NYRB Publishing

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product-file/52/memo9152/product.jpg

!!!!! these dudes have been str8 killing it w/east european translation l8ly

also nice that they put out that mavis gallant collection - penguin canada had a slim and pretty collection of eight stories that i have but this one seems tighter and better chosen also bought memoirs of an anti-semite, vladimir sorkin's ice and the chrysalids (lol)

That's just up my alley

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Chrysalids are arse-kickingly good. Must read Memories of the Future!

i would like to read memoirs of an anti-semite. i have a couple of these on my shelf that i haven't read (because they're on my shelf...). they're very pretty!

I have been enjoying some of those mid-century novels of the American left, which I barely knew existed: "Clark Gifford's Body" by Kenneth Fearing; "The Unposessed" by Tess Schlesinger; "What's For Dinner" by James Schuyler, that Lionel Trilling novel, all variously fine, I'm sure there were one or two more.

I love publishing houses I can trust when I'm not sure whether to take a punt or not. I recently took a punt on "The Ten Thousand Things" by Maria Dermout, and I was pleased I did. It ended up reminding me of "Sleepless Nights" by E. Hardwick herself, which is somewhere near where we came in.

It's costing me money, though: now I want the nice NYRB editions not inferior editions from elsewhere. Time was I'd have been very pleased to pick up the Virago copy of "The Old Man And Me" available for pennies off Amazon...

After reading Stephen Vizinczey's review of The Death of My Brother Abel I don't plan to read anything by von Rezzori.

haha that's funny because i got memoirs out today. but it was the viking edition :(

Really good turn for these guys to give away some of the essays for free -- really enjoyed reading Toni Morrison on Camara Laye.

Right now I really want to have a look at the Walser short story collection. Really.

One slight negative => Let me suggest the way its bound/the design of the books doesn't quite suit anything over 250 pages. But I speak as someone who has not given an awful lot of thought to the way books are designed.

vladimir sorokin's ice

this was weird its not "good" but it was surprisingly tense and creepy. i missed my subway stop one night - sunday maybe? - reading part I and i wish that hed kept up with that. the socialist realist parody section was grating i mean i guess it was supposed to be? and the level of contempt is hard to forgive - it feels like a book that has everything figured out and doesnt really want to know its world any better just to heap derision on its many failings. also it was really violent...

im going to try some of the tatyana tolstaya stuff they have next

Anyone checked out Andrey Platonov? Read an intro to one of the books on the NYRB page, the translator does compare him to Musil/Proust elsewhere but those comparisons always come across as more like blind enthusiasm.

I picked up the NYRB edition of the Opies' Lore and Language of Schoolschildren yesterday (which my Amazon reseller seems to have liberated from Newton le Willows library) which looks fantastic on first glance (includes an extensive etymology and mapping of the use of "fainites"!).

Really on the WILL WILL read: Victor Serge - The Unforgiving Years

oh man this is so good, check out his Memoirs of a Revolutionary too.

I've read one Platonov for a class - The Foundation Pit. It's weird as hell and terribly sad. I think I liked it, I was probably the only person in class to finish it. I checked out one of his books of stories which I never really gave a chance to; about 20 pages in it was getting so over-the-top in Russian misery that I was having trouble not laughing, and then I had to return it to the library.

I try to get these for the library whenever I see them. Lately we've gotten No Tomorrow by Vivant Denon, The Cost of Living by Mavis Gallant, and Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter.

Other paperback publishers who consistently make me happy: New Directions, Editions Gallimard.

I've read one Platonov for a class - The Foundation Pit. It's weird as hell and terribly sad. I think I liked it,

Read, not for a class, but for "fun" -- very sad, very odd, sometimes hard-going, I _think_ I liked it as well.

