Today marks the anniversary of Belgium’s independence from the Netherlands and, in 1831, the coronation of the first king of Belgium. So, it is particularly fitting that Georges Simenon’s Pedigree, the magnum opus of Belgian writing, is released this week. An epic merger of fiction and autobiography, Pedigree has been heralded by Luc Sante as “quite possibly the greatest single work of Belgian literature.”

Simenon, who was born in Liège, Belgium, was the prolific creator of the popular Inspector Maigret series as well as the romans durs, or psychological novels. He wrote over 450 novels and short stories throughout his lifetime, and more than 500 million copies of his books have been printed in over 55 languages. NYRB Classics has previously published nine Simenon titles, including Dirty Snow, Red Lights, and Three Bedrooms in Manhattan.

Pedigree stands alone among Simenon’s works, not only because of its length, scope, and attention to autobiographical detail. It uniquely evokes a national experience, describing his Belgian childhood with both sensory intensity and a full, deep understanding of daily life. Sante, in his introduction to the novel, writes that Pedigree is an unparalleled homage to the Belgian quotidian:

Inhabitants of countries more often depicted in literature may become blasé at reading the same old apercus concerning their lands retailed again and again, but for Belgians who have only experienced things firsthand and unmediated, the effect is startling, a concentrated series of shocks of recognition. All the tropes of petty conversation are there on the page, all the minor superstitions, the strictures on dressing children, the religious-holiday baked goods, the precise cuts of meat that mark different grades of economic well-being, the exact shadings of social cruelty, the odors of shops, the styles of deviance, the disposition of rooms, the forms of address… Pedigree is the embodiment of this homeland of the mind.

Lucille Frackman Backer agrees, writing that “Simenon in Pedigree does for Liège what Joyce did for Dublin: he evokes the city with such immediacy that we feel we’ve walked in its streets.” The autobiographical novel is a tribute not only to Simenon’s own story, but also to the national history it mirrors and probes.

We are delighted to announce that, though published just this month, Frans G. Bengtsson’s The Long Ships has already received two reviews. The San Francisco Chronicle and NPR.org both herald Bengtsson’s novel as a thrilling, intrigue-filled read perfect for the summer.

The Long Ships, originally published in Swedish in 1941, is an epic adventure set in the fantastic world of the tenth century AD. The NYRB Classics edition includes an introduction by long-time enthusiast Michael Chabon, who calls it “a novel with the potential to please every literate human being.”

Chabon is also the novel’s reviewer and recommender for The San Francisco Chronicle, where he champions The Long Ships as this summer’s most exciting read: “It’s thrilling, beautifully written, dry and witty and touching, a classic but little-known historical adventure novel by the Swedish novelist, just out in a handsome reprint from the New York Review of Books, though marred by a tiresome introduction by some windbag.”

Michael Schaub, writing for NPR.org, places The Long Ships at the top of his list of “Historical Fiction: The Ultimate Summer Getaway.” “If you want to be taken back to a time when, say, the ocean was full of Viking long ships instead of leaking oil,” he writes, “wait no more… Even readers with zero interest in the Europe of a millennium ago will want to keep turning the pages. All novels should be so lucky as to age this well.”

Schaub and Chabon agree that The Long Ships is a timelessly entertaining text—it is an escapist indulgence perfect for the summer months.

We are excited to announce that Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver received June reviews in both The Nation and The Believer.

Jansson’s novel, an understated yet exacting portrait of two women trapped in the relentless winter of a small Scandinavian fishing village, was first published in Swedish in 1982, but NYRB’s edition marks its first English publication. In 2008, NYRB Classics reissued The Summer Book, another of Jansson’s novels.

The True Deceiver, as its title suggests, is interested in dissolving the distinctions between truth and deception, honesty and lies. Writes Maria Margaronis in The Nation, “The uncertainties laid bare go to the heart of human relationships: is there such a thing as kindness, or is all generosity ultimately self-serving? Is truthfulness always honorable, or can it be another form of deceit?”

