NYRB Publishing

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

their edition of félix fénéon's novels in three lines has a great introductory essay

Yes. Was having trouble getting into that book- I usually avoid reading forewords and back cover summaries to avoid spoilers- but after reading your post I went back and read that intro and it is essential.

Couldn't get into Novels in Three Lines myself: principle + Santé enthused me, but Barnes in the LRB cooled me a little bit again - plus I wasn't enjoying the experience of reading it that much.

that barnes piece is sorta half right or maybe its right in letter but not in spirit. like santé (and the publishers) probably go too far in 'contextualizing' the work but its wrong to freight the thing with too much significance or 'meaning' either way. fénéon's life and his philiosophy were interesting to read about & some of santés parallels (like the futurists quote) seem correct, or at least illuminating. & really a beautiful turn of phrase, real wit, economy of form all these have value of their own - i dont think the collection needs to be 'ART' or w/e barnes wants it to be.

it also helps not to read them all at a time but just a page or two a day, i found.

Reading Grossman's brilliant unfinished novel Everything Flows, might have to chase up on The Road.

The Road's pretty great -- collection of stories, articles, letters -- the later stories especially are wonderful. I've not read any other Grossman, though 'Life and Fate' is looming hugely on a shelf

we appear to have a bunch of remainders come in

I bought "In Hazard" by Richard Hughes for a couple of quid without any particularly high expectations (I like Richard Hughes a lot and I like NYRB but I'm not so hot on yer maritime novels) - it's really very tremendous indeed.

any recommendations from this lot?

stephen benatar, wish her safe at home
mavis gallant, the cost of living
geoffrey household, rogue male
jakov lind, soul of wood
guy de maupassant, afloat
audrey platonov, the foundation pit
victor serge, unforgiving years
francis wyndham, the complete fiction
stefan zweig, the post-office girl

francis wyndham, that sounds good. complete things are always better.

also, mavis gallant is a good name, and 'the cost of living' sounds like it could be about Important Things.

so i say those.

Unforgiving Years is great, but I haven't read many of those.

I read Season of Migration to the North a few months ago and really enjoyed it.

thomp, I read Gallant's "Paris Stories' a while back and I'm genuinely curious about 'The Cost of Living'.

Platonov and Serge, from that list.

The NYRB have done really well to assemble some of the really good stuff from the former USSR.

All we need now is the complete tales from Shalamov's Kolyma Tales cycle. xp

I really liked Platonov's Foundation Pit, but I think his collection of stories is better. Would like to read most of the rest of that list, thomp.

stephen benatar, wish her safe at home -- very good, very dark comedy - woman comes to own London house, goes mad
geoffrey household, rogue male -- superior adventure thriller about a big game hunter in the 1930s who decides to hunt down Hitler
jakov lind, soul of wood -- brutal but excellent
guy de maupassant, afloat -- lovely non-fictional record of boating trip
audrey platonov, the foundation pit -- brutal but excellent
francis wyndham, the complete fiction -- so, so, so good
stefan zweig, the post-office girl -- I love Zweig, and this is wonderful--sort of post WW1 Bonnie-and-Clyde in Germany, but with lots more to it

I love Zweig, and this is wonderful--sort of post WW1 Bonnie-and-Clyde in Germany, but with lots more to it

I will definitely check this out.

yeah the zweig is fantastic but its p brutal throughout. i really like mavis gallant but cost of living is a weaker collection than any of 'paris stories', 'collected works' or the penguin collection (the best intro imo) - its all earlier stories and shes nowhere near as lean & unsentimental & wise in these stories as she becomes later. theyre kinda 'writerly' also so i dont know how much that will appeal...

'soul of wood' is the one id most like to read but havent

god, oakley hall's warlock is good, isn't it? i can't get enough of it, but it can be so tense i have to stop sometimes. this is a cliched thing to say but it crackles with energy. smart without being ponderous. it feels like it "gets it." walks right up to the edge of romanticism and then rips your guts out. poor bud gannon.

really need to restart that one. preferably on vacation

i started reading it once but i didn't really know what i was reading.

warlock. says so right on the cover

man, i finished warlock a week or two ago and it was so good. waiting for the movie from netflix right now, kind of curious about how good it's going to be.

now i'm reading the big clock by kenneth fearing, don't know how into it i am but it's interesting and seems like a quick read so i'll probably keep going. kind of a noir with a very unappealing "hero" and a ridiculous plot and awkward writing.

wait there's a warlock movie??

starring richard widmark, henry fonda and anthony quinn, no less

it was funny reading it thinking "huh it's weird no one's ever heard of this book" and then finding out about the movie and that the book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize

i read a thing the other day that noted most old-skool pulitzer nominees/winners were bestsellers in their day.

(and i guess, as a corollary, lots of bestsellers probably fall out of view pretty quickly. especially if their authors don't stay in the game somehow.)

The Big Clock has a very odd ending, kind of lame in a way, but it's interesting. I find Clark Gifford's Body, also by Fearing, totally fascinating and unique, though I still don't know quite what to make of it.

I thought I was going to hate "Clark Gifford's Body" and I ended up loving it. One of the things NYRB has done for me is intorduce me to some brilliant leftish US novels from the midele of the twentieth century, including "Clark Gifford's Body", "The Middle of the Journey" by Lionel Trilling, "What's for Dinner" by James Schuyler. Thanks, NYRB.

Currently reading a new NYRB: Iris Owens's 'After Claude', which I'm really enjoying, despite/because of the narrator being one of the most repellent people EVER.

btw "Warlock" movie - not really recommended. They made a decent effort but had to cut a bunch of stuff (mostly for time, obviously, but also the entire mine union plot was taken out, probably due to the time/climate that it was made). Widmark is good, Fonda is good but doesn't really seem right for the part IMO. Seems like it would have been confusing to anyone who hadn't read the book.

Also they do a weird thing where at the beginning Blaisedell and Morgan ride into town together, like they've been traveling together as a team (unlike in the book, where Morgan's already in Warlock and running the saloon). But then all of a sudden Morgan has his own saloon, with no explanation of how he bought it so quickly or anything. Maybe I missed something.

Read a fair bit of Oakley Hall a few years ago (for a big thing on Warlock that got spiked – ashamed of parts of it now, screechy and ignorant about politics, America, not good enough on the history of the Western); didn't like any of his other books as much as Warlock - the Ambrose Bierce mysteries had their heart in the right place, couldn't get through that one about downhill skiers. It was enlightening about what happens to writers - I mean from a lot of perspectives it does look like Hall vanished after Warlock, but there he is, working hard for the rest of his life, right at the centre of West Coast creative writing and regional fiction.

i think hes "known" as a teacher more than an author. disappointing to hear that nothing else reaches warlock, though.

the book store down the street was selling a bunch of these for 99 cents each! bought a bagful. then bought another bagful to give as christmas gifts. couldn't believe it.