Summary: a bunch of Soviet workers are digging the foundations for a massive utopian communist self-contained city thing, but it may actually be a Stalinist mass grave

i think Foundation Pit is one of Platonov weakest stories (actually, it's a novella) maybe cause it's super realistic,dry,too political and with too much dialouge while Platonov merits are in creating a poetic,lyrical,closed to surreal, but very gentle atmosphere, which is closer to Kafka, Schultz, Gombrowicz and a little Cortazar than anything else

Well I do have a taste for political fiction -- I read the intro to Soul (the short story collection also bought out NYRB) and what did draw my attention was the politics (with one eye on the craft of writing; 'dry' and 'political' needn't necessarily go together), and that he wrote the majority of his works (which includes essays on many subjects, writers that do write really widely is a good sign to me) in that 1917-1929 period in Russian history, as I'm really interested in Russian fiction from that period.

It would probably be disappointing to me if it was some kind of Kafka knock-off.

it isn't a Kafka knock-off - it's very unique,though it resemble Kafka .
in a way,all of Platonov's writing is political, but the genius of his writing,imo,is when the political issues are the subtext of the story,not the story itself: isnt that (among other things) what makes a great art - the beauty of the transformation from "message" to "imagery"?
he did it not only because he was a talented writer but also because of the censorship and fear of the goverment,but sometimes,ironically those restaints produce great art..

"Soul" is fantastic, Jules. Summary: geezer goes to be Soviet rep dude to some dwindling, semi-migratory tribe, goes fairly native. You can have a lend of my copy if you want (it's a Harvill not an NYRB, soz). It didn't feel like Kafka, to me. I liked "The Foundation Pit" too, and have read the stories in "The Return" and the feeling I came away with wasn't really gentleness but a slightly panicky inability to move.

(I note that in his Wikipedia page Andrey is being played by Denholm Elliott: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Platonov.)

"The political issues are the subtext of the story, not the story itself" - yes, this, but (in "Soul" and "TFP" I think) it's a subtext which makes the story wrench and scream.

lolz I spent a good five mins trying to work the Denholm Elliott 'thing'. Thanks for the offer, Tim, I'll take.

I see that the translator himself 'comments' on the Amazon page for the book.

Book Court in Cobble/Boerum Hill has a whole shelf just of NYRB books.

Book Court in Cobble/Boerum Hill has a whole shelf just of NYRB books.

hey--does anyone know a place in brooklyn, say, in the cobble hill or boerum hill area, where i can find these books?

I think somebody might have posted about that way up thread.

(Thought it wasn't supposed to let me do that.)

Are there any shops that deal in books by New Directions in London?

I think I've seen some of their stuff in Charing X Foyles. But maybe a while ago - have a half-sense that Foyles have made their stock-buying a bit less idiosyncratic - others might know more.

Other thing is I don't see (unlike Dalkey and NYRB) a lot of New directions stuff 2nd hand. Maybe it just hasn't registered..

have a half-sense that Foyles have made their stock-buying a bit less idiosyncratic

Been a while since I worked there, but even at the time it was part of the remit to move from the old (admittedly ludicrously haphazard and expensive) habits to the new ones. We were still encouraged to take a punt on eccentric hunches (my favourite was getting in a load of Anatomy of Melancholy when NYRB republished it - nowhere else in London got it in, and I took loads - bonanza) but, even if that doesn't go on any more (and after all the misses were greater than the hits), I think there's still a general attempt to take a more left-field approach to things. As much as anything this makes sound business sense, separating you out from competitors. Like anywhere else tho, it's the computer books and medical stuff that brings home the bacon. (Plus true crime and big big blockbusters). Any largish bookshop would be a fool to miss out on that.

Don't know about New Directions, mind, haven't been in for a while, but worth asking, as given a sympathetic ear, they might start getting them in to see how they sell, even if they haven't already.

That NYRB shelf at Book Court is so enticing. It makes me feel like there's this entire alternate universe of great literature I've never read.

Thinking some more, it might have been Borders where I saw them - back in their UK heyday when they had lots of American books unavailable elsewhere (didn't use Amazon back then). The only things I know I've seen, though, are the Ezra Pound editions.

