NYRB NEWS
NYRB Classics a proud sponsor of PEN’s annual World Voices Festival
NYRB Classics is once again a proud sponsor of PEN’s annual World Voices Festival—which aims to foster international understanding by bringing international and American authors together in conversation. This year NYRB Classics and PEN World Voices Festival present an evening of New York Stories, past and present, at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.
April 29, 2010 at 7pm
New York Stories
With Quim Monzó, Darryl Pinckney, Roxanna Robinson, and Colm Tóibín; moderated by Edwin Frank
At The Morgan Library & Museum, Gilder Lehrman Hall, 225 Madison Avenue, New York City
Tickets: $15/$10 for friends of NYRB Classics, Morgan and PEN Members. Please enter discount code pwv10 at www.smarttix.com or call (212) 868–4444.
New York seen from close up and afar, by three great writers who were inextricably attached to the city. Henry James, a native New Yorker, left the city for extended periods of time, though the city haunts his work. Edith Wharton was one of the great chroniclers of New York society, high and low. Elizabeth Hardwick, a transplanted Kentuckian, cast her keen eye on the life of the city in the latter half of the twentieth century, when it established itself as the intellectual center of American life. Distinguished contemporary novelists and critics, Colm Tóibín, Roxana Robinson, and Darryl Pinckney, who have edited the New York stories of, respectively, James, Wharton, and Hardwick, and the contemporary Catalan writer Quim Monzó, who set his novel in New York, consider the city and the stories it has inspired. Moderated by Edwin Frank, editorial director of NYRB Classics.
Welcome
Things look a bit out of the ordinary here at NYRB, and we couldn’t be happier.
Welcome to our new homepage. Along with The New York Review of Books, we’ve completely redesigned our website to help highlight everything new that we’re doing with our books. Here you’ll find podcasts, reading group discussions, NYRB events, videos as well as giveaways, NYRB in the News, social networking, and so much more. It’s a space where we’d like to cultivate a community of readers, as diverse as our catalog.
With NYRB Classics we’ve been in the business of curating a collection of eclectic titles and bringing them into print, and up-to-date, often with a contemporary writer or translator introducing each text. The New York Review Children’s Collection rewards readers who have long wished for the return of their favorite titles and to introduce those books to a new generation of readers. Our occasional Collection series brings together some of the finest writing from the The New York Review’s contributors into book format. These imprints are our contribution of hustling the canon and the commonplace by honoring works we think should be face out on your shelf, because they’re the titles that constantly reinforce everyone’s belief amongst your reading group, your family, and your Friend pages, that the books you bring to the table are by far always the best.
We encourage you to check back often and see what we’re up to, and as always, if you have a book that you think belongs in our publishing program please let us know. (There’s a link on the homepage that, really, you can’t miss.)
We’ve always asked our readers to view things a bit differently. With our new website, we’re more eager than ever to go forward into the future of adventurous reading with you.
Cheers, and stop by often.
Celebrities: They’re just like us.
With the Time article declaring him “American history’s highest-profile professor, bringing a nuanced view of the past into the homes and lives of countless millions,” we’d like to call out Mr. Hanks for bringing the brilliance of John Williams into the homes and hands of many more readers.
NYRB Celebrates National Poetry Month
The Academy of American Poets declared April as Poetry Month in 1996, and we’ve been doing our part to enrich the range of poetry available to the reading public. From award-winning new translations of century-old classics to celebrated anthologies, NYRB has a diverse assortment of verse for you to celebrate the month. And don’t forget: the month long celebration culminates on April 29th with “Poem in Your Pocket Day,” where everyone is encouraged to carry a poem around and share it with friends.
And as a tribute to the month, a poem:
Books on poets and poetry;
We have more than a few.
From Dante, to The Stray Dog Cabaret,
Did we mention Charles Simic, too?
The War and the Iliad twice dissects Homer’s epic,
While our tome on the T’ang begins with Tu Fu,
And the precise, haunting Poems of Osip Mandelstam,
Have W.S. Merwin and Clarence Brown in cahoots.
Held high on our list is Amit Chadhuri,
Who spotlights the brilliance of Koltakar’s Jejuri.
And whipping your knowledge of Latin literature into shape,
Is Gilbert Highet’s just published Poets in a Landscape.
There’s a book of “good bad verse”
And good verse gone real wrong,
Put all into perspective
By former poet laureate Billy Collins.
Even our books for children have rollicking rhythm,
So if your kid’s vocab needs spice,
Give them the unfettered thoughts of Alastair Reid’s soon out Supposing,
or the wondrous waywardness of Ounce Dice Trice.
In April we salute Auden, Byron, and Anne Carson,
(and we have all—in 5x8 format—to fit your pocket or purse),
So join us all month in celebrating Poetry,
Balladry, Poesy, Rhymes, and Verse.
