It was a sad day this past Friday, June 10, when we learned that Patrick Leigh Fermor had passed away at the age of ninety-six. We are extremely proud and fortunate to have published six of Leigh Fermor’s books in the NYRB Classics series, and just last year we published In Tearing Haste, a collection of correspondence between Leigh Fermor, or “Paddy” as he was known to his many friends, and Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire and the youngest of the celebrated Mitford sisters.

It was A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water that confirmed Leigh Fermor’s fame as a great writer. At the age of eighteen, he set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. Originally published more than forty years after his extraordinary foot journey, A Time of Gifts gives the account of his adventures as far as Hungary, while Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero and an intrepid traveler. The New York Times, in its obituary, characterized his work as being filled with “sly humor, curiosity, wide-ranging social connections and sympathies, familiarity with arcane history and a dashing literary style steeped in the ancient writing of Greece and Rome.”

But he was more than a great travel writer, he was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable writers.

The Judges of the Secret Court

David Stacton’s long-lost novel, The Judges of the Secret Court, constitutes one of the most graceful and profound accounts of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and indeed of the Civil War itself. Today’s reader will at last have a chance to experience the masterpiece that The New York Times called “a staggering and compulsive novel” and “a triumph of the recreative imagination.”

Centering on the Booth brothers, Edwin and John Wilkes, Stacton’s gripping novel reimagines the social, emotional, and political milieu that prompted John Wilkes to target Abraham Lincoln. Wielding his lucid prose style and intelligence, Stacton transports his readers into John Wilkes’ mind on the day of the assassination and follows the troubled actor into The Ford Theater and, later, in his mad dash through the backwoods of Maryland and Virginia. Stacton’s novel is a breathtaking and enlightened exploration of political rage and what it means when a nation loses an icon of hope and wisdom.

“The Judges of the Secret Court is a superior historical fiction, accurate in detail, moving and compelling narrative and character. But it is something more than this as well, an exploration by a brilliant and thoughtful writer of the labyrinthine ways of good and evil.” —Robert R. Kirsch, The Los Angeles Times

Reveille in Washington: 1860-1865

Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington recreates the life and atmosphere of the United States capital around and during the time of the Civil War. Written with the creative vibrancy of a novelist and the sharp accuracy of a seasoned historian, Leech’s depiction of Washington, its politicians, socialites, and artists during a time of strife and violence resonates with freshness and gripping urgency, even for our contemporary times.

The author focuses on the everyday politics and preoccupations of Washington at the time. From the stench of corpse-littered streets to the plunging lace on Mary Lincoln’s evening gowns, Margaret Leech illuminates the city and its familiar figures—among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, William Seward, and Mary Surratt—in intimate and fascinating detail. Leech’s book, still considered one of the major works on the Civil War, is truly one of the most engrossing and vivid accounts of this pivotal period in our nation’s history.

The New York Review Children’s Collection is pleased to present A Traveller in Time, a historical adventure story, by Alison Uttley. This new title, along with a selection of books by other British
writers of children’s literature, are available for a limited time at 30% off.

A Traveller in Time

Penelope Taberner Cameron was a solitary and sickly girl, a reader and a dreamer. With a vivid imagination, she imagines what life would be like in other places and times. When her mother decides that it is time for Penelope to spend some time outside of London, she sends her daughter to visit relatives at Thackers, a family
farmhouse in the English countryside. Penelope soon discovers that Thackers is not just a quaint country home, but also a portal into the past.

I, Penelope Taberner Cameron, tell this story of happenings when I was a young girl. To this day every detail of my strange experience is as clear as light…

With these words, our guide and heroine begins her tale of how a simple trip to the country transported her back to Elizabethan times. At Thackers, Penelope finds herself slipping in and out of the sixteenth-century where, much to her surprise, she becomes part of a family that has embroiled itself in a plot to free their beloved Mary, Queen of Scots, from prison. Even with her twentieth-century knowledge, Penelope remains helpless to keep the family—and herself—safe from danger and finds she is living an adventure bigger than any she could have imagined. Aware of the tragedy that lies ahead for her Elizabethan family, Penelope must confront serious questions about freedom, honor, and history as Mary’s impending doom approaches.

Uttley captures the slow loveliness of farm and country life in both centuries, even in the midst of gripping, historical intrigue. Fans of L. M. Boston’s Green Knowe series and Madeleine L’Engle’s A
Wrinkle in Time will enjoy reading Alison Uttley’s thrilling and
thoughtful novel.

