New York Review Books Classics
Author
Author
Language
English
Description
Patrick Leigh Fermor set off as a teenager to make his way across Europe, as recorded in his classic memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. Later he fought with local partisans against the Nazi occupiers of Crete. A Time to Keep Silence stands out among Leigh Fermor s various tales of travel and adventure because it is more an inward than an outward voyage. Here Leigh Fermor chronicles his several sojourns in some of Europe...
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
Just before his death, Sanford Friedman completed this, his final novel, something entirely different from anything he, or for that matter anyone, had written before - Conversations with Beethoven, a moving meditation on greatness and pettiness, vulnerability and genius, that is as elegiac as it is witty and engaging.
4) A legacy
Author
Language
English
Description
"A Legacy is the tale of two very different families. The Merzes are members of the Jewish upper bourgeoisie of Berlin and direct descendants of Henriette Merz, friend of Goethe and Mirabeau. But this imposing legacy has long since ceased to mean much of anything in the Merzes' huge town house, where the family devotes itself to little more than enjoying its comfort and ensuring its wealth. The Feldens are landed Catholic aristocracy, well off but...
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[2016]
Language
English
Description
"One of the most celebrated writers of criticism in nineteenth-century Spain, Leopoldo Alas employed his satirical talent to powerful and humorous effect in fiction as well. In His Only Son, Bonifacio Reyes, a romantic flautist by vocation--and a failed clerk and kept husband by necessity--dreams of a novelesque life. Tied to his shrill and sickly wife by her purse strings, he enters timidly into a love affair with Serafina, a seductive second-rate...
Author
Publisher
New York Review of Books
Pub. Date
[2016]
Language
English
Description
"The hero of The Invisibility Cloak lives in contemporary Beijing--where everyone is doing their best to hustle up the ladder of success while shouldering an ever-growing burden of consumer goods--and he's a loser. Well into his forties, he's divorced (and still doting on his ex), childless, and living with his sister (her husband wants him out) in an apartment at the edge of town with a crack in the wall the wind from the north blows through while...
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[2016]
Language
English
Description
"Paris Vagabond is an unclassifiable masterpiece, a book that purports to be a novel but, accompanied as it is by the photographs of Patrice Molinard, is as much a brilliant documentary as a work of the imagination. In rich prose, suffused with the language of the street, and brilliantly rendered in English by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Jean-Paul Clebert captures the essence of a long-gone Paris of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast: a society of...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Natalia Ginzburg, one of Italy's great writers, introduced A Family Lexicon, her most celebrated work, with an unusual disclaimer: "The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented." A Family Lexicon re-creates with extraordinary objectivity the small world of...
9) Late fame
Author
Publisher
New York Review of Books
Pub. Date
[2015]
Language
English
Description
"An NYRB Classics Original One seemingly ordinary evening, Eduard Saxberger arrives home to find the fulfillment of a long-forgotten wish in his sitting room: A visitor has come to tell him that the youth of Vienna have discovered his poetic genius. Saxberger has written nothing for thirty years, yet he now realizes that he is more than merely an Unremarkable Civil Servant after all: He's a Venerable Poet for whom Late Fame is inevitable--if, that...
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
A landmark of 20th Century literature about New York in the late 1960s, now in English for the first time. As a novel, Uwe Johnson's masterpiece, Anniversaries, is at once daringly simple in conception and wonderfully complex and engaging in effect. Late in 1967, Johnson, already one of the most celebrated German novelists of his generation, set out to write a book that would take the form of an entry for every day of the year that lay ahead. The...
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
"Aickman's superbly written tales terrify not with standard thrills and gore but through a radical overturning of the laws of nature and everyday life. His territory of the strange, of the 'void behind the face of order,' is a surreal region that grotesquely mimics the quotidian: Is that river the Thames, or is it even a river? What does it mean when a prospective lover removes one dress, and then another--and then another? Do a herd of cows in a...
12)
Havoc
Author
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
"In 1941, when Germany turned against the USSR, tens of thousands of Poles--men, women, and children who were starving, sickly, and impoverished--were released from Soviet prison camps and allowed to join the Polish army being formed in the south of Russia. One of the survivors who made the difficult winter journey was the painter and reserve officer Józef Czapski. General Anders, the army's commander in chief, assigned Czapski the task of receiving...
14) Ivory pearl
Author
Publisher
The New York Review of Books
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
"Set in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s, in the days leading up to the Revolution--Manchette's unfinished masterpiece with a fearless female protagonist. Four of the ten titles in Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated 1970s cycle of hard-boiled novels, which the author originally dubbed neo-polars, or "neo-crime novels," have now appeared in English translation. Manchette is beginning to have a significant following among English-language readers,...