A Classic book for Adults and Children singled out on NPR’s Weekend Edition
Recently Scott Simon and Daniel Pinkwater made a giant step into making the genius of Frank Tashlin more recognizable by featuring the newly released The Bear That Wasn’t on NPR’s Weekend Edition. Laughing between reading aloud about fumbling factory workers, fake fur coats, and a bear declaring his bearness, Scott Simon praised the story with it’s “wonderful pictures and even some political satire to appeal to adults who read it as well.” Daniel Pinkwater goes on to name it “a classic. And the proof of that is that it is now coming out…from the wonderful and magnificent New York Review Children’s Collection.”
Chances are that once in your life you’ve come across Frank Tashlin, even though you may not know it. He was a tireless author and director of satirical comedy—writing gag skits for the Marx Brothers and Lucille Ball, screenwriting for Bob Hope and Red Skeleton, and directing Jerry Lewis movies and screwball comedies, films like “The Girl Can’t Help It” and “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?”. He was also an accomplished animator, drawing comic strips for his junior high school newspaper in Queens in his youth, then later moving to Hollywood and working at MGM, Warner Brothers, and Disney (where he helped organize its embattled animators’ union).
He took this gift of making light of what’s wrong and standing up for what’s right with The Bear That Wasn’t. Redefining the phrase “Grin and bear it,” this is not a story about a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but rather a glorious modern day fable about standing up in the world and being true to yourself when there are obstacles and other people that oftentimes make you feel otherwise.
A Letter from the Editor
I’d wanted to write about Dezso Kosztolányi’s Skylark, a deceptively quiet and quietly radiant, intermittently wildly funny, ultimately heartbreaking, and altogether extraordinary novel about life at its most seemingly ordinary, but Deborah Eisenberg got there first. Her review of the book, published in the April 8 issue of The New York Review of Books, begins:
“This short, perfect novel seems to encapsulate all the world’s pain in a soap bubble. Its surface is as smooth as a fable, its setting and characters are unremarkable, its tone is blithe, and its effect is shattering.”
All true. I (as you see) can’t say it better. You can read Deborah Eisenberg’s full review here. It is, from this editor’s point of view, a perfect review, but Skylark is even better.
Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics
Skylark
By Dezső Kosztolányi
Introduction by Péter Esterházy
Translated from the Hungarian by Richard Aczel
Letter from the Editor
Summer Will Show is the third novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner to appear as an NYRB Classic, having been preceded by Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. Warner is one of the most inventive, intelligent, and plain astonishing British writers of the twentieth century, fully the equal of such contemporaries of hers as Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, not to mention the slightly older Virginia Woolf. She is an unmistakably modern writer who, however, worked outside the conventions of literary modernism. That should make her particularly attractive to readers and writers of today, and adventurous younger novelists like Ali Smith and Sarah Waters have in fact praised her very highly in recent years.
Summer Will Show is a historical novel set in 1848, that famous disastrous year of revolutionary uprisings throughout Europe. It is the story of Sophia Willoughby, a headstrong and stubborn young aristocrat of—at least to begin with—ironclad Tory conviction. Having made an early marriage to a classic cad, Sophia has hastily borne two children before packing her cheating husband off to Paris and into the arms of his mistress. Now in rural English retreat, she has decided to devote herself to bringing up her children precisely as she was brought up—the only proper way, after all. But then the children die.
What to do? Grief-stricken, Sophia eventually makes her way to Paris, driven by the thought that her husband, whatever his failings, can at least supply her with more children. Paris, however, is in the throes of revolution. Sophia unexpectedly encounters Minna, the despised mistress, and the two women fall in love.
I’m not going to give away more of the plot of this exciting and surprising book, in which nothing is ever quite as it seems. It is an increasingly bloody carnival, a tale of modern metamorphosis to set beside Ovid’s ancient ones, and a book about the ways love remakes and unmakes people, one in which the politics of the heart exist in competition and confusion with politics as usual. It is a disconcerting, even radical book, and its central subject, as in much of Warner’s work, is the inherent strangeness of the self, resistant to control, insusceptible to coercion, demanding one way or another to be discovered and demanding more after that. How to come to terms with this insistent stranger within?
