NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

(P/B) The Recognitions
A postmodern masterpiece about fraud and forgery by one of the most venerated novelists of the last century. The Recognitions is a sweeping depiction of a world in which everything that anyone recognizes as beautiful or true or good emerges as anything but: our world. The book is a masquerade, moving from New England to New York to Madrid, from the art world to the underworld, but it centers on the story of Wyatt Gwyon, the son of a New England pastor, who forsakes religion to devote himself to painting, only to despair of his inspiration....
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) MEMOIRS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE: 1800-1815
The second part of an infamous memoir about life in the time of Napoleon by a rebellious literary celebrity. In 1800, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand sailed from the cliffs of Dover to the headlands of Calais. He was thirty-one and had been living as a political refugee in England for most of a decade, at times in such extreme poverty that he subsisted on nothing but hot water and two-penny rolls. Over the next fifteen years, his life was utterly changed. He published Atala, Rene, and The Genius of Christianity to acclaim and epoch-making s...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) ALMOST NOTHING

(P/B) POLITICAL ACTION
Political theorist Michael Walzer's classic guide is a perfect introduction to social activism, including what-to-do advice for deciding which issues to take on, organizing, fundraising, and providing effective leadership. Political Action is a how-to book for activists that was written at one of the darkest moments of the Nixon administration and remains no less timely and intelligent and useful today. Michael Walzer draws on his extensive engagement in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s to lay out the practical steps nec...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS

(P/B) GREIF LESSONS

(P/B) CHARISMA AND DISENCHANTMENT
The German sociologist Max Weber is one of the most venturesome, stimulating, and influential theorists of the modern condition. Among his most significant works are the so-called vocation lectures, published shortly after the end of World War I and delivered at the invitation of a group of student activists. The question the students asked Weber to address was simple and haunting: In a modern world characterized by the division of labor, economic expansion, and unrelenting change, was it still possible to consider an academic or political...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(H/B) STONER
Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe. The critic Morris Dickstein has said that John Williams's Stoner "is something much rarer than a great novel - it is a perfect novel," and in the last decade this austere and deeply moving tale of a Midwestern college professor has been embraced by readers all over the world. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Stoner, NYRB Classics offers a special hardback e...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE LIFE OF HENRY BRULARD
The Life of Henry Brulard is the autobiography of one of France's greatest writers, Stendhal, author of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Here, writing at white heat and with such ferocious honesty and indignation that his book was to remain unpublishable for more than a century after its composition, Stendhal revisits his unhappy childhood in a stuffy provincial town and bares his rebellious heart. His adored mother, who died when he was only seven; a father devoted only to his own social ambitions; the aunt whose daily...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE QUEUE
Vladimir Sorokin's first published novel, The Queue, is a sly comedy about the late Soviet "years of stagnation." Thousands of citizens are in line for... nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying. Leather or suede? Jackets, jeans? Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American? It doesn't matter-if anything is on sale, you better line up to buy it. Sorokin's tour de force of ventriloquism and formal daring tells the whole story in snatches of unattributed dialogue, adding up to nothing less than the real voice of the people, overheard on ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) ZONE
Zone is the fruit of poet-translator Ron Padgett's fifty-year engagement with the work of France's greatest modern poet. This bilingual edition of Apollinaire's poetry represents the full range of his achievement from traditional lyric verse to the pathbreaking visual poems he called calligrams, from often-anthologized classics to hitherto-untranslated gems, from poems of cosmic breadth to a poem about his shoes. Including an introduction by the distinguished scholar Peter Read, helpful endnotes, a preface, and an annotated bibliography by...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) LOST TIME
November 2018 selection for the NYRB Classics Book Club. During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier J?zef Czapski brought Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust's masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work's originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brillian...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) ANNIVERSARIES
Late in 1967, Uwe Johnson set out to write a book that would take the unusual form of a chapter for every day of the ongoing year. It would be the tale of Gesine Cresspahl, a thirty-four-year-old single mother who is a German ?migr? to Manhattan's Upper West Side, and of her ten-year-old daughter, Marie-a story of work and school, of friends and lovers and the countless small encounters with neighbors and strangers that make up big-city life. An everyday tale, but also a tale of the events of the day, as gleaned by Gesine from The New York...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) EXISTENTIAL MONDAY
Benjamin Fondane - who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges's friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz - was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, "a torture and a spur." Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, affirming the individual against those great abstractions that limit human freedom - the State, Hist...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF ZACHARIAS LICHTER
Ugly, unkempt, a haunter of low dives who begs for a living and lives on the street, Zacharias Lichter exists for all that in a state of unlikely rapture. After being engulfed by a divine flame as a teenager, Zacharias has devoted his days to doing nothing at all - apart, that is, from composing the odd poem he immediately throws away and consorting with a handful of stray friends: Poldy, for example, the catatonic alcoholic whom Zacharias considers a brilliant philosopher, or another more vigorous barfly whose prolific output of pornograp...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY
One of the major documents of modern European civilization, Robert Burton's astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in all its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century. Lewellyn Powys called it "the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose-writing," while the celebrated surgeon William Osler declared it the greatest of medical treatises. And Dr. Johnson, Boswell reports, said it was the only book that he rose early in the morning to read with pleasure. I...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(H/B) SOFT CITY
The legendary Norwegian pop artist Pushwagner's scathing comics masterpiece - lost for decades, and never before published in the U.S. - is an epic vision of a single day in a world gone wrong: a brightly smiling, disturbingly familiar dystopia of towering skyscrapers, omnipresent surveillance, and endless distant war. "CLEAN BOMB THE HAPPY WAY," blares the morning paper. "Heil Hilton!" barks an overlord on the news. Welcome to Soft City. Now don't be late for work. (From the publisher)...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(H/B) THE MAN WHO LOST HIS HEAD
It's bad news when you wake up in the morning and find you've lost your head, especially if it's an especially agreeable and handsome head, but there you go, such things happen. In any case, the man who loses his head in The Man Who Lost His Head isn't about to grin (that is, if he could grin) and bear it. No, he'll make himself a new one, and starting with a pumpkin and moving on to a parsnip and finally getting a hold of a block of wood, he sets about getting it just right. Still, for all his efforts, it somehow isn't right. It isn't the...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA
In fascist Italy in 1927, Detective Francesco Ingravallo, known to friends as Don Ciccio, is called in to investigate the murder of Liliana Balducci, a well-to-do woman who happens to be a close friend. As Don Ciccio and his colleagues dig deeper into the grisly murder, the mechanics of the detective novel take a backseat to the wordplay and experimentation with which Gadda presents a panorama of life in early fascist Rome....
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) AGONY
Enjoy the ecstasy of agony. Amy and Jordan are just like us: hoping for the best, even when things go from bad to worse. They are menaced by bears, beheaded by ghosts, and hunted by the cops, but still they struggle on, bickering and reconciling, scraping together the rent and trying to find a decent movie. It's the perfect solace for anxious modern minds, courtesy of one of the great innovators of American comics. Now if only Amy's skin would grow back ... (From the publisher)...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...