16) A king alone
Author
Publisher
New York Review of Books
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
This is the first English-language translation of Jean Giono's 1947 masterpiece, Un Roi Sans Divertissement, A King Without Diversion , which takes its title from Pascal's famous remark that "a man without diversions is a man with misery to spare." Giono's novel is an existential detective story set in a snowbound mountain village in the mid-nineteenth century. Deep in winter, inhabitants of the village begin mysteriously to disappear, and Langlois...
17) Three summers
Author
Publisher
New York Review of Books
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
A tender story about three sisters coming of age in Greece over the course of three summers, now available after being out of print for over twenty years. Three Summers is the story of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the Second World War. Living in a big old house surrounded by a beautiful garden are Maria, the oldest sister, as sexually bold as she is eager to settle down and have a family of her own; beautiful but...
Author
Publisher
NYRB, New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
"The Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro is one of the masters of the short story and a major contributor to the great flourishing of Latin American literature that followed the Second World War. In a letter to an editor, Ribeyro said about his stories, 'in most of [them] those who are deprived of words in life find expression-- the marginalized, the forgotten, those condemned to an existence without harmony and without voice. I have restored to...
20) Divorcing
Author
Language
English
Description
"A stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by one of the most interesting minds of the 20th century, now back in print for the first time since 1969. Sophie Blind is starting a new life. She has left her husband Ezra and taken her three children to Paris. She has lovers there and another in New York. She is lecturing and writing. And she is compulsively reviewing her own history, having resumed the "lifelong struggle" of "coming into...
21) The end of me
Author
Publisher
New York Review of Books
Pub. Date
[2020]
Language
English
Description
"A moving tale about middle age, divorce, modern love, and returning home by one of the great American storytellers. Asher's career as a Hollywood screenwriter has come to a humiliating end; so has his latest marriage. Returning to New York, where he grew up, he takes a room at a hotel and wonders what, well into middle age as he is, he should do next. It's not a question of money; it's a question of purpose, maybe of pride. In the company of an arch...
Author
Publisher
New York Review of Books
Pub. Date
[2020]
Language
English
Description
"From Nikolai Leskov's enormous and varied literary output over some forty years, we have selected six works which represent each period and the contrasting genres and subjects of his fiction. Two of these stories - 'The Unmercenary Engineers' and 'The Innocent Prudentius' - have never been translated into English before. Of the other four, 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' received a definitive, accurate translation by Robert Chandler some years ago, and...
23) Motley stones
Author
Publisher
New York Review of Books
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"The first complete English translation of the nineteenth-century Austrian innovator's evocative, elemental cycle of novellas. For Kafka he was my fat brother ; Thomas Mann called him one of the most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping storytellers in world literature. Often misunderstood as an idyllic poet of beetles and buttercups, the 19th-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter has been rediscovered in recent years...
24) Living pictures
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
"The prolonged German siege of Leningrad during the Second World War was among the most destructive sieges in history, leading to mass starvation and well over a million deaths. The contemporary Russian poet and scholar Polina Barskova, born in Leningrad, has done extensive research on the siege in archives in St. Petersburg, research that has borne fruit in Living Pictures, an extraordinary dramatization of life under the most extreme of circumstances....
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[2023]
Language
English
Description
"Collection of stories by Paul Lafargu including The Right to Be Lazy; A Capitalist Catechism; The Legend of Victor Hugo and Memories of Karl Marx. Paul Lafargue's masterpiece, The Right To Be Lazy, at once funny and serious, witty and profound, elegant and forceful, is a logical expansion of The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness announced by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. It was not only extremely popular but also brought about...
26) Telluria
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Telluria is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe, China, and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology or identity, a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds, in which no one power dominates. What does, however, travel everywhere...
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
"The Wounded Age begins with a conversation between an unnamed couple, referred to as the Man and the Woman: "I'm leaving soon, he says. / Where, she asks. / East. The mountains." We are given no names, barely any punctuation, just the barest trail of dialogue set as verse: this is the spare style and austere language of the canonical Turkish author Ferit Edgü, a master of distillation. In the two books paired here and translated into English for...
28) Our philosopher
Author
Publisher
The New York Review of Books
Pub. Date
[2023]
Language
English
Description
""O, it has happened little by little, as many things simply happen little by little, Mother said, and told us everything about Herr Veilchenfeld, as far as it was known to her." Germany, late 1930s. Walking into town on a hot summer evening, the elderly professor of philosophy Herr Veilchenfeld encounters a group of local drunks. He is humiliated and assaulted; his hair is shorn. The police "don't interfere in such minor matters." What happens to...
29)
Mourning a breast
Author