NYRB NEWS
Dime-Store Alchemy by Charles Simic
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In a work that is in various degrees biography, criticism, and sheer poetry, Simic tells the story of Cornell’s life and illuminates the hermetic mysteries of his extraordinary boxes, objects in which private obsessions were alchemically transformed into enduring works of art.
Full of unexpected riches, Dime-Store Alchemy is both an entrancing meditation on the nature of art and a perfect introduction to a major American artist. It is a book that can be perused at length or dipped into at leisure time and time again.
“Incisive, freewheeling, dramatic…a mixture of evocation and observation, as lucid and shadowy as the imagination it celebrates… Dime-Store Alchemy is a meeting of kindred spirits that is itself a work of art.” —Edward Hirsch, The New Yorker
Also by Charles Simic
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Charles Simic has said the secret to our identities lies not in grand events, but in the parentheses between events—and in these brief essays, we get a taste of this great poet’s parenthetical observations and recollections.
Confessions of a Poet Laureate is available as an e-book only. Please order from your favorite e-book seller.
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate on BBC Radio 4
For information about the broadcast please visit BBC Radio 4. Listeners outside the UK will be able to download a podcast for 30 days following the initial broadcast.
Jonathan Lethem on the late L. J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life
Lethem, who grew up a block from Davis and was best friends with Davis’s son, wrote the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of A Meaningful Life.
Hav by Jan Morris
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We are pleased to announce the publication of Hav, a novel by the great Jan Morris. Hav consists of two parts: Last Letters from Hav, originally published in 1985, and its sequel, Hav of the Myrmidons, published in 2006.
When Last Letters from Hav was first published, travel agents heard from clients who wanted to travel to Hav, a place that many thought was real. Morris has written that she was even asked by someone from the Map Room of the Royal Geographical Society “to put him straight about Hav’s location.” But Hav is not real. It is wholly the product of Jan Morris’s prodigious imagination.
In Last Letters from Hav Morris tells of Hav’s glorious past and quaint twentieth-century life. This place, rumored to be the site of Troy, was captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin. Chopin, Mark Twain, Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence, Hitler, and Princess Diana have all visited Hav. A Mediterranean city-state, it is home to architectural marvels and an annual rooftop race. As Morris takes the reader through Hav’s streets, we hear its centuries-old morning trumpet call and the songs of its muezzin, we see the texture of the goods on offer at its markets, and we smell the coffee and smoke drifting from its cafés.
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Morris brings the story up-to-date in Hav of the Myrmidons, when she returns to Hav in 2005. She sees an almost unrecognizable land, stripped of its chaotic and contradictory splendor, renamed, and rebuilt. Sanitized and monetized, it is ruled by a group of fanatics who have rewritten its history to reflect their own view of the past.
Last Letters from Hav was short-listed for The Booker Prize in 1985. Hav was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2007.
Read Ursula K. Le Guin’s introduction (pdf)
Also by Jan Morris
Conundrum
Conundrum is a pioneering memoir exploring the borders of gender and early sex-reassignment surgery.
The Mangan Inheritance
By Brian Moore
Introduction by Christopher Ricks
After splitting with his glamorous film star wife, the once promising poet James Mangan is adrift until he comes across an old daguerreotype of a man bearing a remarkable resemblance to him. Realizing that this could be a photograph of the great 19th-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan, rumored to be his ancestor, the 20th-century Mangan sets off for Ireland determined to uncover the truth behind this discovery and his family’s shadowy past. Equal parts suspenseful and contemplative, the story pulses with cinematic energy, chilling intrigue, and the tragedy of thwarted self-discovery. The Mangan Inheritance is, in short, Brian Moore at his best and most inventive, thus rendering it impossible to put down or to forget.
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Also by Brian Moore
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
Afterword by Mary Gordon
“…Judith Hearne, the Catholic spinster drifting into alcoholism and isolation, is the lyric embodiment of repressed, claustrophobic Belfast, a descendant of the ageing spinsters of James Joyce’s Dubliners.” —Joyce Carol Oates, TLS
Buy both Brian Moore novels at 40% off
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Mr. Fortune
By Sylvia Townsend WarnerIntroduction by Adam Mars-Jones
Brilliant and subversive, Mr. Fortune combines Sylvia Townsend Warner’s two short novels, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot and its sequel, The Salutation.