A Traveller in Time
By Alison Uttley
For ages 8-14
Retail: $17.95
Special Offer: $12.57 (30% off)

We are pleased to announce two new May releases from NYRB Classics: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, Bohumil Hrabal’s stunning confessional novel and the first work from a Czech writer to be included in the NYRB Classics series; and Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, a sharp and touching meditation inspired by the beloved author’s confrontation with cancer and the questions of how to overcome despair in the face of loss.

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is an ebullient, gallivanting novel that encapsulates the world vision of one of the Czech Republic’s best-loved authors.

Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s rambling, rambunctious masterpiece is all these and more. Speaking one day to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué proceeds to tell the story of his life—or at least to unburden himself of a lifetime’s worth of stories. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventures and domestic feuds, of what things were like “in the days of the monarchy” and how they’ve changed since.

As the book tumbles restlessly forward, and the comic tone takes on darker shadings, we realize we are listening to a man talking as much out of desperation as from exuberance. Part drunken boast, part soul-rending confession, part metaphysical poem on the nature of love and time, Dancing Lessons (which unfolds in a single monumental sentence) shows why Milan Kundera, John Banville, and Louise Erdrich were admirers of Hrabal’s work.

Retail: $14.00
Special Offer: $10.50 (25% off)

Love’s Work

Equal parts memoir and work of philosophy, Love’s Work is a stunning and inspiring book written by the late, beloved professor and philosopher Gillian Rose when she was dying of cancer. Through unforgettable anecdotes and musings, Rose shares her “life affair” with love, and the struggle for love, in all its forms.

In this book, Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce, her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others.

Love’s Work is a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.

The NYRB Classics edition includes Geoffrey Hill’s poem, “In Memoriam: Gillian Rose.”

Retail: $14.00
Special Offer: $10.50 (25% off)

In the summer of 1959, three paranoid schizophrenics living together at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan had only one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Milton Rokeach’s stunning psychological narrative, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, is now available to readers again for the first time in over 25 years.

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

Throughout the book, Rokeach layers his unpretentious clinical observations with sharp and compelling recreations of the patients’ daily interactions, arguments, and repeated attempts to prove their delusional identities. Rokeach’s fascinating portrait of the men is sure to stay with readers long after they have left the haunting rooms of the Ypsilanti State Hospital behind.

Retail: $16.95
Special Offer: $13.56 (20% off)

The Pumpkin Eater

Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater explores the interior life of one very unusual woman and, with sharp deadpan humor and unrelentingly honest prose, uncovers a strange and haunting world filled with domestic darkness, celebrity, and madness. Mortimer’s novel approaches the unanswerable questions that surround marriage, sexuality, and reproduction with a striking sensitivity to the absurd and the truly traumatic.

Mrs. Armitage, now in her third marriage, is the mother of many children. Her current husband is a successful and philandering screenwriter and the family has just begun construction on a glass tower in the countryside where they hope to live tolerably, if not happily, ever after. Mrs. Armitage has some stories to tell, and when The Pumpkin Eater opens in a dingy psychiatrist’s office, she unleashes a biting, bizarre, and occasionally hilarious narrative of her incomparable past. Drawing from her own strange and exemplary autobiography, Mortimer’s story combines wit and tragedy, public and private, to yield an exploration of memory and the human psyche unlike any other.

Retail: $14.95
Special Offer: $11.96 (20% off)

Fatale

Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Fatale embodies all of the qualities that made its author far more than a mere crime novelist. Written with grit and gristle, Fatale breaks the boundaries of the typical roman noir and transforms killers and victims into passionate, compelling, and occasionally farcical pictures of a conflicted, post-war society.

When a beautiful newcomer, Aimée, arrives in the unassuming French burg of Bléville, few suspect that she is anything but a lovely young woman. So, when Aimée, a professional killer, sets her eyes on her next victim, the scene is set for manipulation and murder. But then she falls prey to an unexpected passion, and her identity and characteristic tenacity begin to unravel in a dizzying and delicious descent into mayhem. Bristling with Tarantino-esque thrills and biting satire, Manchette’s masterful story-telling style and unforgettable murderess are sure to transport readers with its heart-stopping energy and inimitable wit. To be sure, Fatale stands among the best and the boldest of the crime genre.

Retail: $12.95
Special Offer: $10.36 (20% off)