Throughout much of the last century, the historical novel was in very low critical repute; it was daring for Warner to take up this déclassé genre. Recently, however, the genre has had a surprising revival: think of Ragtime, J.G. Farrell’s Siege of Krishnapur, or Beloved; of Hilary Mantel’s great novel of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. What the best of these new historical novels have in common is that they function not as period pieces but as a form of inquiry into history, an inquiry that implicates the present just as much as the past. Summer Will Show looks forward to these books—or they allow us to look back at it and read it with renewed appreciation for Warner’s achievement. In a year of revolution, Warner’s characters are all under the pressure of historical forces they can barely imagine. They feel themselves becoming ever stranger to themselves, ever more weirdly historical, with every step and quarrel and kiss. In 1936, when Summer Will Show was first published, history was of course very much in the air—but then it always is. Warner’s novel awakens us to the ways in which our lives are, as another great writer puts it, “historical, flowing and flown.”
Those words are Elizabeth Bishop’s, and it strikes me now that Warner’s work may remain underestimated for much same the reason that Bishop’s was throughout much of her life. Warner doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. She doesn’t make a point of writing about big important subjects in a big important way. (To write a historical novel like Summer Will Show in the 30s was, among other things, very much not to write something like The Waves or For Whom the Bell Tolls.) Though utterly individual, she never cultivated a trademark style or subject—each of her novels is different from the last—and though she writes beautifully she is careful never to draw attention to her art.
Her books, however, leave indelible marks. Lolly Willowes, published in 1926, was Warner’s first book and an improbable bestseller. It is the story of a spinster who cuts herself loose from the constraints of respectable family life by becoming a witch and entering into a pact with the Devil. It appears to be a straightforward, though in its day still provocative, feminist parable (call it A Broom of One’s Own), and yet the book takes a mysterious and troubling turn at the end, as the heroine renounces her witchcraft and takes to the road, sleeping out in the open and moving ever farther away from society—as if true freedom could only be had at the cost of a separation from humanity and even life.
Mr. Fortune’s Maggot may be the most perfect (even if perfection doesn’t admit of degrees) book in the NYRB Classics series—an immaculate work, the story of a missionary on a tiny island in the South Seas who falls in love with a young man (again a daring subject for its day) and loses his faith. Timothy Fortune isn’t your stereotypic fictional missionary, all dead dogma and dammed-up desire, but a genuinely good man for whom the discovery of love and the discovery of his utter aloneness come with a shock any of us can share. And yet nothing in Warner’s telling of his tale is melodramatic or sentimental. The “maggot” that sticks out of the book’s title means foible—Warner alluding almost ironically both to Fortune’s falling in love and falling from grace—but it also echoes the names of lute and keyboard fantasies by early English composers like Byrd and Dowland and Gibbons. These dance-inspired pieces, with titles such as “Lord Salisbury’s Pavan” and “Hugh Aston’s Ground,” are both stately and melancholy, brooding and quirky, light and dark—precisely the qualities of the book itself.
Sylvia Townsend Warner was a woman of extraordinary achievement—not only a marvelous novelist and writer of stories but a very fine poet and a notable musicologist to boot. Summer Will Show is perhaps her most out-and-out exciting book, but Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot are equally good places to start exploring the work of a wonderful writer who seems all the more central because she stands so beautifully apart.
Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics
Letter from the Editor
There are certain writers who feature in a large way in the NYRB Classics series—some, like Simenon and Victor Serge, I’ve written about in the past; others, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, perhaps the most purely original of modern English storytellers, I mean to. Here I want to say a little bit about Andrey Platonov, whose Soul and Other Stories we published last year and whose great and harrowing novel The Foundation Pit we have just put out in a striking new translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, the first translation of the book in English to be based on the recently established definitive Russian text.
As a plaudit, “recently established definitive Russian text” may sound like a pedantic mouthful, but Platonov is anything but a writer of merely academic interest. He is the twentieth century Russian novelist who, more than any other (more than Pasternak, more than Solzhenitsyn, more even than Bulgakov), Russians will tell you has added to and transformed the great tradition of Russian literature. Russians may also tell you that if you are one of those unfortunates who doesn’t read Russian, just how great Platonov is you’ll never know. I’m one of those unfortunates, I confess, but then I’m confident that, as a rule—a rule to which Platonov is no exception—great literature translates. I first encountered this extraordinary writer’s work in an old and uncertain translation based on a censored text, a book given to me by a friend of my father’s who I later learned was an agent for the CIA. Even so, I knew I was hearing a voice as distinct and powerful as any to emerge in the twentieth century, a writer who not only reflected the unimaginable realities of modern history, but actively shifted reality, staggering us, making us see the world in a strange and disorienting new light. At last, with this new translation, the greatness of Platonov, the difference that he makes, become unmistakable for readers of English.