So that isn't very helpful.

That's ok. So much of what's on their Latin American and Asian lists interests me.

I guess I'll eventually have to start buying things on amazon.

they really are like the criterion collection of book publishers. the jg farrell ones are my favorite i've read thus far, particularly 'troubles'.

That's an interesting comparison.

Thinking about getting Anatomy of Melancholy soon.

they really are like the criterion collection of book publishers.

truth bomb

A few NYRB favourites, pulled out of my head at random...

Any and all Tove Jansson and JG Farrell, as you said, plus Stefan Zweig

LJ Davis: A Meaningful Life -- black suburbanite comedy, very uncomfortably funny
Adolfo Bioy Cesares: The Invention of Morel -- clever, mind-twisting sci-fi
Christopher Priest: Even cleverer, more mind-twisting sci-fi
Harvey Swados: At Night in the Gardens of Brooklyn -- wonderful short story collection
JR Ackerley: My Dog Tulip, My Father and Myself, We Think the WOrld of You -- the first two are memoirs, the 3rd a novel, all great
William Attaway: Blood on the Forge -- savage, bleak, amazing story about two black brothers in the 1930s
Frigyes Karinthy: A Journey Round my Skull -- funny and fascinating memoir of brain injury
Dezső Kosztolányi: Skylark -- beautiful short book about doting parents whose daughter goes away on a holiday, causing them to break out as gamblers, drinkers, eaters, etc etc

Man, so many other gems, cant list them all. Am also especially looking forward to:

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: "On July 1, 1959, at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics: Clyde Benson, an elderly farmer and alcoholic; Joseph Cassel, a failed writer who was institutionalized after increasingly violent behavior toward his family; and Leon Gabor, a college dropout and veteran of World War II.

The men had one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Their extraordinary meeting and the two years they spent living together serves as the basis for this poignant and often hilarious investigation into the nature of human identity, belief, and delusion. With novelistic momentum and insight, Rokeach takes us into the lives of these three incredible and, despite their common claim, altogether singular personalities who find themselves “confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”

In scenes of remarkable power and vividness (“I'm telling you I'm God!” “You're not!” “I'm God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost! I know what I am. . .”) we see the three Christs argue, proclaim, and soliloquize about the nature of their contentious divinity, and are given a window onto one of the most remarkable psychological case studies on record. "

Harvey Swados: At Night in the Gardens of Brooklyn -- wonderful short story collection

this is really terrific & its kinda so good that i think anything i cld say wld do it a disservice? its fantastic imo

if i were doing a pov i think id choose:

vladimir sorokin: ice - 'flat' kinda minimal russian horror + socialist realist parody + ad-speak parody
don carpenter: hard rain falling - impressionistic 50s crime novel really beautiful
mavis gallant short story collection - i just like her voice stark and knowing and terrible
stefan zweig: post-office girl - idk... unrelenting? really wonderful tho
gregor von rizzi: memoirs of an anti-semite - five interconnected stories abt a central european aristocrat 'dark and funny'

hey lamp we were talking sorokin on the shakey hates books thread--if i read sacred book of the werewolf and found it readble and engaging but haaaaaated the buddhist theologizing, would i like ice

i like the opies' 'lore and language of schoolchildren' (mentioned above), it's got an amazing ethnographic touch. i only wish it were more about american children (or slightly latter-day ones).

their recent selection of thoreau's journals (chosen by damion searls, of the recent melville redaction) is very nice too.

i read like a quarter of 'the long ships' in the bookstore the other day it was so rad

ice is really readable and for the first third really riveting but he does sacrifice story/character/language for the sake of explicating the thematic/structural ideas hes interested in - i think maybe if you dont care much about post-stalin russian lit the middle section in particular might be a slog. i mean the arguments hes making arent as repetitive/textual as the ones in werewolf but they infect the very form hes using.

im a lot more interested in post-stalin russian lit than a werewolf explaining buddhism 102

max werent you guys talking abt victor pelevin on the other thread, rather than sorokin? or are you just comparing the two

lol

we were

all those russian "v"s

hahaha

lets not tell anyone about this

Last night in Grand Central I picked up the The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick and the one I've read so far is ace.

