New York Review Books’ virtual event series with Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore is still going strong. Archives of the events can be found on the bookstore’s YouTube page. Below, you can find a few recent highlights.

Mark Polizzotti and Chris Clarke on Arthur Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat

Marina Warner and Frances Wilson on Warner’s Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir

Alex Andriesse, Saskia Hamilton, Darryl Pinckney, and Merve Emre on The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

Vincent Kling has been announced as this year’s winner of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his NYRB Classics translation of Heimito von Doderer's novel The Strudlhof Steps. Administered each spring by the Goethe-Institut, the award comes with a prize of $10,000.

In its statement, the Wolff Translator’s Prize jury had this to say about Kling’s efforts:

Our jury was tickled and transported by the translation’s musicality (“contrive, connive, keep the tryst alive”), alliterative allure (“secret sharer of his solitude”), command of nomenclature, and metaphoric inventiveness (“her neck lengthened out over the situation”), its adherence to the long and twisty sentences of the original German, and its introduction of words-that-ought-to-be-words (“advicelets”). We congratulate Vincent Kling on this monumental linguistic and literary achievement, the masterful quality of which is maintained on each of the novel’s more than eight hundred pages. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the very last word of this resplendent translation is “perfection.”

To read the entirety of the jury’s statement and learn more about the prize, click here.

Our heartiest congratulations to Joshua Cohen, whose novel The Netanyahus (published by New York Review Books in June 2021) was just awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Pulitzer Prize board wrote of the book:

“A mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot.”

To read more about the Prize for Fiction and see the winners in the other categories, click here.

Amit Chaudhuri’s memoir Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music, which was published by New York Review Books last spring, is on the shortlist for the UK’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. The shortlist was selected from 400 books. The winner will be announced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August and will be rewarded a cash prize of £10,000.

To read more about the prize and the other three books on the shortlist, click here.

Two 2021 New York Review Books titles recently made it on awards shortlists. Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild (trans. Sophie R. Lewis) is a finalist for the French-American Foundation’s 2022 Translation Prize, and Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West) is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award, which recognizes debut works of fiction. The winner of the former award will be announced later this year, and the winner of the latter will be announced during an awards ceremony on April 22, 2022, at 7pm PT.

To see the rest of the shortlist for the FAF Translation Prize, click here. To check out the other Art Seidenbaum Award finalists and to get more info about the L.A. Times Book Prizes award ceremony, click here.

Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus, published under the New York Review Books imprint last summer, was recently selected by the Jewish Book Council as the winner of the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction in the 2021 National Jewish Book Awards. In his review of the novel for the JBC, Bob Goldfarb writes: “The Netanyahus is fun­ny, exu­ber­ant, and intel­lec­tu­al­ly stim­u­lat­ing, with an absorb­ing sto­ry cul­mi­nat­ing in a riotous cli­max — a vir­tu­oso per­for­mance by a mas­ter. It’s not to be missed.”

You can see a list of the other winners and finalists by clicking here.

We’re delighted to report that Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West) is on The New York Times Book Review’s list of “The 10 Best Books of 2021.” The NYT said about the novel:

Labatut expertly stitches together the stories of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers to explore both the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs: their immense gains for society as well as their steep human costs. His journey to the outermost edges of knowledge — guided by the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, the physicist Werner Heisenberg and the chemist Fritz Haber, among others — offers glimpses of a universe with limitless potential underlying the observable world, a “dark nucleus at the heart of things” that some of its witnesses decide is better left alone. This extraordinary hybrid of fiction and nonfiction also provokes the frisson of an extended true-or-false test: The further we read, the blurrier the line gets between fact and fabulism.

Read about the other nine books on the list here.

And that’s not all: Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus was selected as one of “The 10 Best Books of 2021" by The Wall Street Journal. You can check out the WSJ’s write-up and see the other books on the list by clicking here.

Two New York Review Books titles, Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus and Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West), both landed on The New York Times Book Review’s ‘100 Notable Books of 2021’ list. Below, read excerpts from write-ups of the novels in the NYTBR from earlier this year: