Books published by New York Review Books

An NYRB Classics OriginalA humble clerk and his loving wife scrape out a quiet existence on the margins of Tokyo. Resigned, following years of exile and misfortune, to the bitter consequences of having married without their families’ consent, and unable to have children of their own, Sōsuke and Oyone find the delicate equilibrium of their household upset by a new obligation to meet the educational expenses of Sōsuke’s brash younger brother. While an unlikely new friendship appears to offer a way out of this bind, it also soon threatens to dredge up a past that could once again force them to flee the capital. Desperate and torn, Sōsuke finally resolves to travel to a remote Zen mountain monastery to see if perhaps there, through meditation, he can find a way out of his predicament.        This moving and deceptively simple story, a melancholy tale shot through with glimmers of joy, beauty, and gentle wit, is an understated masterpiece by one of Japan’s greatest writers. At the end of his life, Natsume Sōseki declared The Gate, originally published in 1910, to be his favorite among all his novels. This new translation captures the oblique grace of the original while correcting numerous errors and omissions that marred the first English version.

Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter . . . weak heart, brown hair,” a young man with an excellent education but permanently condemned to a low-paid job without security in the short or the long run.What’s to be done? Fabian and friends make the best of it—they go to work though they may be laid off at any time, and in the evenings they go to the cabarets and try to make it with girls on the make, all the while making a lot of sharp-sighted and sharp-witted observations about politics, life, and love, or what may be. Not that it makes a difference. Workers keep losing work to new technologies while businessmen keep busy making money, and everyone who can goes out to dance clubs and sex clubs or engages in marathon bicycle events, since so long as there’s hope of running into the right person or (even) doing the right thing, well—why stop?Going to the Dogs, in the words of introducer Rodney Livingstone, “brilliantly renders with tangible immediacy the last frenetic years [in Germany] before 1933.” It is a book for our time too.

Plot and counterplot lie at the heart of Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and The Marriage of Figaro, the three brilliant libretti that Lorenzo Da Ponte prepared for Mozart. They were also central to Da Ponte's own extraordinary life. His Memoirs record a fantastic variety of romantic, political, and professional intrigues, and tell of meetings with a host of remarkable men. In a life that took him from the canals of Venice to the streets of New York, Da Ponte was at different times priest, professional gambler, proprietor of a bordello, political agitator, court poet, impresario, grocery store owner, and the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. His Memoirs, a minor classic of Italian literature, are the picaresque and engrossing story of a man of enormous talent and unsurpassed flair who was, above all, an indefatigable survivor."I shall speak of things . . . so singular in their oddity as in some manner to instruct, or at least entertain, without wearying." —Lorenzo da Ponte

Gilbert Seldes, the author of The Stammering Century, writes: This book is not a record of the major events in Ameri­can history during the nineteenth century. It is concerned with minor movements, with the cults and manias of that period. Its personages are fanatics, and radicals, and mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements and figures with the primary forces of the century, and to supply a background in American history for the Prohibitionists and the Pente­costalists; the diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors and the Fundamen­talists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and possibly the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious excitements, and the relation of each of these to the others and to the orderly progress of America are the subject.The subject is of course as timely at the beginning of the twenty-first century as when the book first appeared in 1928. Seldes's fascinated and often sympathetic accounts of dreamers, rogues, frauds, sectarians, madmen, and geniuses from Jonathan Edwards to the messianic murderer Matthias have established The Stammering Century not only as a lasting contribution to American history but as a classic in its own right.

Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd was a runaway best seller when it was first published in 1960, and it became one of the defining texts of the New Left. Goodman was a writer and thinker who broke every mold and did it brilliantly—he was a novelist, poet, and a social theorist, among a host of other things—and the book’s surprise success established him as one of America’s most unusual and trenchant critics, combining vast learning, an astute mind, utopian sympathies, and a wonderfully hands-on way with words.For Goodman, the unhappiness of young people was a concentrated form of the unhappiness of American society as a whole, run by corporations that provide employment (if and when they do) but not the kind of meaningful work that engages body and soul. Goodman saw the young as the first casualties of a humanly re­pressive social and economic system and, as such, the front line of potential resistance. Noam Chomsky has said, “Paul Goodman’s impact is all about us,” and certainly it can be felt in the powerful localism of today’s renascent left. A classic of anarchist thought, Growing Up Absurd not only offers a penetrating indictment of the human costs of corporate capitalism but points the way forward. It is a tale of yesterday’s youth that speaks directly to our common future.

