Andrew Roberts chose two NYRB Classics for his Five Best of “World War II First Hand Accounts” list in Saturday’s The Wall Street Journal. Both Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte and Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman are on the list.

On Kaputt, Roberts wrote “The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte was sent to Russia by the newspaper Corriere della Sera to cover Hitler’s glorious victory over the Bolsheviks, but instead he witnessed the drawn-out Nazi defeat on the Eastern Front. He recorded what he had seen in an autobiographical novel, ‘Kaputt,’ which he had to keep hidden until after the war.” First published in the US in 1946, Kaputt was released by NYRB Classics in 2005.

On Life and Fate, “Taking extensive notes throughout the war, Grossman—a Jew who felt deeply betrayed by the Bolsheviks’ growing anti-Semitism— incorporated the stories into his monumental autobiographical novel, Life and Fate, which has been likened to War and Peace in its scope and ambition.” Confiscated by the KGB, Life and Fate was not published in the US until 1980 and joined the NYRB Classics series in 2006. Life and Fate is one of the series’ bestselling titles.

To read more about Andrew Roberts’ book picks, click here.

Be sure to stop by the NYRB booth (#25-26) at the Brooklyn Book Festival—a wide selection of NYRB Classics and Little Bookroom titles will be on sale at discounted prices. Plus, Karen Seiger will sign copies of her new book, Markets of New York City: A Guide to the Best Artisan, Farmer, Food and Flea Markets, from 1-3PM at the booth.

And, don’t miss the event sponsored by The New York Review of Books:
The Economic Crisis and What To Do About It
11AM at St. Francis College Auditorium (180 Remsen Street)
Free and Open to the Public

A conversation with Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, moderated by Jeff Madrick—all frequent contributors to The New York Review of Books. Introduced by Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books.

Tickets are free and will be distributed one hour before the start of the program from the Brooklyn Book Festival Information Booths.

For more information, visit www.brooklynbookfestival.org.

New York Review Books would like to wish you a Labor Day unlike Steve Hogan’s. The protagonist of Georges Simenon’s dark psychological thriller Red Lights, Steve is one of the millions of Americans hitting the highway on the Friday before Labor Day weekend. He and his wife, Nancy, are traveling from New York City to Maine, where their children are at summer camp. But somewhere in the midst of the thick traffic and heavy drinking of the trip, Steve “goes into the tunnel”: a mental fugue characterized by pathological uncertainty, dangerous strangers, and the uncanny.

Red Lights, one of the prolific Simenon’s nearly two hundred novels, is remarkable for its flawless American flavor. It combines the distinctive ingredients of the romans durs—chilling clarity, a strange departure from normal life, and a moment of rapture that will ensure the plot’s downfall—with the sensory detail of the American public holiday.

Simenon’s thriller, heralded by New York Magazine as “a truly chilling road trip novel,” was also named by Men’s Journal as one of the “15 Best Thrillers Ever Written.” Red Lights is a gripping read with an extra shot of spine-chill this September 6; we dare you to read it.

“The day promised to be exceptionally torrid.”

So Albert Cossery begins his novel, The Jokers, a tale that, from its opening sentence, is packed with charged wit and barbed satire. The Jokers, an NYRB Classics Original appearing in its first English translation, has been making headlines since its July publication.

The San Francisco Chronicle includes The Jokers on its list of July “Grabbers”: new books with gripping first sentences. And Benjamin Moser, in the August edition of Harper’s Magazine, writes a resounding description of the novel:

“We’re in a country much like Cossery’s native Egypt, which he left in 1931 to spend most of the rest of his life in a Parisian hotel. There, at a rate of one novel per decade (one sentence per week, he claimed), he composed a body of work whose primary theme is the relation of power to powerlessness.

The Jokers describes how a motley group of fainéants conspire to bring down an odious governor by printing and distributing posters that praise him so extravagantly that even the police, whose job it is to ensure oleaginous devotion to their boss, grow concerned…As the conspirators begin to score successes against the governor, who is increasingly enchanted by his own propaganda, Cossery introduces a Dostoevskyan figure, Taher, whose former friend Karim, the author of the seditiously ass-kicking poster, was once, like Taher, a hardened revolutionary. Now Karim dedicates himself to political tomfoolery and leisurely dalliances with prostitutes; Taher is outraged that the police think he and his comrades would have anything to do with such frivolity. ‘They make us look ridiculous to the police. And I don’t like that. We’re not pranksters!’”

The “grabbing” satirical edge of Cossery’s novel invites mayhem, laughter, and reflection—it promises, in other words, to be an exceptionally torrid read.

We are thrilled to announce that Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion is now on sale.

Stafford, a writer perhaps best known for her marriages to Robert Lowell, Oliver Jensen, and A.J. Liebling, was the heralded author of three novels and many short stories. The Mountain Lion, her second novel, is a devastating, unconventional coming-of-age story.

Ralph and his younger sister Molly, a pair of imaginative, precocious adolescents growing up in a genteel suburb of Los Angeles, are an inseparable pair. Fiercely independent and more than a little wild, they have no patience for the restrictions of polite society and are delighted by the opportunity to spend summers on their uncle’s Colorado mountain ranch. However, the exhilaration of the Colorado landscape, vividly depicted in Stafford’s mandarin prose, quickly becomes overwhelming as Ralph and Molly begin their unsettling transformation into adulthood. In her afterword, Kathryn Davis writes that their poignant, brutal metamorphosis is what sets The Mountain Lion apart from other texts:

The Mountain Lion is often characterized as a coming-of-age story, but it is not a conventional coming-of-age story. This book is not a conventional anything. It is one of a kind. It is freakish—like the girl at its heart—a marvel…[Its] details—not so much realistic as unreal—accumulate and grow in intensity as the novel unfolds, the world they limn increasingly disturbing, creating in the reader a similarly queer and horrible feeling…It is a story about the impossibility of growing up and the impossibility of remaining a child.

