NYRB Publishing

but the content itself is awful

the appearance of the content, i mean. the stories are great.

(if a little racist)

i think a lot of them--and this seems to be true of a lot of smaller (and i assume poorer) boutique and academic publishers like verso--seem to just re-use the same type setting as whatever the last edition was, which can lead to v jarring differences in font, spacing, layout etc., among books ostensibly in the same series

I love them. They are my favourite classics publishing house by some way. They are nice to look at and often to read, and just have the most interesting titles. Some random favourites: The Glass Bees, The Invention of Morel, The Lore and language of Schoolchildren, A Month in the Country, all that Simenon. But I'd have to look at my shelves. Oh - the Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. And yes, Tim Robinson, absolutely. And Kaputt!

(Londoners: generally a lot of NYRB remainders upstairs in the Gower St. Waterstone's)

thanks for the tip

i read the invention of morel and was not really feelin it tbh

Really? THat's too bad. Love that one and The Glass Bees.

Good point about the jarring fonts of others. Also good point by M. White about the forewords and afterwords.

One publishing house that I've gone off is Europa Editions. They've got some good Italian stuff, but a lot of what they put out is just kind of Euro-bestsellers with some dusting of intellectual pretension.

These are some of my favorites from this year.

The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy

The Old Man and Me - Elaine Dundy

Summer Will Show - Sylvia Townsend Warner

Memoirs of Montparnasse - John Glassco

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda

Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig

The Unpossessed - Tess Slesinger

Just reading through their catalogue makes my mouth water...

Been meaning to read That Awful Mess, but I'm afraid it will just go on the shelf next to the others I've gotta get around to.

multi-xp

I liked Morel a lot a few years ago - for me got the mix of reality-twisting oddness and 19th-century Stevenson-y island adventure about right (ie it worked as middle-distance Borges), but I think I was moping about unobtainable women at the time so I might find it a bit less appealing now.

Haven't got more than a few pages into his one about a dog though.

I enjoyed 'The Awful Mess...', but from what I gather, it's what Bierce disdainfully referred to as 'novel in dialect' - apparently Gaddo captured Roman slang really, really well though how you would translate that is a complete mystery to me.

Is 'Morel' by Bioy Casares? Wasn't he pals w/Borges or something?

Yes, they were great mates I believe. Also collaborated with him on some stories. So Morel being Borges-y is very understandable, but I meant it's successful in that - doesn't seem like a rip, seems to be synthesising the same stuff well over a different length.

borges wrote an intro to morel, that i believe is included in the NYRB edition

i was disappointed by morel in part because it was recommended to me very highly--it had the borgesian plot mechanics w/out the economy of style that makes borges so gripping; i felt like the man himself could have done the same thing twice as well in half as many pages

Well, that is Borges' forte, isn't it?

i would read all these nyrb books.

seriously, they all look appealing to me. of the ones i've seen.

Well, that is Borges' forte, isn't it?

Warlock by Oakley Hall

^^^ i think this may be the only one of these i read but it was dope. oh - looking ive also read the stephen leacock nonsense novels, which was okay.

For those who enjoyed Morel, I also recommend his similarly Wells-ian Plan of Escape. His later stuff I don't like too much.

Oh, Michael, I really liked The Dud Avacado -- you recommend the other Dundy as well?

It's true, these things have always looked a cut above, from the get-go.

Cesare Pavese - The Moon and the Bonfire

Really on the WILL WILL read: Victor Serge - The Unforgiving Years, and Henry De Montherlant

As for the Gadda - The 'mess' is part of the point and integral, but this seems amplified by the almost impossible job of translation of those linguistic puns! Still it does hold its fascination and the guy has written widely on a range of topics. I really hope that bringing this translation out will mean more novels and writings to come in English, but I do fear it was the wrong book of his to bring out, as much as I liked it.

I really liked The Dud Avacado -- you recommend the other Dundy as well?

Yes! Unfortunately it's in England as opposed to France but the plot is neater and the ending far superior to the ending of TDA, which I found a little artlessly abrupt. You can tell that Dundy is more grown-up or something. It's a hoot.

I find Montherlant rather depressing. His prose is rather gorgeous in French but he's such a bitter misogynist.

I seriously, like scott seward, would read almost all of these (except for the translations from the French) but the one that's next for me is probably Zweig's 'The Post-Office Girl'.

It's a posthumous novel, just now translated into English and it's a 2009 PEN Translation Prize Finalist. Also, I just love Zweig.

yah the zweig u linked sounds fantastic

turn yr zweig on

The Post Office Girl is, indeed, fantastic. I love NYRB--beautiful books, and most of those I've read have been great.

wasn't there a thread on this before?

i have read and enjoyed:

the Joyce Cary trilogy - Herself Surprised/The Horse's Mouth/To be A Pilgrim
Darcy O'Brien - A Way of Life Like Any Other
J.F. Powers - Morte D'Urban
Georges Simenon - Three Bedrooms In Manhattan

oh yeah, High Wind In Jamaica - Richard Hughes too

and i have The Go-Between on my shelf,bought it a few years ago and forgot it so I will start that in the next couple of weeks

Darcy O'Brien - A Way of Life Like Any Other

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
Seconding this one too. Will take this opportunity to recommend Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood. I think they've got another one by her as well.

i really like the thing mentioned upthread, where the typesetting is a slightly wonky copy of the previous edition's. it's nice to have that reminder of er the history of the book you're reading as a series of previous physical objects

(/wank)

their children's books are occasionally quite gorgeous; i bought this for my nephew and never actually gave it to him

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515bHOayxkL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Didn't Buzzati write 'The Tartar Steppe'?