No one has written more feelingly and more beautifully than Nescio about the madness and sadness, courage and vulnerability of youth: its big plans and vague longings, not to mention the binges, crashes, and marathon walks and talks. No one, for that matter, has written with such pristine clarity about the radiating canals of Amsterdam and the cloud-swept landscape of the Netherlands. Who was Nescio? Nescio-Latin for "I don't know"-was the pen name of J.H.F. Grönloh, the highly successful director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company and a father of four-someone who knew more than enough about respectable maturity. Only in his spare time and under the cover of a pseudonym, as if commemorating a lost self, did he let himself go, producing over the course of his lifetime a handful of utterly original stories that contain some of the most luminous pages in modern literature. This is the first English translation of Nescio's stories.

This story of adventure, bravery, daring, friendship, and honor begins when Runcible, a Weimaraner, digs a hole from Cape Cod all the way to Japan. There he meets Taka-chan, a little girl who has been imprisoned by a fierce and fearsome sea dragon. The dragon is angry that Taka-chan’s father and his fellow fishermen no longer pay him proper respect, but he is willing to free Taka-chan on one condition: Runcible must seek out the most loyal creature in all Japan and lay a flower at his feet. So Taka-chan and Runcible set out on a quest of discovery that takes them to the bustling heart of Tokyo. From palace grounds to noodle shop, Runcible explores the city, stopping at nothing to solve the mystery that will release his new friend from her captivity.Taka-chan and I joins image and word in a tale that is as thrilling as it is poignant. Betty Jean Lifton, a lifelong student of Japanese folklore, and Eikoh Hosoe, a renowned Japanese photographer, have together created an enduring work of beauty that is fit to share a shelf with a classic like The Red Balloon.

An NYRB Classics OriginalThe first great twentieth-century novel of dictatorship, and the avowed inspiration for García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme, Tyrant Banderas is a dark and dazzling portrayal of a mythical Latin American republic in the grip of a monster. Ramón del Valle-Inclán, one of the masters of Spanish modernism, combines the splintered points of view of a cubist painting with the campy excesses of 19th-century serial fiction to paint an astonishing picture of a ruthless tyrant facing armed revolt. It is the Day of the Dead, and revolution has broken out, creating mayhem from Baby Roach's Cathouse to the Harris Circus to the deep jungle of Tico Maipú. Tyrant Banderas steps forth, assuring all that he is in favor of freedom of assembly and democratic opposition. Mean­while, his secret police lock up, torture, and execute students and Indian peasants in a sinister castle by the sea where even the sharks have tired of a diet of revolutionary flesh. Then the opposition strikes back. They besiege the dictator's citadel, hoping to bring justice to a downtrodden, starving populace. Peter Bush's new translation of Valle-Inclán's seminal novel, the first into English since 1929, reveals a writer whose tragic sense of humor is as memorably grotesque and disturbing as Goya's in his The Disasters of War.

An NYRB Classics OriginalRobert Sheckley was an eccentric master of the American short story, and his tales, whether set in dystopic city­scapes, ultramodern advertising agencies, or aboard spaceships lighting out for hostile planets, are among the most startlingly original of the twentieth century. Today, as the new worlds, alternate universes, and synthetic pleasures Sheckley foretold become our reality, his vision begins to look less absurdist and more prophetic. This retrospective selection, chosen by Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich, brings together the best of Sheckley's deadpan farces, proving once again that he belongs beside such mordant critics of contemporary mores as Bruce Jay Friedman, Terry Southern, and Thomas Pynchon.

