NYRB NEWS
NYRB Titles on 2021 End-of-Year Lists
We’re delighted to report that Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West) is on The New York Times Book Review’s list of “The 10 Best Books of 2021.” The NYT said about the novel:
Labatut expertly stitches together the stories of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers to explore both the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs: their immense gains for society as well as their steep human costs. His journey to the outermost edges of knowledge — guided by the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, the physicist Werner Heisenberg and the chemist Fritz Haber, among others — offers glimpses of a universe with limitless potential underlying the observable world, a “dark nucleus at the heart of things” that some of its witnesses decide is better left alone. This extraordinary hybrid of fiction and nonfiction also provokes the frisson of an extended true-or-false test: The further we read, the blurrier the line gets between fact and fabulism.
Read about the other nine books on the list here.
And that’s not all: Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus was selected as one of “The 10 Best Books of 2021" by The Wall Street Journal. You can check out the WSJ’s write-up and see the other books on the list by clicking here.
Two NYRB Titles on The New York Time Book Review’s ‘100 Notable Books of 2021’
Two New York Review Books titles, Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus and Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West), both landed on The New York Times Book Review’s ‘100 Notable Books of 2021’ list. Below, read excerpts from write-ups of the novels in the NYTBR from earlier this year:
An Upcoming NYC In-Person Event with BBC Broadcaster and Composer Stephen Johnson
Stephen Johnson, BBC broadcaster and composer and author of the Notting Hill Editions title How Shostakovich Changed My Mind, will be at the Bohemian National Hall in New York on Thursday, November 18 at 6 p.m. ET for a conversation and book signing. In line with the subject matter of his book, Johnson will speak about music, nature, and the healing effects of art on the troubled human mind. Hosted by the Aspect Chamber Music Series, this free, in-person event will be held before a 7:30 p.m. concert called Songs of Solace, which will feature compositions by Shostakovich, Brahms, and Stephen Johnson himself.
To learn more about the conversation and book signing and to order a free general admission ticket, click here. Tickets for the Songs of Solace concert must be purchased separately.
Recent Virtual Events with Community Bookstore
Last month, New York Review Books authors and contributors participated in four virtual events as part of our ongoing series with Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore. You can read more about the events and watch the archived streams below.
October 7, 2021: D. M. Black and Edwin Frank on Purgatorio
October 14, 2021: Dash Shaw and Greg Hunter on Discipline
October 21, 2021: Benjamín Labatut and Lawrence Weschler on When We Cease to Understand the World
October 28, 2021: Hernan Diaz, Roxana Robinson, and Ed Simon on Edith Wharton’s Ghosts
NYRB Titles on the 2021 National Book Award Shortlist
Two of our 2021 books, Ge Fei's Peach Blossom Paradise (trans. Canaan Morse) and Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West), have both been named as finalists for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Congratulations to the authors and their translators!
The 2021 winner will be announced on November 17. To view the other three finalists and check out the rest of the National Book Award categories, click here.
New York Review Books at the 2021 Brooklyn Book Festival
New York Review Books will be at this year's Brooklyn Book Festival. You can visit us on the Children's Day (Saturday, October 2) at booth #12 at MetroTech Commons, and on the Festival Day (Sunday, October 3) at booths #405 and #406 at Brooklyn Borough Hall and its vicinity. We'll have a diverse assortment of new and classic titles from across our imprints—and they'll all be available at discounted prices!
Two of our authors, Dash Shaw and Benjamín Labatut, will be participating in festival events on October 3. You can register for the virtual panel with Labatut by clicking here and find more info about the in-person panel with Shaw by clicking here.
An Essay on ‘The Stone Face’ in The NY Times
William Gardner Smith's The Stone Face, reissued as an NYRB Classic earlier this month, is the subject of a new essay by James Hannaham in The New York Times. Writes Hannaham:
Smith’s fiction belies a lifelong skepticism. His books, now mostly out of print, are sometimes referred to as protest novels, and while they tackle social issues, they’re far from prescriptive; none ever provides an easy answer. . . . The Stone Face represents the maturing of a voice determined to confound preconceived notions about patriotism, Blackness and sanctuary, and accordingly the story takes no prisoners, so to speak.
To read the rest of the essay, which covers autobiographical details from Smith's life and the historical and social background of the 1963 novel, click here.
Rave Reviews for ‘The Netanyahus’
Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus, published under the New York Review Books imprint late last month, has been receiving high praise from a bevy of outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR's Fresh Air. Read quotes from some of the reviews below:
“Riffing freely on a true story, this brilliant and hilarious new book takes a cozily familiar form, the campus novel, and turns it into a slyly oblique fable about history, identity and the conflicted heart of Jewishness, especially in America.” —John Powers, Fresh Air
“With [The Netanyahus] Cohen proves himself not just America’s most perceptive and imaginative Jewish novelist, but one of its best novelists full stop.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“With its tight time frame, loopy narrator, portrait of Jewish-American life against a semi-rural backdrop, and moments of cruel academic satire, The Netanyahus reads like an attempt, as delightful as it sounds, to cross-breed Roth’s The Ghost Writer and Nabokov’s Pale Fire.” —Leo Robson, The Guardian
“The Netanyahus, like Cohen’s previous novels, is driven by the momentum of its prose. . . . This is a surprising novel, full of quirks and explosive moments.” —Christopher Shrimpton, The Spectator
“Clever, funny, dark, deeply moving, full of references to everyone from Nabokov and the Marx Brothers to Jabotinsky and the late Harold Bloom, The Netanyahus is a joy to read.” —David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
“Cohen’s new book is among his best: a fastidious and very funny book that is one of the most purely pleasurable works of fiction I’ve read in ages.” —Jon Day, Financial Times
“The Netanyahus. . . is a campus novel that is also a novel of ideas—a conjunction less common than one might expect. Luckily it’s also very, very funny.” —Len Gutkin, The Chronicle of Higher Education