NYRB NEWS
Three NYRB Titles on 2022 Awards Lists
Anna Badkhen‘s upcoming essay collection for New York Review Books, Bright Unbearable Reality, has been included on the 2022 National Book Awards longlist for nonfiction along with nine other titles. The books were selected from a submissions pool of over 600 titles. To see the other books on the list, read about the awards judges, and view other 2022 NBA longlists, click here.
In addition, two recent NYRB titles have landed on the 2022 National Translation Award in Poetry shortlist: Najwan Darwish’s Exhausted on the Cross (NYRB Poets; trans. by Kareem James Abu-Zeid) and Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio (NYRB Classics; trans. D. M. Black). You can read the shortlist citations for both books below:
Exhausted on the Cross
Exhausted on the Cross, Najwan Darwish’s second volume of poetry, is poignant, raw, unflinching, and deeply humane, infusing the sorrow and suffering of occupation and the human condition with a startling lyricism. Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s unforgettable translation in its stark, clean, yet melodic register, invites us into the complexity of Darwish’s poetry, the suppleness of his Arabic, and the uncompromising vision of resistance in the face of oppression that beats at the heart of this marvelous book.
Purgatorio
There is nothing middle-of-the-road about D. M. Black’s version of the middle book of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The translator’s every step is sure, evincing not only his sensitive ear for the cadences of blank verse but also his profound insight into the psychology of the poet as well as of his shades. Black shows great respect for Dante as both a craftsman and a thinker, and in so doing serves the reader as a uniquely competent guide to “that Mountain where the blade of Reason probes us.”
To read about the other two titles on the list, click here.
Amit Chaudhuri Wins James Tait Black Prize for ‘Finding the Raga’
Our heartiest congratulations to Amit Chaudhuri, who this week was announced as the winner of the UK’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography for his 2021 New York Review Books memoir Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music. The award comes with a cash prize of £10,000.
Dr. Simon Cooke, one of the judges in the Biography category, called Finding the Raga “a work of great depth, subtlety, and resonance, which unobtrusively changed the way we thought about music, place, and creativity. Folding the ethos of the raga into its own form, it is a beautifully voiced, quietly subversive masterpiece in the art of listening to the world.”
To read more about this year’s James Tait Black prizes, click here.
Recent Events with Community Bookstore
New York Review Books’ virtual event series with Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore is still going strong. Archives of the events can be found on the bookstore’s YouTube page. Below, you can find a few recent highlights.
Mark Polizzotti and Chris Clarke on Arthur Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat
Marina Warner and Frances Wilson on Warner’s Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir
Alex Andriesse, Saskia Hamilton, Darryl Pinckney, and Merve Emre on The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
Vincent Kling Wins the 2022 Wolff Translator’s Prize for ‘The Strudlhof Steps’
Vincent Kling has been announced as this year’s winner of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his NYRB Classics translation of Heimito von Doderer's novel The Strudlhof Steps. Administered each spring by the Goethe-Institut, the award comes with a prize of $10,000.
In its statement, the Wolff Translator’s Prize jury had this to say about Kling’s efforts:
Our jury was tickled and transported by the translation’s musicality (“contrive, connive, keep the tryst alive”), alliterative allure (“secret sharer of his solitude”), command of nomenclature, and metaphoric inventiveness (“her neck lengthened out over the situation”), its adherence to the long and twisty sentences of the original German, and its introduction of words-that-ought-to-be-words (“advicelets”). We congratulate Vincent Kling on this monumental linguistic and literary achievement, the masterful quality of which is maintained on each of the novel’s more than eight hundred pages. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the very last word of this resplendent translation is “perfection.”
To read the entirety of the jury’s statement and learn more about the prize, click here.
‘The Netanyahus’ Wins the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Our heartiest congratulations to Joshua Cohen, whose novel The Netanyahus (published by New York Review Books in June 2021) was just awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Pulitzer Prize board wrote of the book:
“A mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot.”
To read more about the Prize for Fiction and see the winners in the other categories, click here.
‘Finding the Raga’ on James Tait Black Prize Shortlist
Amit Chaudhuri’s memoir Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music, which was published by New York Review Books last spring, is on the shortlist for the UK’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. The shortlist was selected from 400 books. The winner will be announced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August and will be rewarded a cash prize of £10,000.
To read more about the prize and the other three books on the shortlist, click here.
Two NYRB Titles on Awards Shortlists
Two 2021 New York Review Books titles recently made it on awards shortlists. Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild (trans. Sophie R. Lewis) is a finalist for the French-American Foundation’s 2022 Translation Prize, and Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West) is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award, which recognizes debut works of fiction. The winner of the former award will be announced later this year, and the winner of the latter will be announced during an awards ceremony on April 22, 2022, at 7pm PT.
To see the rest of the shortlist for the FAF Translation Prize, click here. To check out the other Art Seidenbaum Award finalists and to get more info about the L.A. Times Book Prizes award ceremony, click here.
‘The Netanyahus’ Wins a 2021 National Jewish Book Award
Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus, published under the New York Review Books imprint last summer, was recently selected by the Jewish Book Council as the winner of the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction in the 2021 National Jewish Book Awards. In his review of the novel for the JBC, Bob Goldfarb writes: “The Netanyahus is funny, exuberant, and intellectually stimulating, with an absorbing story culminating in a riotous climax — a virtuoso performance by a master. It’s not to be missed.”
You can see a list of the other winners and finalists by clicking here.