“If not the best novel of the 1940s, The Mountain Lion is a very fine book indeed, a classic of childhood rage and bewilderment told in a superbly controlled colloquial prose.” — Elaine Showalter

This gripping story, out of print for more than a decade, is filled with transformative power and intense insight.

“The month of January. Night time. North wind blowing. The fire in the hearth was going out.” This is where Alexandros Papadiamantis’s The Murderess begins—in cramped, dark quarters on a dirtpoor island in the Aegean Sea. A man snores, a sleepless woman tosses and turns, a baby coughs and cries. It is a hundred years ago, but it could be anytime, and it goes on. Hadoula, a woman of sixty or so, an old witch her neighbors say, is trying to rock the baby, her granddaughter, to sleep, even as she gives way to “bitter wandering thoughts.” All her life Hadoula has shown herself to be a clever, industrious, tough woman, and yet now it strikes her:

She had never done anything except serve others. When she was a little girl she had served her parents. When she was mated, she became a slave to her husband, and at the same time, because of her strength and his weakness, she was his nurse. When she had children she became a slave to her children, and when they had children of their own, she was slave to her grandchildren.

Her life, or anywoman’s. Boys are frail and often die. Grown up, they go away to sea or America. Women are left behind looking after the helplessly young and the hopelessly old, struggling to scrape together dowries for daughters so that their daughters can enjoy the same life their mothers are sick of. Hadoula finds herself hoping against hope that her sickly granddaughter will die. And then she realizes that she can take fate into her own hands. “That was all,” the story goes.

Crime is freedom. Day breaks. Hadoula, unsuspected, leaves the house of mourning and goes to the mountains to pick herbs. She looks for a sign that God approves what she has done. Papadiamantis is as extraordinary a describer of the natural world, full of mingled welcome and menace, as he is of the toiling mind and heart:

The old woman climbed higher up to the steep top of the valley. Below her the river cut deep through the Acheilas ravine, and its stream filled all the deep valley with soft murmurs. In appearance it was motionless and lakelike, but in reality perpetually in motion under the tall and longtressed planes. Among mosses and bushes and ferns it prattled secretly, kissed the trunks of the trees, creeping like a serpent along the length of the valley, green-coloured from leafy reflections, kissing and biting at once at the rocks and the roots, a murmuring, limpid stream, full of little crabs which ran to hide in piles of sand, while a shepherd, letting the little lambs graze on the dewy greenery, came to lean down over the water, and pull out a stone to hunt them with.

Crime is freedom, but also compulsion. It is a new world that must be discovered again and again. Eventually, Hadoula’s own uneasy conscience leads her to flee her village and family. Two policemen (Papadiamantis always identifies them as the two policemen, as if they were interchangeable) pursue her. They are as clueless and bumbling as the Keystone Kops—Hadoula always evades them—and yet, stupid as they are, they are always still there, still on her trail. Hadoula flees to the mountain at the center of the island and she flees to the sea. She seeks open space, the opposite of the cramped, abysmal conditions that she has endured throughout her life, but then there is nowhere left for her to flee.

A feeling of inescapable confinement is central to this stark and startling short novel, even as the story is no less about the irrepressible desire to break free. After her initial crime, Hadoula can find no rest. She has left behind the life she was born to only to find that she is haunted by herself. She has discovered herself as a crime seeking solution, or, more traditionally, a sinner salvation.

This restlessness and searchingness is captured in the very language of Papadiamantis’s book, which mixes registers that are often kept apart: the sacred and the secular, the profane and the profound, the cruel and the comic. It is a wild book. Papadiamantis, who lived from 1851 to 1911 and is commonly described as the founder of modern Greek fiction, is notoriously hard to translate. The translator, the late Peter Levi, a fine poet who served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, discusses the difficulties and how he dealt with them in his introduction to The Murderess. What he came up with here—with a little help, he acknowledges, from John Berger—is beautiful and strange and a real work in English. Listen, for example, to the liquid tones and artful repetitions in the river passage quoted above.

What kind of book is this? A murder story, obviously, and a story of flight and pursuit. It is also a story of self-discovery and self-abandonment. It is certainly a story that holds the reader’s attention through and through. Readers may be reminded of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, of The Mayor of Casterbridge or Camus’s The Stranger. Above all, it’s a book that hails from the borderlands. Papadiamantis wrote it at a time and in a place that lacked immediate models for such an endeavor. The novel was a novelty. He had read the new French realists and longtime popular fixtures like Dumas and Walter Scott. At the same time, he had studied to be a priest and was steeped in the old Greek liturgy. From these unlikely elements, he had to fashion not just a story but a new language and a whole genre. It’s that, I think, that gives this work its uncanny power, the power of first discovery. Encountering this book, about a woman’s desperate effort to defeat the inevitability of fate, we feel the force of Papadiamantis’s own primal encounter with the possibilities of fiction.

A last word. Long ago, Ben Sonnenberg published a fine piece about Papadiamantis by Maria Margaronis in his magnificent quarterly Grand Street. It was a rare notice of this great writer in English, and I remember feeling that I must read him. So much began with Ben, who, though confined for many years to a wheelchair, possessed a sensibility and intellect of marvelous reach and agility. He died in June. He was a great supporter of New York Review Books and a dear friend. To his suggestion, NYRB Classics owes Tibor Dery’s Niki and a series of new translations from great Spanish authors that we will publish in years to come. To our Children’s Collection, he contributed The Bear That Wasn’t and The Sorely Trying Day. He is greatly missed. Who will tell us what to do next now?

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics