New York Review Books

they're like the criterion collection w/r/t digging up quality works both previously known and mostly unknown. i've got a small handful of these: tove jansson's 'the summer book', simenon's 'dirty snow', jg farrell's "empire trilogy", christina stead's 'letty fox', and a pair of leonardo sciascia books. any other must-reads? must-owns? musts-to-avoid?

http://www.nybooks.com/books/

sorry if this thread already exists, it didn't turn up in search if it does.

this same? NYRB Publishing

Thanks, I was just about to post that.

totally missed that. feel free to lock or delete this one, mods...

New and forthcoming editions in latest enewsletter; particularly interested in this:

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0726/9203/products/doblin.cvr_1024x1024.jpg?v=1442335624

If image isn't there, it's
Bright Magic
Selected Stories
by Alfred Döblin, introduction by Günter Grass, translated from the German by Damion Searls

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590179734
Pages: 240
Publication Date: October 25, 2016

Alfred Döblin’s many imposing novels, above all Berlin Alexanderplatz, have established him as one of the titans of modern German literature. This collection of his stories —astonishingly, the first ever to appear in English—shows him to have been a master of short fiction too.

Bright Magic includes all of Döblin’s first book, The Murder of a Buttercup, a work of savage brilliance and a landmark of literary expressionism, as well as two longer stories composed in the 1940s, when he lived in exile in Southern California. The early collection is full of mind-bending and sexually charged narratives, from the dizzying descent into madness that has made the title story one of the most anthologized of German stories to “She Who Helped,” where mortality roams the streets of nineteenth-­century Manhattan with a white borzoi and a quiet smile, and “The Ballerina and the Body,” which describes a terrible duel to the death. Of the two later stories, “Materialism, A Fable,” in which news of humanity’s soulless doctrines reaches the animals, elements, and the molecules themselves, is especially delightful.

Praise

Bright Magic is the work of a sorcerer, an indispensable translation welcome in any cabinet of wonders.
—Publishers Weekly

Essential anthology of short works by the master of German literary expressionism...Döblin’s stories are uplifting in their elegance and beauty.
—Kirkus starred review

An indisputable, though often overlooked, pioneer of modernism is Alfred Döblin...remarkably, Bright Magic: Stories, translated by Damion Searls, is the first publication of Döblin’s short fiction in English...[There is] always a courship of the absurd, and language that is as vivid as Technicolor and as jarring as a car crash.
—Christine Smallwood, Harper’s Magazine

Without the futurist elements of Döblin’s work from Wang Lun to Berlin Alexanderplatz, my prose is inconceivable...He’ll discomfort you, give you bad dreams. If you’re satisfied with yourself, beware of Döblin.
—Günter Grass

I learned more about the essence of the epic from Döblin than from anyone else. His epic writing and even his theory about the epic strongly influenced my own dramatic art.
—Bertolt Brecht

As we look back over the rich literary output of this great writer, as we look back over the long and fruitful life of this fighter and this friend of man, this perennial spring of spiritual life, we venture to ask: When will the gentlemen [sic] of the Nobel Prize jury discover him?
—Ludwig Marcuse, Books Abroad

[A] major writer who grappled with the roots of darkness in our time...
—Ernst Pawel, The New York Time

also new

Iza’s Ballad
by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian and with an introduction by George Szirtes

His Only Sonwith Doña Berta
by Leopoldo Alas,
translated from the Spanish and with an introduction by Margaret Jull Costa

The Invisibility Cloak
by Ge Fei,
translated from the Chinese by Canaan Morse

The Moth Snowstorm
Nature and Joy
by Michael McCarthy

Soft City
by Hariton Pushwagner,
introduction by Chris Ware,
afterword by Martin Herbert

What Am I Doing Here?
by Abner Dean,
preface by Clifton Fadiman

From Notting Hill Editions
Wandering Jew
The Search for Joseph Roth
by Dennis Marks

The Complete Polly and the Wolf
by Catherine Storr,
illustrated by Marjorie Ann Watts and Jill Bennett

From Notting Hill Editions
You and Me
The Neuroscience of Identity
by Susan Greenfield

The Marzipan Pig
by Russell Hoban,
illustrated by Quentin Blake

Mistress Masham’s Repose
by T.H. White,
illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg

Back
by Henry Green,
introduction by Deborah Eisenberg

Loving
by Henry Green,
introduction by Roxana Robinson