Theodore McDermott, in The Believer, compares Jansson’s intricately constructed prose to a watch: “All those mechanisms [are] carefully crammed into so small a space, performing their task so unrelentingly… The True Deceiver makes storytelling seem simple by marking the narrative in only the most lucid, concrete sentences.” In its spare, incisive language, he argues, the novel brilliantly cultivates the illusion that Jansson and her characters are somehow connected: “Jansson complicates our willingness to believe that The True Deceiver is strictly fiction, encourages us to consider the novel’s world as being real, and, in doing so, deepens our engagement. I’m thinking that this is a stunning novel, a fiction that becomes, through Jansson’s efficient precision, a true deception.”

Margaronis and McDermott are intrigued and compelled by The True Deceiver, and both regard it as a deeply significant work of deliberate uncertainty. Jansson’s novel, they agree, is as relentlessly thought-provoking as it is poignant, eloquent.

NYRB Classics has many reading group guides now available. You can download the PDF for The True Deceiver here and for The Summer Book here .

Wickedly funny and delightfully sad, Three Ladies Beside the Sea is a tale of love found, love lost, and love never-ending. Edward Gorey’s off-kilter Edwardian maidens are the perfect accompaniment to opera librettist Rhoda Levine’s lilting text.

The place is remote:
Three houses beside the sea.
The Characters are Few:
Laughing Edith of Ecstasy,
Edith so happy and gay.
Smiling Catherine of Compromise,
She smiles her life away.
And then there is Alice of Hazard,
A dangerous life leads she.
The question in the plot is quite simple:
Why is Alice up in a tree?
The answer can be discovered:
Edith and Catherine do.

“First, three cheers—large noisy ones—two huzzahs and one hurrah for The New York Review Children’s Collection. They have been reissuing lost and neglected juvenile classics, wonders of children’s literature that a new generation of children will be dazzled by, charmed by, and God willing, read in their beautiful red cloth bindings as they encounter the pleasures of odd characters and freshly minted language which just might beat the joys of video games…they are astonishingly quiet and deliciously gentle, with just a dash of danger, something every child needs in their life to counteract the effects of a noisy, aggressive world….The latest of these books to be reissued is Three Ladies Beside the Sea by Rhoda Levine… Ms. Levine’s wry imagination and Mr. Gorey’s powerfully epicene drawings (figure that one out) constitute a whole new country for a child to visit or for a lucky grandfather to act as tour guide. …This is, of course, a must for the many Edward Gorey fans of all ages, and a chance to discover the fine poetry of Rhoda Levine. I read this one to my five year old grand-daughter because it is just long enough to be engaging and just short enough to be wiggle proof, and just wise enough to set a young imagination free as a bird.” —Sherman Yellen, The Huffington Post

We are especially pleased to announce the publication of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, selected by The Guardian as one of 1,000 novels you must read before you die. Take advantage of a limited 25% discount on this most recent NYRB Classic, and discover the elegant craft of Brian Moore’s debut novel that launched his distinguished literary career.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

By Brian Moore
Afterword by Mary Gordon

Dreary minutes marked the days, but Miss Hearne put loneliness aside on Sunday morning. She was the definition of a city spinster, brought up in Belfast with no family save for an ailing aunt she spent her youth nursing, and barely any friends. She scraped by with an inherited annuity and the earnings from a few piano lessons, moving from boarding house to boarding house—always in what used to be the best parts of the city—and stitching herself further into the seams of a solitary life. But like a new key, Sunday offered threads of opportunity. It was a dependable day for communion (even if it was coerced), and a chance for her to make new impressions, to confess her secret vices and forgive her indiscretions, and above all, it was a new chance to believe that there was something more to passion than suffering, and that maybe, this time, love might finally find her.

The breakfast table at her new boarding house on Camden Street was where she met Mr. Madden. He was an American, or rather an Irishman who’d lived in America for quite some time. His reasons for return were not entirely unclear, although he was surely wealthy from working in the hotel business there. Perhaps he too was looking to open a new door, settle down, and start anew? There was something deeper to him—something darker, she knew the signs—but she would choose to put aside prejudice and wouldn’t pry, because time was ticking and unlike other men, he didn’t look away when Judith caught his eye.