The story of a London bank-clerk-turned-minister who sets his heart on serving on a remote island, a place that turns out to be not at all what he expected, shows why John Updike described Townsend Warner as “a witty, poetic, clairvoyant writer.”
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Also by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Lolly Willowes
Introduction by Alison Lurie
A classic story of cool feminist intelligence about an aging spinster’s struggle to break away from her controlling family.
Summer Will Show
Introduction by Claire Harman
This thrilling novel brings 19th-century Paris to life will the tale of a proper Victorian aristocrat’s political and emotional awakening among the barricades.
Buy all 3 Sylvia Townsend Warner books at 40% off
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The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story
By Glenway WescottIntroduction by Michael Cunningham
A work of classical elegance and concision, Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk stands with Faulkner’s The Bear as one of the best American short novels.
The events of this novel take place during a single afternoon: an American
expatriate and sometime novelist is staying with a friend outside of
Paris, when a well-heeled, itinerant Irish couple drops in, with Lucy,
their trained but restless hawk.
Also by Glenway Wescott
Apartment in Athens
Introduction by David Leavitt
Set in Nazi-occupied Athens, this novel stages an intense and unsettling drama of accommodation and rejection, resistance and compulsion.
Buy both Glenway Wescott books at 40% off
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The Radiance of the King
By Camara LayeIntroduction by Toni Morrison
Translated from the French by James Kirkup
Clarence, a white man, has been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa. He demands to see the king, only to learn the king has left for the south of his realm. Traveling through an increasingly phantasmagoric landscape, Clarence is gradually stripped of his pretensions, until he is sold to the royal harem as a slave.
“A classic work of modernism—a signal work in the African canon and one that every lover of literature will admire and enjoy.”
— Henry Louis Gates Jr.
The Rescuers
Margery Sharp’s The Rescuers, her classic tale of pluck, luck, and derring-do, is now available from The New York Review Children’s Collection. Having been out of print for over ten years, we are pleased to bring it back to life in an edition with illustrations by the great Garth Williams.
The Rescuers follows the beautiful white mouse, Miss Bianca, on her very first mission. Full of thrills and humor, Sharp’s book is graced by the pen-and-ink drawings of Garth Williams, the renowned children’s book illustrator of such classics as Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and Little House on the Prairie.
Owned by an ambassador’s son, Miss Bianca spends most of her days in a porcelain pagoda, dining on cream cheese and writing poetry. When the mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society recruits her to help with a perilous rescue mission, she must leave her elegant lifestyle behind. Miss Bianca, her partner Bernard, and the brave Nils, set out for Norway where a human poet has been imprisoned in the dungeons of the fabled Black Castle. On their journey, the trio encounters rowdy field mice, harrowing fortresses, and a particularly nasty prison cat. More importantly, each of the heroic mice learns the value of bravery, self-confidence, and the warmth of friendship.
Poignant, witty, and thrilling, Sharp’s story is a masterpiece of children’s literature and, as one critic notes, is sure to charm all “wise children from age 10 to 100.” The Rescuers is the perfect summer adventure book for the entire family.
Bastille Day Praise for When the World Spoke French
In the July 9th issue of The Wall Street Journal, Frederic Raphael praised the book as “a magisterial compendium” and a “grandiose elegy,” and in the July 10th issue of The New York Times Book Review, Caroline Weber describes Fumaroli’s study of Francophile personalities as “a wild and woolly human drama, its players every bit as multifaceted (and flawed) as those making headlines today.” Read more from Raphael’s review here, and from Weber’s review here.
Love’s Work praised by Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian (UK)
“I struggle to think of a finer, more rewarding short autobiography than this…And for those who have suffered for and in love, this may prove to be one of the most useful books they will ever read. Here there are no soupy platitudes which deal with that near-miraculous unlikelihood, the happy and eternal love affair: Rose is the enemy of fatuity, which you had better be, if you are going to give any honest, meaningful answer to the question of whether the agonies of love are worth its joys (or vice versa).” —Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian (UK).
Read the rest of this review here.