NYRB NEWS
Bastille Day Praise for When the World Spoke French
In the July 9th issue of The Wall Street Journal, Frederic Raphael praised the book as “a magisterial compendium” and a “grandiose elegy,” and in the July 10th issue of The New York Times Book Review, Caroline Weber describes Fumaroli’s study of Francophile personalities as “a wild and woolly human drama, its players every bit as multifaceted (and flawed) as those making headlines today.” Read more from Raphael’s review here, and from Weber’s review here.
Love’s Work praised by Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian (UK)
“I struggle to think of a finer, more rewarding short autobiography than this…And for those who have suffered for and in love, this may prove to be one of the most useful books they will ever read. Here there are no soupy platitudes which deal with that near-miraculous unlikelihood, the happy and eternal love affair: Rose is the enemy of fatuity, which you had better be, if you are going to give any honest, meaningful answer to the question of whether the agonies of love are worth its joys (or vice versa).” —Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian (UK).
Read the rest of this review here.
When the World Spoke French
By Marc Fumaroli
Translated from the French by Richard Howard
When the World Spoke French, Marc Fumaroli’s engaging portrait of a time when French was the intellectual lingua franca of Europe and beyond, is appearing in English for the first time in a translation by Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Howard.
During the eighteenth century, from the death of Louis XIV until the Revolution, French culture set the standard for all of Europe. In Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, England, Russia, and Germany, among kings and queens, diplomats, military leaders, writers, aristocrats, and artists, French was the universal language of politics and intellectual life. In When the World Spoke French, Marc Fumaroli presents a gallery of portraits of Europeans and Americans—including Catherine the Great, Frederick II, Lord Chesterfield and Benjamin Franklin—who conversed and corresponded in French, along with excerpts from their letters and other writings.
Despite their differences, these men and women were all irresistibly attracted to the ideal of human happiness inspired by the Enlightenment, whose capital was Paris and whose king was Voltaire. Whether they were in Paris or far away, speaking French connected them in spirit with all those who desired to emulate Parisian tastes, style of life, and social pleasures.
“Letters and memoirs composed in French from major figures… along with relative unknowns…map a trail from the enlightened salons of Paris to the partition of Poland by Prussia, Russia, and Austria in the 18th century…. The smooth translation by Pulitzer winner Howard facilitates appreciation of the witty writers…. Whether randomly selecting a chapter or treating the book as a saga sweeping inexorably toward the Polish debacle and the French Reign of Terror, readers cannot fail to find their own enlightenment in these gems.” —Publishers Weekly
Read the introduction (pdf)
Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1915-2011
It was a sad day this past Friday, June 10, when we learned that Patrick Leigh Fermor had passed away at the age of ninety-six. We are extremely proud and fortunate to have published six of Leigh Fermor’s books in the NYRB Classics series, and just last year we published In Tearing Haste, a collection of correspondence between Leigh Fermor, or “Paddy” as he was known to his many friends, and Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire and the youngest of the celebrated Mitford sisters.
It was A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water that confirmed Leigh Fermor’s fame as a great writer. At the age of eighteen, he set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. Originally published more than forty years after his extraordinary foot journey, A Time of Gifts gives the account of his adventures as far as Hungary, while Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains.
Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero and an intrepid traveler. The New York Times, in its obituary, characterized his work as being filled with “sly humor, curiosity, wide-ranging social connections and sympathies, familiarity with arcane history and a dashing literary style steeped in the ancient writing of Greece and Rome.”
But he was more than a great travel writer, he was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable writers.
Perfect Father’s Day gifts from NYRB Classics
The Judges of the Secret Court
By David StactonIntroduction by John Crowley
David Stacton’s long-lost novel, The Judges of the Secret Court, constitutes one of the most graceful and profound accounts of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and indeed of the Civil War itself. Today’s reader will at last have a chance to experience the masterpiece that The New York Times called “a staggering and compulsive novel” and “a triumph of the recreative imagination.”
Centering on the Booth brothers, Edwin and John Wilkes, Stacton’s gripping novel reimagines the social, emotional, and political milieu that prompted John Wilkes to target Abraham Lincoln. Wielding his lucid prose style and intelligence, Stacton transports his readers into John Wilkes’ mind on the day of the assassination and follows the troubled actor into The Ford Theater and, later, in his mad dash through the backwoods of Maryland and Virginia. Stacton’s novel is a breathtaking and enlightened exploration of political rage and what it means when a nation loses an icon of hope and wisdom.
“The Judges of the Secret Court is a superior historical fiction, accurate in detail, moving and compelling narrative and character. But it is something more than this as well, an exploration by a brilliant and thoughtful writer of the labyrinthine ways of good and evil.” —Robert R. Kirsch, The Los Angeles Times
Reveille in Washington: 1860-1865
By Margaret LeechIntroduction by James M. McPherson
Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington recreates the life and atmosphere of the United States capital around and during the time of the Civil War. Written with the creative vibrancy of a novelist and the sharp accuracy of a seasoned historian, Leech’s depiction of Washington, its politicians, socialites, and artists during a time of strife and violence resonates with freshness and gripping urgency, even for our contemporary times.