A romance of any sort in a boarding house does not go unnoticed, and soon hushed whispers of disapproval are heard throughout the hallways, especially from the landlady, Mr. Madden’s sister. With her worldly passions threatened and her secret life possibly exposed, Judith turns to The Church that she could once rely on. What she finds instead is a cold confessional full of impassivity—one that fails to bring her any comfort, and which sends her faith further into crisis. She has no option but to repent. After all, penitence gives strength, and attrition leads to absolution. But tell that to a lonely soul, facing an eternity of dreary day after dreary day.

Made into an award winning movie starring Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins, Brian Moore’s compassionate portrait of a woman trapped by disillusionment and destroyed by self and circumstance has forever enshrined Judith Hearne in the gallery of literature’s unforgettable women.

A “very fine writer, also seriously neglected…I just don’t understand why he hasn’t yet won a wider audience. Every good writer I know admires his work. I’ve always thought Judith Hearne is a masterpiece.” —Richard Yates

“Brian Moore [wrote] a superb first novel; The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne reads as freshly, and as heart-breakingly, today as it did when it first appeared in 1955.” —John Banville

“The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is, to my notion, everything a novel should be.” —Harper Lee (New York Times, 1960)

 

View the reading group guide (pdf)

Forty years after it was first published, Troubles, by J G Farrell, was announced, on May 19, 2010, as the winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize — a one-off prize to honour the books published in 1970, but not considered for the prize when its rules were changed.

It won by a clear majority, winning 38% of the votes by the international reading public, more than double the votes cast for any other book on the shortlist.

Troubles is the first in Farrell’s Empire Trilogy, which was followed by The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and The Singapore Grip (1978). The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker Prize in 1973 and was shortlisted for the Best of the Booker, a special award created to mark the 40th anniversary of the prize in 2008. J G Farrell died in 1979. Farrell’s trilogy is published by NYRB Classics in the US & Canada.

Set in Ireland in 1919, just after the First World War, Troubles tells the tragic-comic story of Major Brendan Archer who has gone to visit Angela, a woman he believes may be his fiancée. Her home, from which he is unable to detach himself, is the dilapidated Majestic, a once grand Irish hotel, and all around is the gathering storm of the Irish War of Independence.

The Guardian wrote, “The evidence of change and decay at the Majestic is no parochial phenomenon and it is this feeling of the particular reflecting the universal, a feeling so successfully pervading page after page of this clever book that makes it a tour de force.”

Ion Trewin, Literary Director of the Man Booker Prizes comments, ‘Troubles is a novel of such lasting quality that it has never been out of print in the 40 years since it was first published. Had this been the winning novel in 1970, JG Farrell would have gone on to become the first author to win the Booker Prize twice.”

For more information about the Man Booker Prizes click here.

It’s not easy being Edie, and at only ten years old, there’s nothing fair about being a middle kid in the Cares family. But you have to be an indomitable character if you want to survive a parentless summer by the seaside with snooty brothers, a show-off sister, a pair of very small half-siblings (that you must take sailing), some stolen things, an oncoming hurricane, and, of course, a mystery that needs solving. With the publication of The New York Review Children’s Collection edition of E.C. Spykman’s classic, Terrible, Horrible Edie, she’s back, standing shoulder to shoulder with all the gutsy girls from American juvenile fiction.

A tad bit spoiled, revved up with rebellion, and filled with a sublime curiosity for sleuthing out the truth, even at her most terrifically terrible and humorously horrible, she charms you into cheering for the troublemaker’s chance to finally save the day—the Edie way.

Called “the most uninhibited youngsters in fiction since Richard Hughes wrote The Innocent Voyage” by The New York Times, Edie and her siblings are back in print after more than 30 years. The Chicago Tribune declared it as “must reading for boys and girls of 10 and up.” Take advantage of this limited 30% discount and acquaint the favorite youngster in your life with the courageous and admirably outright Edie Cares.

The New York Review The New York Review Children’s Collection wholeheartedly endorses the Children’s Book Week, and encourages you to visit your local bookstore or the CBC website to find out about more events in your neighborhood. Children’s Book Week began with the simple message that an appreciation of books and a love of reading can change children’s lives. Supported by publishers, teachers, librarians, and booksellers, as well as young people and their caregivers, it is now in its 91st year, and its organizers, the Children’s Book Council, have once again cultivated a fantastic week long celebration of events and outreach.