NYRB Publishing

Reading/enjoying Elizabeth David's /A Book of Mediterranean Food/. Written as a kind of food/luxury porn in 1940s food-rationed Britain, full of then-obscure ingredients like cilantro. Recipes in prose form. Fun.

cooked suleiman's pilaf just last night - one of my all time favourite dishes.

summer sale: http://www.nybooks.com/books/summersale/

what should i get?

stoner!

Stoner shook me quite a bit last summer.

Try Apartment in Athens too.

alfred you've read most of those amis ones, right?

apart from lucky jim, which would you recommend?

the two from "gritty american novels" i've read (nightmare alley and on the yard) are both pretty incredible

thought about ordering the picture book collection for my daughter's bday but i think she's still a little young for them

also: all those K. Amis titles (I haven't read The Alteration)

The Green Man is good. So is The Old Devils but it's ponderous in spots.

The Alteration is great. So are the Esther Averill children's books.

does nyrb have a bookshop in manhattan or am i imagining that? the google maps result for it looks like offices.

Don't know about Manhattan but I believe there are places with a lot of their books in some of the other boroughs

ha thx. i think i had probably confused nyrb and lrb.

is stoner really good

I liked it up until the end which kind of ruined it for me.

i am 20pp in so who knows, but it comes recommended by tom hanks and time magazine, and i have seen about five people reading it on the columbia campus in three weeks.

the international rise in the prominence of stoner is fascinating/weird.

you forgot morris dickstein. (xp)

I liked Stoner enough to read his novel on Augustus lol

I still need to read warlock and 30 years war

i read stoner a year or two ago and honestly have very little memory of it. read warlock instead (or first, at least).

You guys have sold me on Warlock but but never got around to reading the library copy I had. Still gotta finish The Long Ships.

oh god i didnt realize stoner was by the guy who wrote augustus! i liked augustus, actually

the best nyrb book I've read is The Fountain Overflows, you should all read it.

oh god i didnt realize stoner was by the guy who wrote augustus! i liked augustus, actually

I did too but I had to overcome my addition to Vidal's approach to history (specifically in Julian).

Argh, I tried to read Augustus and hated it so fucking much. I hope Stoner is better.

i didnt like 'stoner' at all, probably because its deeply stupid

'speedboat' was the best of the recentish stuff i've read from them. i'd also recommend 'the murderess'

I admired its modest attempt to sketch the life of a mediocrity.

Was hoping Stoner would get some tough love from his creator near the end but as it turned out any pretense of authorial distance collapsed completely. (xp)

Ah, Stoner! Ah, Humanity!

i've got speedboat and pitch dark lined up to read soon

you're all stoners

the two from "gritty american novels" i've read (nightmare alley and on the yard) are both pretty incredible

Hard Rain Falling is great as well, haven't read Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley was incredible--the movie was pretty good too

Film of Nightmare Alley is pretty great, believe it was some sort of vanity project for Tyrone Powers, afraid the book won't live up.

oh, the book was better

OK, it's going back into the indefinite detention center holding pen book pile reading list.

Has anyone read The Three Christs of Ypsilanti?

I added an 's' to Tyrone Power's name, sorry.

xpost granted I hadn't seen the film yet when I read the book, so when I saw the movie I was looking through those "they left out that part I liked" glasses

Note that J. Hoberman said that the film "is neither a great movie nor even a classic noir but it has a great ambition to be daring and, once seen, is not easily forgotten."

Has anyone read The Three Christs of Ypsilanti?

It's interesting and distressing in equal parts, but also a bit too long--skimmed the second half. Hard for any book to match up to its premise, to be fair: 'True story of 3 mental patients who all believe they're Jesus sharing a house! Hijinks ensue!'

i don't really know anything about searls still, but as far as i'm concerned he is probably 100% otm from being editor/selector of thoreau's journals:

http://conversationalreading.com/damion-searls-top-ten-nyrb-classics/

To avoid needless repetition, please cut and paste in your mind the following sentence into all ten descriptions below: “It passes the bounds of human understanding how good this book is.”

the patrick leigh fermor books are all so so so great

^^ agree

The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos Hardcover
Patrick Leigh Fermor (Author)

This title will be released on September 12, 2013.

that's the uk edition. hope there's an nyrb ed too

Another Melville House hijack - anyone had the chance to look at their Neversink Library titles?

http://www.mhpbooks.com/series/the-neversink-library/?id=506

Definitely seek out the Irmgard Keun, Ödön von Horváth, Raymond Radiguet, Simenon and the Strugatsky Bros books. I have a couple of the others but haven't read them yet.