The author focuses on the everyday politics and preoccupations of Washington at the time. From the stench of corpse-littered streets to the plunging lace on Mary Lincoln’s evening gowns, Margaret Leech illuminates the city and its familiar figures—among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, William Seward, and Mary Surratt—in intimate and fascinating detail. Leech’s book, still considered one of the major works on the Civil War, is truly one of the most engrossing and vivid accounts of this pivotal period in our nation’s history.
Songs of Kabir praised by August Kleinzahler in The New York Times Book Review
A glowing review of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Songs of Kabir appeared in the May 29th issue of The New York Times Book Review.
“Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s new translation of Kabir brings the poetry of the great 15th-century Indian poet and holy man to life in English for the first time. Not that others haven’t tried: Pound, Robert Bly and, most notably, Rabindranath Tagore in 1915, with a version consisting of thees, thous and thines, delivered in a sandalwood-scented prayer-book-ese that would not have been out of place atop a teak sidetable at one of Mme. Blavatsky’s legendary seances. But it is Mehrotra who has succeeded in capturing the ferocity and improvisational energy of Kabir’s poetry.” —August Kleinzahler, The New York Times Book Review
Plus, Songs of Kabir was applauded by Chandrahas Choudhury in the May 13 issue of The Wall Street Journal.
“Kabir’s famed iconoclasm, speed of thought, slashing paradoxical style, metaphorical zest and rhetorical brilliance have rarely been rendered into English better than in Mr. Mehrotra’s versions.” —Chandrahas Choudhury, The Wall Street Journal
Selected and translated from the Hindi by
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Preface by Wendy Doniger
A Traveller in Time
The New York Review Children’s Collection is pleased to present A Traveller in Time, a historical adventure story, by Alison Uttley. This new title, along with a selection of books by other British
writers of children’s literature, are available for a limited time at 30% off.
A Traveller in Time
By Alison UttleyWith chapter opening illustrations by Phyllis Bray
Penelope Taberner Cameron was a solitary and sickly girl, a reader and a dreamer. With a vivid imagination, she imagines what life would be like in other places and times. When her mother decides that it is time for Penelope to spend some time outside of London, she sends her daughter to visit relatives at Thackers, a family
farmhouse in the English countryside. Penelope soon discovers that Thackers is not just a quaint country home, but also a portal into the past.
I, Penelope Taberner Cameron, tell this story of happenings when I was a young girl. To this day every detail of my strange experience is as clear as light…
With these words, our guide and heroine begins her tale of how a simple trip to the country transported her back to Elizabethan times. At Thackers, Penelope finds herself slipping in and out of the sixteenth-century where, much to her surprise, she becomes part of a family that has embroiled itself in a plot to free their beloved Mary, Queen of Scots, from prison. Even with her twentieth-century knowledge, Penelope remains helpless to keep the family—and herself—safe from danger and finds she is living an adventure bigger than any she could have imagined. Aware of the tragedy that lies ahead for her Elizabethan family, Penelope must confront serious questions about freedom, honor, and history as Mary’s impending doom approaches.
Uttley captures the slow loveliness of farm and country life in both centuries, even in the midst of gripping, historical intrigue. Fans of L. M. Boston’s Green Knowe series and Madeleine L’Engle’s A
Wrinkle in Time will enjoy reading Alison Uttley’s thrilling and
thoughtful novel.
A Traveller in Time
By Alison Uttley
For ages 8-14
Retail: $17.95
Special Offer: $12.57 (30% off)
May Classics
We are pleased to announce two new May releases from NYRB Classics: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, Bohumil Hrabal’s stunning confessional novel and the first work from a Czech writer to be included in the NYRB Classics series; and Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, a sharp and touching meditation inspired by the beloved author’s confrontation with cancer and the questions of how to overcome despair in the face of loss.
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
By Bohumil HrabalIntroduction by Adam Thirlwell
Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim
Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is an ebullient, gallivanting novel that encapsulates the world vision of one of the Czech Republic’s best-loved authors.
Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s rambling, rambunctious masterpiece is all these and more. Speaking one day to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué proceeds to tell the story of his life—or at least to unburden himself of a lifetime’s worth of stories. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventures and domestic feuds, of what things were like “in the days of the monarchy” and how they’ve changed since.
As the book tumbles restlessly forward, and the comic tone takes on darker shadings, we realize we are listening to a man talking as much out of desperation as from exuberance. Part drunken boast, part soul-rending confession, part metaphysical poem on the nature of love and time, Dancing Lessons (which unfolds in a single monumental sentence) shows why Milan Kundera, John Banville, and Louise Erdrich were admirers of Hrabal’s work.
Retail: $14.00
Special Offer: $10.50 (25% off)
Love’s Work
By Gillian RoseIntroduction by Michael Wood
Equal parts memoir and work of philosophy, Love’s Work is a stunning and inspiring book written by the late, beloved professor and philosopher Gillian Rose when she was dying of cancer. Through unforgettable anecdotes and musings, Rose shares her “life affair” with love, and the struggle for love, in all its forms.
In this book, Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce, her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others.
Love’s Work is a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.
The NYRB Classics edition includes Geoffrey Hill’s poem, “In Memoriam: Gillian Rose.”
Retail: $14.00
Special Offer: $10.50 (25% off)