy’s The World As I Found It: “Hands-down, the novel I liked most was The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy….a fictional telling of the interactions between the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. That makes it sound terrible, doesn’t it? All I can say is that it plunged me into an intensely realized other world populated by characters who seemed as alive in my mind as any fictional characters I can remember.”
Ferdinand Mount chose Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado: “For those who missed Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado (1958) the first time round, I recommend the recent reissue from New York Review Books. The adventures of Sally Jay Gorce in postwar Paris have lost none of their zany zap after 50 years.”
Ahmed Rashid chose Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows:
“…a masterpiece of suffering, showing how Stalin laid the seeds for Hitler. New York Review Books has done sterling service by publishing Grossman’s books again in English after they had been out of print for many years. They include his masterpiece, Life and Fate an 800-page tome of World War II and the siege of Stalingrad. All his books were banned by Stalin.”
Russell Hoban, 1925-2011
Many of Hoban’s stories for young readers were written after he married Lillian Aberman; they were based upon his own family life (he and Lillian had four children). Lillian drew pictures for the books, which include the Francis the Badger series, The Little Brute Family, Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, and The Mouse and his Child. Last spring we are proud to have reissued one of Hoban’s most heartwarming classics, The Sorely Trying Day. Hailed by The Los Angeles Times as a “timely antidote to stress,” this is an outrageously funny tale about the domestic chaos that a father encounters upon his return from a “sorely trying day” at work.
Hoban was an exceptionally imaginative writer who was able to delight children and adults alike with his humor and wit. His stories are timeless and will certainly be read and re-read by many generations to come.
Have Yourself a Retro Little Christmas
Something for Christmas is a timeless treasure, and its sentimental, simple charm makes it the perfect gift for now grown retro children and their own children, too. Be sure to check out the entire NYRB Children’s Collection, full of charming classics waiting to become family favorites. Everyone could use a little retro something for Christmas.
A Letter from the Editor
The Sindbad whose adventures the great Hungarian writer Gyula Krúdy recounts has very little to do with the dauntless character whose name, we are told, the Hungarian Sindbad picked out himself from the Arabian Nights, his favorite book. He could even be accused of passing under false pretences. Yes, this Sindbad is incorrigibly restless, frequently in a tight spot, and not a little wily, but he is hardly a man of action and in no sense a hero. He is not young but ageless, wandering grayhaired in a green hat across the Hungarian plains or turning up in a Carpathian mountain village when not haunting the streets of Buda and Pest.
As to Sindbad’s adventures, they are exclusively amatory. He loves women indiscriminately and pursues them indefatigably, women who often are in no less hot pursuit of him, not least because he is as fickle in love as he is passionately persuasive. And yet if Sindbad is both a lover and a liar (“When precisely did the lies begin?” he wonders at one point; there is, at all events, no end to them), he is hardly a Don Juan. He doesn’t seek to conquer and possess but to find a place in a woman’s thoughts and dreams, to exist there in a state of ongoing suspense before his or her affections drift away to attach themselves to some other object of desire. (Of course he complains bitterly and quite unreasonably about women’s faithlessness.)
Sindbad and his paramours are often seen languishing broken-hearted or on their way to drown their sorrows in the Danube, and at times it appears that these adventures are doomed to end badly and sadly for all concerned. And yet it isn’t so. Everything in these stories is a matter of regret, but in the end somehow nothing is. Everything happened long ago and is now over and lost for good, while at the same time everything comes back and goes on. (“I have never completely forgotten you,” Sindbad reassures an old flame, who responds, “You really should have given up lying by now.”) Love is nothing if not unreal, and what is a good story if not a good lie? It seems altogether appropriate that most of what happens to Sindbad in these stories happens when he is already dead, while in one he exists for several pages as a sprig of mistletoe.
