NYRB NEWS
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
Congratulations to Stephen Greenblatt, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction
In May 2012, NYRB Classics will publish Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and Urne-Burial, edited and introduced by Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff. Thomas Browne was an English Renaissance author and physician who wrote about both Christian spirituality and medicine. Religio Medici, is an assessment of his relationships with both his medical profession and his Christian faith. Browne also wrote about philosophy, as one can read in Urne-Burial, a meditation on mortality. Greenblatt and Targoff’s extensive introduction and rich annotations will surely further illuminate what is already an enlightening read.
Happy Birthday to Daniel Pinkwater!
“No author has ever captured the great fun of being weird, growing up as a happy mutant, unfettered by convention, as well as Pinkwater has. When I was a kid, Pinkwater novels like Lizard Music…made me intensely proud to be a little off-center and weird…The NYRB edition of Lizard Music is beautiful…It’s one of those books that, in the right hands at the right time, can change your life for the better and forever.”—Cory Doctorow
“Pinkwater is the uniquest. And so are his books.”—Neil Gaiman
“Lizard Music is…funny, properly paranoid, shot through with bad puns and sweet absurdities, and all about a baffled kid intent on tracking reality (as slippery as lizards) in a media-spooked milieu.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A writer for smart kids…Pinkwater writes for, and about, people who are not ashamed to look at life a little differently.” —Wired
Veterans’ Day
Though Burns died at the young age of thirty-six, depriving American literature of his promise, he left us a truly original portrait of war. Paul Fussell writes in his introduction to the novel, “For one magical creative moment, in The Gallery he revealed an impressive command of setting and character as well as intense moral feelings about the worst war in history and its power to corrupt soldiers and civilians alike.”
November Events for Songs of Kabir
Friend,
You had one life,
And you blew it.
Mehrotra’s translation has been hailed by Eliot Weinberger as “simultaneously a work of long scholarship and a jazz performance of the Kabir tradition.”
November 2, 7pm:
McNally Jackson (52 Prince Street)
Arvind Mehrotra and Jason Grunebaum
November 3, 7pm:
Poets House (10 River Terrace at Murray Street)
25th Anniversary Program
Visit the NYRB Calendar for details.
October Events for Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
Join John Summers, editor of Masscult and Midcult: Essays Again the American Grain, for a series of discussions about Dwight Macdonald.
Dwight Macdonald
October 12th:
James Wolcott and John Summers at McNally Jackson Books, NYC
October 14th:
J.C. Gabel and John Summers at Stop Smiling Storefront, Chicago
October 20th:
Louis Menand and John Summers at Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge
October 22nd:
Andrew Ferguson, Chris Lehmann, and John Summers at Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington DC
Visit the NYRB Calendar for details.
The Autobiography of Irène Némirovsky, by Her Daughter
Now available in its first English translation is Élisabeth Gille’s The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter. Gille’s imagined autobiography of her mother was first published in France in 1992.
Élisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, Irène Némirovsky, a once popular novelist and Russian émigré from a wealthy family. Némirovsky had not considered herself Jewish, yet she died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew. To her daughter she was a tragic enigma and a stranger. It was to come to terms with that stranger that Gille wrote The Mirador, a fictional memoir of her mother.
In the first part of the book, dated 1929, the year the novel David Golder brought Némirovsky acclaim, she takes us back to her difficult childhood in Kiev and St. Petersburg. Her father is doting, her mother a beautiful monster, while Irène herself is bookish and self-absorbed. There are pogroms and riots, parties and excursions, then revolution, from which the family flees to France, a country of “moderation, freedom, and generosity,” where at last she is happy. Some thirteen years later Irène picks up her pen again. Everything has changed. Abandoned by friends and colleagues, she lives in the countryside and waits for the knock on the door.
The Mirador, written a decade before the publication of Suite Française made Irène Némirovsky famous once more (something Gille did not live to see), is a haunted and a haunting book, an unflinching reckoning with the tragic past, and a triumph not only of the imagination but of love.
“Now we can rediscover Némirovsky through this novel, a fictionalized biography written by her daughter…Gille writes in a style at once lyric and focused, periodically introducing her alter ego’s dispassionate reflections as an adult. As Gille concludes, Némirovsky ‘will remain thirty-nine for all eternity,’ and that painful realization resonates throughout this beautiful book.” —Library Journal
“We will never know whether the The Mirador is an accurate reflection of her mother’s feelings and observations. Nonetheless, the book stands as a nuanced, eloquent portrait of a complicated woman.” —Nora Krug, The Washington Post