Platonov was born into a working-class family in 1899 and grew up with the Russian Revolution, which he initially embraced with enthusiasm and never disavowed. For better or for worse, Platonov’s world is the world after the Revolution, with which a new reality begins. Platonov, however, is hardly a conventionally realistic writer, since the nature of the post-Revolutionary world is that history has ended and reality has been upended, replaced by a heady brew of utopian anticipations and nightmarish premonitions. This is the paradoxical regime of progress—appearing no doubt in an extreme form under Communism, but common to all modern societies—under which everything is understood to exist on the condition that it is to be replaced by something better, and so may be judged as already obsolescent; a bipolar world in which exterior and internal realities become weirdly intermixed and people seesaw between irrational exuberance (it wasn’t a Communist who coined that phrase) and boundless melancholy. In The Foundation Pit a character feels himself “hurtling forwards into the distance of history, towards the summit of universal and unprecedented times.” Another remarks dolefully, “Everybody dies of life. In the end there’s just bones.”
Written in the early thirties, The Foundation Pit is Platonov’s most direct reckoning with Revolutionary terror. The novel describes the devastation caused in the late 1920s by Stalin’s twin policies of crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture—a Revolution from Above that was no less important and traumatic than the Revolution of 1917. The story begins when Voshchev, a classic Chekhovian luftmensch, is fired from his job for excessive “thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor.” Voshchev wanders out into the country where he happens upon a group of workers engaged in constructing a grand new All-Proletarian Home, a title which is meant entirely literally. Among them is Zhachev, a bitter, irascible, scabrous, mutilated veteran, who hauls himself around on a little cart, a freak, in his own words. Also there is Chiklin, the hardworking single-minded earnest proletarian, determined to get things right, though not entirely sure what that means. Voshchev joins this oddly assorted group which soon adopts an orphan girl in whom they place all their hopes for the future. Nastya is a strange waif:
“Now who might you be, my little girl?” asked Safronov [a Revolutionary zealot]. “What did your dear mama and papa do?”
“I’m nobody,” said the little girl.
“How can you be nobody? Some kind of principle of the female sex must have been pleased to oblige you, if you got yourself born under Soviet power?”
“But I didn’t want to get myself born—I was afraid my mother would be a bourgeois…. When only bourgeoisie lived, I couldn’t be born, because I didn’t want to be born. But now that Stalin’s become, I’ve become too!”
Soon it becomes clear that the task of digging the pit is unending—almost by definition, since it must accommodate the whole (no pun intended) of the future: the pit is a inverted tower of Babel or, as it eventually turns out, an immense grave. Because after the mysterious death of the zealot Safronov, digging the pit takes second place to making sure that construction will not be sabotaged by “counter-revolutionary elements.” The peasantry in particular must be purified. But purification also turns out to be an unending task, and in an extraordinary scene, at once savagely satirical and disconcertingly moving, in the midst of a simultaneous blizzard of snow and flies, pro-revolutionary workers and condemned peasants, doomed to die, gather in the yard of a collective farm as in a church to kiss and forgive each other:
“All right now, comrades?” asked Chiklin.
“Yes,” came the word from the whole of the OrgYard. “Now we feel nothing at all—only dust and ashes remain in us.”
Voshchev was lying a little way apart and he was quite unable to fall asleep without the peace of truth inside his own life—he got up from the snow and entered into the midst of people.
“Greetings!” he said, rejoicing, to the collective farm. Now you’ve become like me. I’m nothing too.”
“Greetings!” The entire collective farm rejoiced at this one man….
All that could be heard was a dog barking in some alien village—just as in olden times, as if it existed in a constant eternity.
I mentioned the Tower of Babel above, and as even these brief excerpts from The Foundation Pit must suggest, there is no discussing the book without considering its strange language, a mixture of political groupspeak, biblical allusion, slapstick, and bereft lyricism, a kind of language of unlikeness. It is a made-up language and a traumatized one—made dead, you could say. It is at once the babble of infancy, the lying cant of corruption, an outcry of desperation, and the voice, against all odds, of hope. Part of the fascination of the work is that the reader is perpetually unsure which register it is pitched in.
Platonov, as much as Beckett and Kafka, is a major writer of the twentieth century and, like them, he is a writer in extremis. Kafka’s statement that “hope is infinite, but not for us” might come from Platonov. These are all writers who in different ways recognize the terror, tedium, and sheer contingency of the modern world. And yet in the later stories collected in Soul, Platonov shows us something else, something more in tune with Chekhov: people trying to rescue from the flux of life and the disaster of history some memorable and sustaining moment of true feeling. In “The Return,” a story beloved by the wonderful Penelope Fitzgerald, a man returns from World War II to wife and family and—and almost leaves. The art of the story is to capture in that prolonged moment of hesitation the entirety of life. And in the nightmarish world of The Foundation Pit, too, a similar tenderness, however bare-knuckled, can be discerned. As Zhachev remarks, “It’s best to love something small and living and do yourselves in with labor! Exist, you bastards, for now!”
Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics