The end of the year always brings in a torrent of best-of lists, and in 2023, NYRB titles appeared on several of them. The books selected for praise came from across all of our imprints. Congratulations to our authors, illustrators, and translators for the recognition of their hard work! Below, you can read some highlights from the lists.
Need a House? Call Ms. Mouse! on Slate’s “10 Best Literary Rediscoveries of 2023”
“[A]n utter delight, a book that certain aesthetically oriented children will find endlessly fascinating, picking out detail after tiny detail in Ms. Mouse’s elegant designs for Squirrel, Fox, and Rabbit.”
My Death on Tor.com’s “Best Books of 2023”
“Lisa Tuttle’s My Death, reissued in October, is a perfect uncanny novella about two writers and their blurring identities. It’s not conventionally scary, but it will haunt you.”
The Gull Yettin on The New York Times’s “Year in Graphic Novels”
“[I]t’s one of the strangest comics I’ve ever read and also one of the most affecting. . . . [Kessler] sequences his panels with deliberate simplicity, so every incident in his story becomes as bright and clear as he intends. But he also breaks out of his simple layouts for emphasis and effect, and every time he does so, the decision reminds you how beautiful the individual drawings are.”
Loved and Missed selected as “My Favorite Book of the Year” by Vogue writer Chloe Schama
“Advance apologies if I have a personal relationship with you (friend, book club member, crossing guard at my kids’ school), because you have undoubtedly already heard me say this: I absolutely loved this book. . . . There is a place, an important one, for the novels that give voice to the struggles and drudgeries of parenting. (And we have had many of those novels in recent years.) But what a fresh tonic and a delight to read a book that also allows for its wonders.”
Glowrushes on The New York Times’s “Best Children’s Books of 2023”
“A painter’s brush moves in tandem with an ailing boy’s imagination and, ultimately, his soul in the first English translation of an enchanting 1987 novel by Italy’s foremost living children’s author.”
Exhausted on the Cross on Granta’s “Books of the Year 2023”
“[Darwish’s] scant, grasping lyrical assertions, imagistic and elegiac, space-making and taking, have felt like necessary reading: ‘Night’s content with its skewed vision / day’s a blind man hurling prophecies.’”