Sir Thomas Browne is one of the supreme stylists of the English language: a coiner of words and spinner of phrases to rival Shakespeare; the wielder of a weird and wonderful erudition; an inquiring spirit in the mold of Montaigne. Browne was an inspiration to the Romantics as well as to W.G. Sebald, and his work is quirky, sonorous, and enchanting. Here this baroque master's two most enduring and admired works, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, appear in a new edition that has been annotated and introduced by the distinguished scholars Ramie Targoff and Stephen Greenblatt (author of the best-selling Will in the World and the National Book Award-winning The Swerve). In Religio Medici Browne mulls over the relation between his medical profession and his profession of the Christian faith, pondering the respective claims of science and religion, questions that are still very much alive today. The discovery of an ancient burial site in an English field prompted Browne to write Urne-Buriall, which is both an early anthropological examination of different practices of interment and a profound meditation on mortality. Its grave and exquisite music has resounded for generations.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a man of staggering gifts, whose accomplishments as philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, and activist still command attention and inspire debate. Sartre’s restless intelligence may have found its most characteristic outlet in the open-ended form of the essay. For Sartre the essay was an essentially dramatic form, the record of an encounter, the framing of a choice. Whether writing about literature, art, politics, or his own life, he seizes our attention and drives us to grapple with the living issues that are at stake.We Have Only This Life to Live is the first gathering of Sartre’s essays in English to draw on all ten volumes of Situations, the title under which Sartre collected his essays during his life, while also featuring previously uncollected work, including the reports Sartre filed during his 1945 trip to America. Here Sartre writes about Faulkner, Bataille, Giacometti, Fanon, the liberation of France, torture in Algeria, existentialism and Marxism, friends lost and found, and much else. We Have Only This Life to Live provides an indispensable, panoramic view of the world of Jean-Paul Sartre.

"Pussy Riot are Vvedensky's disciples and his heirs. Katya, Masha, and I are in jail but I don't consider that we've been defeated.... According to the official report, Alexander Vvedensky died on December 20, 1941. We don't know the cause, whether it was dysentery in the train after his arrest or a bullet from a guard. It was somewhere on the railway line between Voronezh and Kazan. His principle of 'bad rhythm' is our own. He wrote: 'It happens that two rhythms will come into your head, a good one and a bad one and I choose the bad one. It will be the right one.' ... It is believed that the OBERIU dissidents are dead, but they live on. They are persecuted but they do not die." - Pussy Riot [Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's closing statement at their trial in August 2012]"I raise[d] my hand against concepts," wrote Alexander Vvedensky, "I enacted a poetic critique of reason." This weirdly and wonderfully philosophical poet was born in 1904, grew up in the midst of war and revolution, and reached his artistic maturity as Stalin was twisting the meaning of words in grotesque and lethal ways. Vvedensky-with Daniil Kharms the major figure in the short-lived underground avant-garde group OBERIU (a neologism for "the union for real art")-responded with a poetry that explodes stable meaning into shimmering streams of provocation and invention. A Vvedensky poem is like a crazy party full of theater, film, magic tricks, jugglery, and feasting. Curious characters appear and disappear, euphoria keeps company with despair, outrageous assertions lead to epic shouting matches, and perhaps it all breaks off with one lonely person singing a song.A Vvedensky poem doesn't make a statement. It is an event. Vvedensky's poetry was unpublishable during his lifetime-he made a living as a writer for children before dying under arrest in 1942-and he remains the least known of the great twentieth-century Russian poets. This is his first book to appear in English. The translations by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich, outstanding poets in their own right, are as astonishingly alert and alive as the originals.

Paul Hazard's magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the process by which new developmentsin the sciences, arts, philosophy, and philology came to undermine the stable foundations of the classical world, with its commitment to tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage. Hazard shows how travelers' tales and archaeological investigation widened European awareness and acceptance of cultural difference; how the radical rationalism of Spinoza and Richard Simon's new historical exegesis of the Bible called into question the revealed truths of religion; how the Huguenot Pierre Bayle's critical dictionary of ideas paved the way for Voltaire and the Enlightenment, even as the empiricism of Locke encouraged a new attention to sensory experience that led to Rousseau and romanticism. Hazard's range of knowledge is vast, and whether the subject is operas, excavations, or scientific experiments his brilliant style and powers of description bring to life the thinkers who thought up the modern world.