Krúdy’s stories, at all events, don’t set out to describe events so much as they seek to set a mood. The mood is melancholy, languorous, worldly-wise, teasingly romantic, funny, sometimes silly. Certainly it is all Krúdy’s own. The stories are exercises in seduction. “What did Sindbad like,” “An Overnight Stay” begins. “He liked snowdrifts and women’s legs… He liked hands, hair, women’s names, voices and caresses. He liked to appear in young girls’ dreams, to court fallen women at masked balls… He liked lies, illusions, fictions and imagination.” Krúdy can strike that note, but he can also display an unsettling clarity of observation, describing “a child sitting on a low stool, apprehensively, almost fearfully watching the garden yawning with autumn” or a teacher of mathematics whose “face always smelled of cold water.”
It seems a curious coincidence that the Sindbad stories were mostly written and published in the course of World War I, when they were a great success, making Krúdy’s name and even making him some money. (Krúdy, even more of a wastrel than Sindbad, soon lost it all.) Otherworldly as Sindbad’s adventures are, one supposes they may have offered readers a refuge from the mind-boggling brutalities of the war, and yet I wonder whether they aren’t better seen as a response to the war than an escape from it. A response, in fact, not only to the war but to the explosion of modernization that preceded it (and in some sense led up to it) in the course of which Budapest became for a time the fastest-growing city in the world. The old Hungary that Sindbad haunts is an archaic world, long since destroyed by modernity, and yet it also stands as a haunting reminder that the modern world is no less condemned to destruction. And the modern world, sadly, will never have had a moment to enjoy the wasted nights and days and deliciously unproductive pastimes that lie at the heart of, as Krúdy puts it, “Sindbad’s not altogether pointless and occasionally amusing existence.” Sindbad, with his endless loves and lies, has all the time in the world, and perhaps he is as intrepid a hero, and as artful a survivor, as his Arabian namesake. Krúdy’s Sindbad stories, beautifully translated by George Szirtes, find a way to outpace the forced march of what passes for life in the modern world.
Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics
December Event for Alice James: A Biography
As Colm Tóibín declares in the preface of the re-issue, “Jean Strouse’s biography succeeds in giving Alice James her full due.” Alice was the tragically overlooked younger sister of William and Henry James; she possessed a fiery intelligence that was at odds with her claustrophobic life and societal norms. Written in a unique Jamesian style, Strouse’s biography presents a breathtaking account of Alice’s tortured existence, capturing her indomitable energy and heroic moments—as well as the bizarre dynamics of the entire James family.
December 7 at 7pm
The New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, South Court Auditorium
(5th Avenue at 42nd Street)
Free and Open to the Public, but RSVP required.
Click here for more information and to reserve seats.
Stefan Zweig
During the 1930s, Zweig was one of the best-selling writers in Europe and was among the most translated German-language writers before the Second World War. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where, in 1942, he committed suicide with his wife.
In Chess Story, a mysterious stranger advises travelers on a ship from New York to Buenos Aires on how to beat the arrogant and unfriendly world champion of chess at what is quite literally his own game; in Journey into the Past, a man tries to rekindle a love that time and distance had snuffed out; in The Post-Office Girl, a young woman is introduced to and cast out of a world of wealth, only to find that she is driven by the desire to make meaning out of meaninglessness; and, in Beware of Pity, a minor blunder ruins a man’s life as he succumbs to guilt and, ultimately, tragedy. In each of these works, Zweig writes tales that are as harrowing and haunting as they are thrillingly compelling.
“In Zweig’s fiction, someone in the story, in a way everyone, has a terrible secret. Secrets are integral to adventure stories [and] the experience of reading Zweig is not so much of entering the world of the story as of plunging inward and dreaming the story.”— Rachel Cohen, Bookforum
“Admired by readers as diverse as Freud, Einstein, Toscanini, Thomas Mann and Herman Goering.” — Edwin McDowell, The New York Times
“Zweig belongs with three very different masters who each perfected the challenging art of the short story and the novella: Maupassant, Turgenev and Chekhov.” — Paul Bailey