NYRB NEWS
Virtual Events in May
Though in-person events are off the table for the indefinite future, we have plenty of virtual events coming up, including two later this month.
The first is a conversation between Katherine Silver, translator of Julio Ramòn Ribeyro's The Word of the Speechless (published in fall 2019 by NYRB Classics), and the award-winning novelist Mauro Javier Cárdenas. Hosted by City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, the event will take place on Zoom on Thursday, May 14, at 9pm EST. For more information and to reserve a spot, click here.
To celebrate the release of Curzio Malaparte's Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, NYRB Classics editorial director Edwin Frank will join author Gary Indiana for a discussion of the book. Hosted by Community Bookstore, the event will take place on Crowdcast on Thursday, May 21, at 7:30pm EST. To register and learn more, click here.
Be sure to check our events page and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to hear about more online book talks in the coming months.
New York Review Books at AWP 2020
20th Anniversary Event at the New York Institute for the Humanities
Daniel Mendelsohn and Eve Babitz Longlisted for PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
New York Review Comics at Comic Arts Brooklyn 2019
New York Review Comics will be at this year's Comic Arts Brooklyn book festival on Saturday, November 2 from 11am–7pm. Find us at table A3 in Pratt Institute's Activities Resource Center to browse our titles, all of which will be available at discounted prices. Admission to the festival is free. It's sure to be a lot of fun!
Also, be sure to catch Frank Santoro, author of the recent NYR Comics release Pittsburgh, in conversation with journalist Calvin Reid at Pratt Institute's ARC Building at 4pm. Learn more about the event here. Santoro will be signing copies of Pittsburgh at our table from 5–6pm.
NYRB at the 2019 Brooklyn Book Festival
Five of our authors will be participating in festival events on the 22nd: Maxim Osipov, Mark Alan Stamaty, Daniel Mendelsohn, Amit Chaudhuri, and Frank Santoro. Learn more about their events here.
'Transit' Movie in U.K. and Ireland
'Stalingrad' in the Press
The reviews are in for the centerpiece of our summer season. Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, in a pioneering English translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, by all accounts more than lives up to its companion Life and Fate. If you still need convincing, see some of the most notable recent praise below.
"Stalingrad is Life and Fate’s equal. It is, arguably, the richer book – shot through with human stories and a sense of life’s beauty and fragility.” —Luke Harding, The Guardian
"In the front-line posts, factories and power-plants of Stalingrad itself, with interludes in Moscow, Kazan and even in the German high command, Grossman knits a dozen plot strands into a single narrative. He shows how “a lacerating sense of historical change” cuts deep into the exhausted bodies and brooding minds of his characters. The battle scenes set in Stalingrad’s 'vast, rumbling smithy' have all the mesmeric thrill and dread that admirers will recall from “Life and Fate”. The lyricism, tenderness and pathos of the moments of respite touch the same heights.”—The Economist
"A fascinating afterword by translator Robert Chandler charts how this text was drawn together from early draft manuscripts and editions published both before and after Stalin’s death in 1953, which allowed restoration of previously excluded passages. The almost polyphonic breadth and rich nuance of Grossman’s prose is perfectly captured by Chandler’s translation, accomplished with his wife Elizabeth. At close on 1,000 pages, it’s a monumental achievement.” — Tom Birchenough, The Arts Desk
"[Stalingrad] is an astonishing example of the compromises between creativity and censorship. Observing the negation of Grossman’s art as it tries to burst into flame in spite of the dampening of the censor, you get a deeper appreciation for the empathy, truth and magnanimity of its sequel. Perhaps the most intriguing element of all is the overstory: the way the Grossman of this novel somehow became the dissident author of Life and Fate. In the space between the two novels, the idealised bronze figures on a Soviet war memorial were transmuted into living beings. And in the process, the empathic knowledge that his work came to embody seems to have altered the heart of its creator.”—Marcel Theroux, The Guardian
"Google 'great writers' and his name doesn’t come up; suggest him to a book group and all you will get are shrugs; bring his name up in a writing workshop and students stare blankly. And yet the writer I’m talking about, Vasily Grossman, should be remembered for taking on one of the hardest challenges literature ever faced — trying to make sense of the madness and horror that swept over the world in the years 1939-45 — and by some miracle of courage and compassion wresting from it art.”—W.D. Wetherell, The Valley News