Think it was called The Desert of The Tartars but yeah, that's the same guy.

Found another one to recommend: The Waste Books by George Chistoph Lichtenberg. Perhaps will post some cherce nuggets in the near future.

Found a bunch more I've purchased but never gotten round to reading. It's a little depressing. Ah, M. White! Ah, humanity!

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.

It's Szabo, it'll be great.

https://d1w7fb2mkkr3kw.cloudfront.net/assets/images/book/lrg/9781/6813/9781681372013.jpg

this is a really fun one

Asked the question. This is excellent news.

I’ve translated both. The Silentiary will come out from @nyrbclassics in fall 2021, and The Suicides thereafter (no set pub date yet). Thanks for asking! https://t.co/mgqu7qBbpE

— Esther Allen (@estherlallen) November 20, 2020

There's a Flash Sale at NYRB publishing right now. 20% off two titles. 30% off three. 40% off four or more.

i recommend ‘we think the world of you’ by j.r. ackerley off the sale list. ‘inverted world‘ and ‘party going’ are on there too but most ilxors have read those

Looked at four I wanted however shipping to the UK is pretty much the 40% saving lol

Before the pandemic I'd circle my uni library's original printing of Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. Leave it to fucking NYRB to finally release its first paperback edition, like, ever:

https://www.nyrb.com/products/reflections-of-a-nonpolitical-man

I pick up a copy at my local bookstore tomorrow.

Is that his ‘Actually, it was me, not Heinrich, who was brave all along? ‘ book?

lol the og 'actually, I was brave and right to support the invasion of Iraq'

What was that in the sky? A flash? Must be the NYRB Classics Summer Flash Sale! Up to 40% off list price. Free shipping on orders of $50 or more within the US. https://t.co/cMPrY3Wl6c pic.twitter.com/kBisVepIxZ

— NYRB Classics (@nyrbclassics) June 30, 2022

This looks real tasty

https://www.nyrb.com/collections/ferit-edgu/products/the-wounded-age-and-eastern-tales?variant=41906350489768

Very funny bitching about nyrb.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/lament-for-susan

Review of the novel was fairly convincing tbh.

As to the bitching it was just something to put upfront. Publishing is looking to make stuff happen. Which includes some forgotten things, if you feel they are now again the fashion.

What the editors declare a “classic” is almost certainly a subcanonical instance of Europe’s endlessly dying modernism or its American imitations.

Sounds great to me.

This relentless pushing of Elizabeth Taylor novels -- I feel smothered.

— Moderna Love Gets Me to the Church on Time (@SotoAlfred) July 18, 2023

that Tablet piece is like a book world version of "Pitchfork is Dumb..."

I'd rather they publish more translation than reissue Anglo literary writing but they are already doing a lot.

pic.twitter.com/wK664Lxobf

— Chris (@CMccafe) July 17, 2023

The resolution of the photo is so bad I can't read most of the titles . . . or maybe it's just my eyes. At any rat, I do see that The House of Mirth is the bottom title. I'd be OK being ruled over by Edith Wharton.

*rate

Actually, it's The New York Stories of Edith Wharton lol

Start of that Tablet piece is so astonishingly dumb, can't imagine why you'd want to read to the end.

Edith Wharton would have no problem ruling over us all tbc

I tried to read the Susan Tubes novel Divorcing, referenced in the review xyzz posted. A very sixties experimental stream of consciousness novel, which sounds good on paper but I found it just too baggy, verbose, formless. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for that kind of thing at the time. The story around it is an eye-opener though, she committed suicide 2 weeks after publication - possibly because of a bad review in the NYT, and Susan Sontag identified the body!

Taubes not Tubes, thanks autocorrect

Is Inverted World in there?

While browsing in bookstores, I always get fooled by those red-spine Vintage classic paperbacks that look identical to NYRB paperbacks from the spine, with same typeface and everything. I guess its an intentional homage?

A few favourites that I don't think have been mentioned so far:

Emmanuel Bove - My Friends
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen - Diary of a Man in Despair
Alberto Moravia - Boredom and Contempt
Ivo Andric - Omer Pasha Latas
G B Edwards - The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
Rose Macaulay - The Towers of Trebizond

Ebenezer Le Page is amazing.

finally read it a couple of years ago, & yes^

Since twitter is wild west at the moment, I'm going to pipe up to say that those of you who are dragging Tove Jansson for not being sufficiently "adult" in her writing are showing if not your whole ass, a good portion of it.

— NYRB Classics (@nyrbclassics) August 11, 2023

That poll has been quite something..

It's not even wild west, it's just "book twitter".

I'd rather they publish more translation than reissue Anglo literary writing but they are already doing a lot.

they do pretty good though on the translation front imo -- they can't be selling too much Ivo Andric but there he is! tons of super edgelord lit types like to hate on nyrb for what amount imo to not being edgelordy enough

I love this review of Johnson's Anniversaries. It's very good at describing the book, gives a sense of the achievement as well as it's potential flaws, and does this with a good level of precision. It matches a lot of my reading of it.

https://4columns.org/scribner-charity/anniversaries

xp - is edgelord lit like William Burroughs/the Beats?

nah yknow I mean this is now a v dated reference but ny tyrant types, of whom there are a good handful

wild western canon still includes blood meridian

The Alvaro Mutis is all time.

May the memory of Edith Grossman be a blessing! What a dear professor, and an incredible titan in world literature. Her translations provided terrifying and melancholic worlds. pic.twitter.com/ZCbfYHMCui

— Zach Issenberg (@ZIssenberg) September 4, 2023