Last week, Edwin Frank discussed his greatest literary rediscoveries, the history of the Classics series, and the success of John Williams's Stoner and Magda Szabó's The Door, among other topics, with Susannah Hunnewell on The Paris Review's blog. You can read their conversation here. 

Frank was also interviewed by Yongxi Wu of Lit Hub. Read their discussion about John Williams, Frank's personal connection with Stoner, and American academic life here. 

In the March 19-20, 2016, issue of The Wall Street Journal, Martin Riker reviewed the NYRB Classics edition of Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe's Really the Blues. Read an excerpt below, and the rest of the Riker's review here. 

“American counter-culture classic Really the Blues [is] a stylized oral history that anticipates the Beat novel…Really the Blues is part quixotic adventure novel, part inside-scoop…Mezzrow’s voice is funny, impulsive, full of itself and often spectacularly scatological….Listening to “Mezz” is tremendous fun…the book’s true literary inheritance is its style…one of the great, flawed, jubilant, jive-talking characters of American literature.” —Martin Riker, The Wall Street Journal

Congratulations to Margaret Jull Costa, who was recently honored with a commendation by the judges of the Premio Valle Inclán prize for translation from the Spanish for her translation of Tristana by Benito Peréz Galdós. The judges wrote: "An excellent, modernising translation of a light, slightly mocking novel - a classic - once filmed by Buñuel."

This is the fourth time that Jull Costa has been commended for her translation work by the Premio Valle Inclán prize panel and she has been awarded the prize three times.

We're pleased to share an excerpt from Publishers Weekly's review of Jean Giono's Hill, which NYRB Classics will reissue in a new translation by Paul Eprile, with an introduction by David Abram, in April 2016:

"In this 1929 classic, an elegiac ode to Provence, Giono tells a simple tale of peasants living in a valley...Giono describes every element of the surrounding French landscape in luscious detail, but it is the hill that physically and spiritually dominates the land. Giono delights in watching his characters interact and go about their business of drinking wine, making up stories, and contemplating normal human unhappiness...The ultimate gift of Giono’s short novel is that it allows the reader to travel back to a distant, almost primitive time in rural France."

Read the rest of the review here. 

In the January 28, 2016 issue of The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk, named Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes as one of the last great books she has read. Here's Macdonald on the book, published by NYRB Classics:

"It tells the story of a woman who rejects the life that society has fixed for her in favor of freedom and the most unexpected of alliances. It completely blindsided me: Starting as a straightforward, albeit beautifully written family saga, it tips suddenly into extraordinary, lucid wildness." 

Read the rest of Helen Macdonald's "By the Book" interview here.