The Jameses are perhaps the most extraordinary and  distinguished family in American intellectual life. Henry’s novels, celebrated as among the finest in the language, and William’s groundbreaking philosophical and psychological works have won these brothers a permanent place at the center of the nation’s cultural firmament. Less well known is their enigmatic younger sister, Alice. But as Jean Strouse’s generous, probing, and deeply sympathetic biography shows, Alice James was a fascinating and exceptional figure in her own right. Tormented throughout her short life by an array of nervous disorders, constrained by social convention and internal conflict from achieving the worldly success she desired, Alice was nonetheless a vivid, witty writer, an acute social observer, and as alert, inquiring, and engaging a person as her two famous brothers. “The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science,” writes Strouse, “Alice simply lived.”

Now in PaperbackIn Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic reflects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America's great artists. Simic's spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned.

Anna Akhmatova on Osip Mandelstam • Virgil Thomson on Gertrude Stein • Jonathan Miller on Lenny Bruce • Robert Lowell on John Berryman • Stephen Spender on W. H. Auden • Mary McCarthy on Hannah Arendt • John Thompson on Robert Lowell • James Merrill on Elizabeth Bishop • Isaiah Berlin on Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova • Joseph Brodsky on Nadezhda Mandelstam • Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale on George Balanchine • John Richardson on Douglas Cooper • Hector Bianciotti on Jorge Luis Borges Gore Vidal on Dawn Powell • Bruce Chatwin on George Ortiz Philip Roth on Ivan Klíma • Elena Bonner on Andrei Sakharov Elizabeth Hardwick on Murray Kempton • Aileen Kelly on Isaiah Berlin • Murray Kempton on Frank Sinatra • Adam Michnik on Zbigniew Herbert • John Updike on Saul Steinberg Jonathan Mirsky on Noel Annan • Alison Lurie on Edward Gorey Ian Buruma on John Schlesinger • Darryl Pinckney on Elizabeth Hardwick • Colin Thubron on Patrick Leigh FermorTWENTY-SEVEN MEMOIRS OF TRANSFORMING PERSONAL AND INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIPS AMONG WRITERS AND ARTISTS FROM THE PAGES OF THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKSA sense of the intimacy and verve of the memoirs is captured in Darryl Pinckney's description of the premises of The New York Review of Books itself, from whose offices these writings were edited and in whose pages they first appeared: "Books were streaking across the ocean and galleys were zooming in from the West Coast or the East Side, nearly all by messenger, by overnight delivery, because everything was urgent, every contributor was at the center of a drama called his or her 'piece.' Incredible battles went on during press week as indescribable things rotted in the office refrigerator. Someone's laughter in the typesetting studio would provoke to fury someone doing layout next door and the storms, the slammed doors. It was a family."The New York Review of Books, with an international circulation of more than 130,000, began during New York's 1963 newspaper strike when the present editor, Robert B. Silvers, and founding co-editor Barbara Epstein, along with Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, decided to create a new kind of magazine-one in which the most interesting and qualified minds would discuss current books and issues in depth. Since then, every twoweeks, The New York Review has continued to be the journal where the most important issues in American life, culture, and politics are discussed by writers who are themselves a major force in world literature and thought. "The secret of its success, The New York Times wrote, "is this: Its editors' ability to get remarkable writers and thinkers, many of them specialists in their fields, to write lucidly for lay readers on an enormous range of complex, scholarly and newly emerging subjects, issues and ideas." Many of the contributors to The New York Review of Books have written about deep and abiding relationships- both personal and intellectual-with fellow poets, writers, and artists. The Company They Kept, Volume II is a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these friendships that were always stimulating, often inspiring, and sometimes vexing (as Robert Lowell writes about John Berryman: "Hyperenthusiasms made him a hot friend, and could also make him wearing to friends-one of his dearest, Delmore Schwartz, used to say no one had John's loyalty, but you liked him to live in another city").There are historic moments-Isaiah Berlin's conversations with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, Hector Bianciotti's account of the death of Borges-as well as lighthearted ones-Bruce Chatwin's hilarious drunken evening with George Ortiz, and Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale's subway ride with George Balanchine ("…like a mythical guide he made the dingy steps, the sinister train, the underground arrival at the State Theater a Tiepoloesque flight into heaven").Many of the portraits include vivid images that otherwise would have been lost forever: the poet Osip Mandelstam, whom Anna Akhmatova first glimpsed as "a thin young boy with a twig of lily-of-the-valley in his button-hole"; the young Gore Vidal in Dawn Powell's living room suddenly realizing "this is a ménage à trois in Greenwich Village. My martini runs over"; twelve-year-old aspiring cartoonist John Updike writing Saul Steinberg to ask for a cartoon (Steinberg sent one, and another, nearly fifty years later, when Updike turned sixty). Each portrait is written with feeling and fullness of heart.

