NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

(P/B) THE INVENTION OF MOREL
Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of The Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious. Inspired by Bioy Casares's fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Ma...
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(H/B) FLETCHER AND ZENOBIA
Our story opens with a cat stuck in a tree, an ordinary-enough occurrence. Fletcher the cat, having run up the tree in a moment of thoughtless abandon, cannot get back down. Then strange things begin to happen: Fletcher finds in his tree a steamer trunk full of hats, and among the hats a papier-mache egg that opens to reveal Zenobia, a worldly talking doll who was locked in the egg by an unfeeling child named Mabel. To cheer each other up, Fletcher and Zenobia decide to throw a party, complete with cake, peach ice cream, and punch from a s...
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(P/B) HARRISON LOVED HIS UMBRELLA
Harrison liked to hold his umbrella in the rain. He also held it in the sun. He found it very helpful in the snow. But most of all he loved to hold it open in the house. In fact, Harrison was the only child on his block to hold an open umbrella in his hand all the time. How his friends admired him! Then one rainy day, after the rain was over, all the children held umbrellas, and they, too, continued to hold the umbrellas open. They all found them useful in the sun, helpful in the snow, and loved them in the house. Complications? Of cours...
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(P/B) THE 13 CLOCKS
Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile, and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. So begins James Thurber's sublimely...
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(P/B) MY MARRIAGE
Alexander Herzog, a young writer, goes to Vienna to escape his debts and a failed love affair. There he is pursued by book-loving Ganna: giddy, girlish, clumsy, eccentric, and wild. Dazzled and unnerved by her devotion to him, and attracted to the large dowry offered by her wealthy father, he thinks he can mold Ganna into what he wants. But no one can control her troubling passions. As their marriage starts to self-destruct, Herzog will discover that he can never escape her. Posthumously published in 1934 and based on Jakob Wassermann's ow...
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(H/B) THE WONDERFUL O
Black and Littlejack are bad men. Littlejack has a map that indicates the existence of a treasure on a far and lonely island. He needs a ship to get there. Black has a ship. So they team up and sail off on Black's vessel, the Aeiu. "A weird uncanny name," remarks Littlejack, "like a nightbird screaming." Black explains that it's all the vowels except for O. O he hates since his mother got wedged in a porthole. They couldn't pull her in so they had to push her out. Black and Littlejack arrive at the port of the far and lonely island and dem...
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(P/B) WHAT'S FOR DINNER?
James Schuyler's utterly original What's for Dinner? features a cast of characters who appear to have escaped from a Norman Rockwell painting to run amok. In tones that are variously droll, deadpan, and lyrical, Schuyler tells a story that revolves around three small-town American households. The Delehanteys are an old-fashioned Catholic family whose twin teenage boys are getting completely out of hand, no matter that their father is hardly one to spare the rod. Childless Norris and Lottie Taylor have been happily married for years, even a...
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(H/B) HE WAS THERE FROM THE DAY WE MOVED IN
The naming of dogs can be a tricky business, as Ogdon and his big brother discover in this charming collaboration between Rhoda Levine and Edward Gorey. You see, before Ogdon and his family moved to a new house, no one mentioned the big shaggy sheep dog in the back yard, but there he was, just sitting and waiting, imperturbable as can be. Waiting for what? Ogdon wonders. Dinner? A lollipop? A stray cat? Someone to talk to? No, what the dog wants is a name. And not just any name, but the right name. And with a little patience, and a lot of ...
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(P/B) THE MURDERESS
The Murderess is a bone-chilling tale of crime and punishment with the dark beauty of a backwoods ballad. Set on the dirt-poor Aegean island of Skiathos, it is the story of Hadoula, an old woman living on the margins of society and at the outer limits of respectability. Hadoula knows about herbs and their hidden properties, and women come to her when they need help. She knows women’s secrets and she knows the misery of their lives, and as the book begins, she is trying to stop her new-born granddaughter from crying so that her daughter can...
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(H/B) D'AULAIRES' BOOK OF ANIMALS
The celebrated husband-and-wife team of Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire prepared this exceptionally beautiful volume for their own son Ola, and it is as fresh and enchanting today as it was when it ?rst sprung from their imaginations. D'Aulaires' Book of Animals introduces young children to the creatures of every continent. Here more than fifty animals lithographed in full color form one side of a book that can be read page by page or unfolded to form a continuous panorama; the flipside of the panorama reveals the nighttime world of the a...
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(H/B) THREE LADIES BESIDE THE SEA
Wickedly funny and delightfully sad, Three Ladies Beside the Sea is a tale of love found, love lost, and love never-ending. Edward Gorey’s off-kilter Edwardian maidens are the perfect accompaniment to Rhoda Levine’s lilting rhymes. The place is remote: Three houses beside the sea. The Characters are Few: Laughing Edith of Ecstasy, Edith so happy and gay. Smiling Catherine of Compromise, She smiles her life away. And then there is Alice of Hazard, A dangerous life leads she. The question in the plot is quite simple: Why is Alice up in a tre...
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(H/B) D'AULAIRES' BOOK OF TROLLS
Trolls of all kinds - mountain trolls, forest trolls, trolls who live underwater and trolls who live under bridges, uncouth, unkempt, unbearable, unforgettable, and invariably unbelievably ugly trolls - fill the pages of D'Aulaires' Book of Trolls, the spectacularly illustrated and delightfully entertaining companion volume to the much-acclaimed D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths. Here the husband-and-wife team of Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire explore the shadow side of Norse mythology, the night world in which the trolls work their wiles ...
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(P/B) NOVELS IN THREE LINES
Novels in Three Lines collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906 - true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthless economy that provokes laughter even as it shocks. This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Felix Feneon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Feneon carefully mai...
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(H/B) MEN AND GODS
This outstanding collection brings together the novelist and scholar Rex Warner’s knack for spellbinding storytelling with Edward Gorey’s inimitable talent as an illustrator in a memorable modern recounting of the most beloved myths of ancient Greece. Writing in a relaxed and winning colloquial style, Warner vividly recreates the classic stories of Jason and the Argonauts and Theseus and the Minotaur, among many others, while Gorey’s quirky pen-and-ink sketches offer a visual interpretation of these great myths in the understated but brill...
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(P/B) MISERABLE MIRACLE
"This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored." In Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior space and a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable. Includes forty pages of black-and-white drawings and an introduction by...
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(P/B) THE UNKNOWN MASTERPIECE
One of Honore de Balzac's most celebrated tales, "The Unknown Masterpiece" is the story of a painter who, depending on one's perspective, is either an abject failure or a transcendental genius or both. The story, which has served as an inspiration to artists as various as Cezanne, Henry James, Picasso, and New Wave director Jacques Rivette, is, in critic Dore Ashton's words, a "fable of modern art." Published here in a new translation by poet Richard Howard, "The Unknown Masterpiece" appears, as Balzac intended, with "Gambara," a grotesque...
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(P/B) THE WASTE BOOKS
German scientist and man of letters Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an 18th-century polymath: an experimental physicist, an astronomer, a mathematician, a practicing critic both of art and literature. He is most celebrated, however, for the casual notes and aphorisms that he collected in what he called his Waste Books. With unflagging intelligence and encyclopedic curiosity, Lichtenberg wittily deflates the pretensions of learning and society, examines a range of philosophical questions, and tracks his own thoughts down hidden pathways to ...
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