NYRB Publishing

trying to think which of the Great Liberal Institutions in magazine terms actually now *has* a good editor these days:

certainly not the new yorker
nor the atlantic
new republic has a miserable past to recover from and (under j.j.gould) is perhaps somewhat doing so?
the nation: katrina vanden heuvel trundles on, but i don't remember the last time i bothered read anything there
LRB: mary kay wilmers shakily past her best i feel (she's 80 and there are more blunders than there were)

NYRB vs LRB and its neither. In fact its the TLS atm who is doing fine work oh wait

no LRB no Lanchester-blogging from fizzles so this is a tough call

Eh David Remnick is fine, the Bannon thing is whatever.

Anyway, we already had a whole generation of liberal institutions become neoconservative institutions, surely some new ones will arise to disappoint us later. Heck, Jacobin is already disappointing everyone!

NYRB editor Ian Buruma will be appearing Sunday at the Brooklyn Book Festival: https://t.co/dBBxaB4mo5

— Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagira) September 15, 2018

The only good coming out of the Bannon 'thing' was how they cancelled his appearance 24 hours later. Even then inviting him was an error and not fine.

i wasn't even thinking of the stupid bannon thing: remnick is a not-great and very self-congratulatory writer who tackles big topics that deserve better (ali, russia, obama) and two out of every three longform NY pieces i read needed to go back to the writer with editor's notes requiring better unpacking of some sections and less glib handwavey assumption overall -- not everything the magazine runs needs to be heavyweight, the light-hearted scan is right there in the eustace tilley DNA and that's fair enough, but my overall mark for DR's reign as editor is "dude, could do better"

also:
https://i.imgur.com/FGL4WOu.jpg

I assume Borowitz is someone’s unacknowledged child and employed by the magazine as a sop to keep him quiet.

it calls everything else into question. like someone you're dating wondering how we can really 'know' vaccines are safe

borowitz really brings the hits to the website, apparently. at least they don't put him in the magazine (to my knowledge)

this thread is about nyrb *publishing* can u talk about john gomeshi somewhere else

what about borowitz?

new yorker thread

If the magazine shuts down it may take nyrb publishing with it. It doesn't really matter, its not like its a huge derail.

”It was unclear if Mr. Buruma resigned or was fired. He did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.” https://t.co/fyBrhZI8Oy

— Davey Alba (@daveyalba) September 19, 2018

being discussed here Book Reviews? LRB vs the failing New York Review of Books vs ... ?

ah thanking you

If the magazine shuts down it may take nyrb publishing with it. It doesn't really matter, its not like its a huge derail.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, September 17, 2018 6:00 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think publishing would survive

It would, but i would be sad. NYRB books are great.

Think maybe I’d better get me a copy of Moderan before they go under.

Mine just arrived today. It has a LOT of stories--contents list is 3p long--for a 320p book.

A great NYRB book:

https://www.nyrb.com/products/store-of-the-worlds

Their sci-fi selections in general are few and eclectic but very high-quality.

Among which is the ILBeloved Inverted World

https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-et-jc-nyrb-covers

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/06/fat-city-fifty-years-later-an-interview-with-leonard-gardner/

good new interview with leonard gardner about "fat city"

thanks. really loved that one

btw someone wrote a biography of john williams, author of noted ILB text 'stoner'

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-substantially-good-book-on-charles-j-shieldss-life-of-john-williams

Since this seems to be the de facto John Williams thread:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/20/mrs-stoner-speaks-an-interview-with-nancy-gardner-williams/

Too many good lines to quote from that interview. Mrs Williams seems like a very cool lady.

a dissent

Novelist John Williams is enjoying a bit of a revival. There’s just one problem: his books are not good. https://t.co/ZSomxtafwt

— The Baffler (@thebafflermag) February 22, 2019

counterpoint: i've read all of his books, they're fuckin good

His books are also misogynistic. Women in his novels are frigid, they are bitches, they are, usually, stupid; at their best, they are a liability

ctrl+f "augustus" "julia"

His newfound popularity has also coincided—again, not surprisingly—with the fetishization of the book as an object. This kind of book-fervor is a few years old now, but as the recent backlash to Marie Kondo’s dry suggestion that most people only need thirty books indicates, it’s far from gone. Books now exist as book-objects; they are written by writers, loved by “book lovers,” made into lists, declared important. As objects they can be staged, as purveyors of relatability they can be used. But there’s a pervasive sense that they aren’t really meant to be read, critically evaluated, hated, or loved.

also weird tangential paragraph talking about something old as if it is new: dud

actually i've never read nothing but the night but if you have to base the majority of your criticism on a book he disowned then

I’ve only read Stoner, so I can’t comment on the other books, but I do think that reviewer is getting at something kind of odd about the interior void and fatalism in the character of Stoner, except I guess I thought it was interesting and they hated it.

i mean yes the writer definitely approaches the point of the books and says "i don't like the point of these books"; the interiority hinted at but never quite described bc we're just skating over the surface of stoner's actions, the way it suddenly rears up in the otherwise stiff undecorated prose like we've been sucked backwards into a dream state (the scene where he looks through his office window at the snow-covered campus for instance), the way he only seems to come close to approaching himself in (spoiler but... imo it doesn't matter) death

augustus is probably truly his best book bc it breaks out of that third person swinging between stiff observation and dreamy suspended light configurations to dwell richly in character, in the simultaneous performance of identity and narrative that makes up someone's perspective. but the former approach i rarely encounter in books i guess? the tense bridge they walk between intimacy and distance, between the ordinary and the brutal

anyway i love that the piece admits that augustus might legitimately be good but it never appears again in the piece as if it might compromise the integrity of the argument somehow

This guy was the Paul Auster of his generation.

savage

NEW YORK – Monday, February 25, 2019 — Rea Hederman, the publisher of The New York Review of Books, announced today that Emily Greenhouse and Gabriel Winslow-Yost have been named co-editors of the magazine, the leading English-language journal of literary criticism and ideas with a worldwide circulation of approximately 150,000. The editors will be joined by longtime contributor Daniel Mendelsohn in the newly created position of editor at large.

ian buruma, still clueless

https://www.ft.com/content/7d47be7e-4efb-11e9-b401-8d9ef1626294

if you're paywalled, you may be able to get at that by opening this in an incognito window https://t.co/pzRImMAurH

I'm reading Nothing But the Night. Another fifty pages to go. Augustus and Stoner are superior but not by much.

Great photo of NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3p-59Chhri/?igshid=1aq5rmoqlfqk2

legend

Wonderful achievement for NYRB to bring these out:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/01/21/a-slap-in-the-face-of-stalinism/

Definitely! Although I read the less complete but still huge Penguin version years ago and am not strong enough to tackle them a second time.

Yeah that vol (tr. John Glad) was great, and it's good to see his poetry mentioned. There are 20/30 pages on the Penguin Russian Poetry that were a revelation to me. We need a solid edition of those poems.