A New York Review Books Original Élisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, a name, Irène Némirovsky, a once popular novelist, a Russian émigré from an immensely rich family, a Jew who didn't consider herself one and who even contributed to collaborationist periodicals, and a woman who died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew. To her daughter she was a tragic enigma and a stranger. It was to come to terms with that stranger that Gille wrote, in The Mirador, her mother's memoirs. The first part of the book, dated 1929, the year David Golder made Némirovsky famous, takes us back to her difficult childhood in Kiev and St. Petersburg. Her father is doting, her mother a beautiful monster, while Irene herself is bookish and self-absorbed. There are pogroms and riots, parties and excursions, then revolution, from which the family flees to France, a country of "moderation, freedom, and generosity," where at last she is happy. Some thirteen years later Irène picks up her pen again. Everything has changed. Abandoned by friends and colleagues, she lives in the countryside and waits for the knock on the door. Written a decade before the publication of Suite Française made Irène Némirovsky famous once more (something Gille did not live to see), The Mirador is a haunted and a haunting book, an unflinching reckoning with the tragic past, and a triumph not only of the imagination but of love.

Over four decades and a multitude of books, "Colonel" Glen Baxter has built a world and a language all his own-slightly familiar, decidedly abnormal, irresistibly funny. Have you felt the terror of a failed Szechuan dinner? Have you seen what happens at precisely 6:15? Do you know where the beards are stored? Either way, this is the book for you.Baxter's drawings are a delicious stew of pulp adventure novels, highbrow hjinks, and outright absurdity: lonesome cowboys confront the latest in modern art, brave men tremble before moussaka, schoolgirls hoard hashish, and the world's fruits are in constant peril. Wimples abound.This new selection of Baxter's work brings together highlights from the full sweep of his long career, and is sure to enchant both confirmed Baxterians and those iin dire need of an introduction.This NYRC edition is a hardcover with printed endpapers, debossed cover design, and extra-thick paper.

The Glory of the Empire is the rich and absorbing history of an extraordinary empire, at one point a rival to Rome. Rulers such as Basil the Great of Onessa, who founded the Empire but whose treacherous ways made him a byword for infamy, and the romantic Alexis the bastard, who dallied in the fleshpots of Egypt, studied Taoism and Buddhism, returned to save the Empire from civil war, and then retired "to learn to die," come alive in The Glory of the Empire, along with generals, politicians, prophets, scoundrels, and others. Jean d'Ormesson also goes into the daily life of the Empire, its popular customs, and its contribution to the arts and the sciences, which, as he demonstrates, exercised an influence on the world as a whole, from the East to the West, and whose repercussions are still felt today. But it is all fiction, a thought experiment worthy of Jorge Luis Borges, and in the end The Glory of the Empire emerges as a great shimmering mirage, filling us with wonder even as it makes us wonder at the fugitive nature of power and the meaning of history itself.

A New York Review Books OriginalIn 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters' galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram. Originally appearing in literary magazines as well as the feuilleton sections of newspapers, the early stories are characterized by a joyous urgency and the generosity of an unconventional guide. Later pieces take the form of more personal reflections on the writing process, memories, and character studies. All are full of counter-intuitive images and vignettes of startling clarity, showcasing a unique talent for whom no detail was trivial, at grips with a city diving headlong into modernity.