Picked up Paul Schmidt's The Stray Dog Cabaret last weekend.

http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~kohler/z/nyrb/stray-dog-cabaret.jpg

Just started title story/opener of xpost Soul: lead male has just gone to graduation party at the Institute and met the girl of his dreams, seems like. She has boils, but third-person narrator says these are evidence of her unstoppable vitality. It's all warm and engaging, lilting, even, though Russian as hell.

So Nazar ("Vision" in Persian) marries Vera ("Faith" in Russian) and soon sets out from Moscow to the Eastern barrens of his birth, assigned to create an enlightened people's nation, living and working in joyous rationality, of his bereft native-and-others aggregation, the Dzhan ("a soul in search of happiness," also a reminder that your soul is the only thing you can truly call your own, especially if you're Dzhan---tagged that by ancient khans, as meaning something like "Born Loser," or just "Loser.")
Word from preceding reports:The Dzhan used to get occasional work on irrigation canals, but now they're just wandering around out there, basically starving, and not that conscious of anything, apparently.

Translator Robert Chandler points out how this situation also fits with Gurdjieff's principle of sleepwalking as a way of life, and how the overall narrative sometimes recalls Sufi allegories The Conference of the Birds and The Beauty and the Heart. But mainly gratifying to secular me is the way the author develops characters, individually and in recombinant subsets, with philosophical comments brushing by a lot of emphasis on physical activity in the foreground, especially concerning food and terrain (where be animals and those damn birds: very hungry food, for humans who can rouse themselves).
Also gratifying: he goes past and around on-the-nose resolutions, without being coy.
He does this in idiosyncratically lucid and graceful and fully-loaded sentences, being something like a very Russian Henry Green.
Whatta fully-loaded novella! I may have to take a break before reading the rest of this collection.

Back to Plat: despite a familiar, tastefully (and relatively) transparent presentation of (Russian) pathos, "The Third Son" left me a little too dependent on translator's comments. Maybe it's too simple-subtle-sensitive for me, but I think I got a fair amount of it first time around...

Translator's more extensive and more revelatory comments on the longer "Among Plants and Animals" were actually less necessary for enjoyment and the feeling that I was getting it, which I was, to an extent, tromping around the upper layers of the story with a young switchman, dedicated, officially and personally, to a section of track in the forest.

The author turned out to be a switchman too, between several leading emotions and shades of humor, and I found myself switching between the story and notes (in intro and follow-up): the building response of one to another.

The storytelling seems laidback, but is tight enough that it's hard to avoid spoilers---know only that his Soviet contemporaries, if they encountered this unbowdlerized version, might well recognize just what Platonov was allusively switching to and from, code-switching, and would likely be afraid for him as author, themselves as readers.

And you don't need to know that "Fro" relates in some ways to Platonov's story, not in this collection, abut Afrodita, Russian for Aphrodite---Russian name and Russian character for sure, judging by translator's intriguing take, incl. quotes: here, Fro is like Jools for Julie for Julia or Juliet, and she is a young and restless wife pf the town or village, pining for her traveling engineer husband, a visionary and aspiring inventor, who extends the author's deep ecology to iron, no doubt to oil, rare earth, what the hell, any mineral: all part of nature, and in a sense given new life in Man's Creations.
Fro has plugged into this and is doing well in a course on Signals and Communications but getting tired of it all without him.
A dance sequence feels like a different kind of turn in here, except the whole story is a dance sequence.

Bomarzo sounds great.

https://books.substack.com/p/review-michael-robbins-on-bomarzo

Thanks---his mention of The Wandering Unicorn led me to this appealing description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Unicorn
Translation by Mary Fitton, foreword by Borges.
Also appreciate his mention of John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting.