Skip to product information
1 of 1

Bambi

Bambi

by Felix Salten, translated from the German by Damion Searls, afterword by Paul Reitter

Regular price $16.95
Regular price Sale price $16.95
Format
Bambi first came out in Vienna a hundred years ago, the work of Felix Salten, a Viennese litterateur, journalist, and man about town, and was an immediate success with readers. An English translation soon appeared with an introduction by the Nobel Prize winner John Galsworthy and was widely and well reviewed. Later Walt Disney made his famous movie of the book, and as a consequence Salten’s intimate, delicate, poetic, and gripping tale of forest life, a book that captures both the calm and the disquiet of the animal world, has come to be thought of as a children’s book. Bambi is certainly a book that children can enjoy, but it is also a moving and lasting contribution to the literature of the natural world. In Damion Searls’s new translation the fawn Bambi and his mother, the groves and thickets of the forest, the open and dangerous space of the great field, the ever-present threat of the human—the whole intricate weave of life and death that Salten handles so deftly—all come alive for a new generation of readers. Paul Reitter’s afterword discusses the surprising political readings to which Salten’s fable of the woods was subjected.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681376318
Pages: 152
Publication Date:

Praise

Returning to Bambi nearly a century after it was published is an opportunity to attune ourselves to its cacophony of sounds, its ripples of gossip, its characters’ headbutting. The book is a rich and busy ecosystem — much like a Viennese café.
—Maddie Crum, Los Angeles Review of Books

The novel combines a richly imagined animal world with the narrative trajectory of a Bildungsroman.
—Leo A. Lensing, TLS

Bambi articulates a tension between fear and desire, and an attempt to dominate one’s emotions to avoid the pitfalls of foolishness. . . Thanks to a new translation from Damion Searls. . . Salten’s name and prose and the true, complex spirit of Bambi are finally restored.
—Farah Abdessamad, Observer

Bambi is a delicious book. Delicious not only for children but for those who are no longer so fortunate. For delicacy of perception and essential truth I hardly know of any story of animals that can stand beside this life study of a forest deer. Felix Salten is a poet.
—John Galsworthy

View full details
  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 
  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 
  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it