Hearty congratulations to Len Rix, who was just announced the winner of the 2018 PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Magda Szabó's novel Katalin Street.

From the judges’ citation: “The jury is proud to honor Len Rix’s exceptional translation of Magda Szabo’s novel Katalin Street, which tracks the intertwined lives of three Budapest families before and after the devastation of World War II. This beautiful translation illuminates Szabo’s deep humanity. Translating Katalin Street‘s intricate, elegant text required tremendous subtlety and artistry to achieve such flawlessness, and Rix clearly possesses the mastery to allow Szabo herself to stand out as an exemplary writer. This translation from the Hungarian does that, and Len Rix has gained lifelong admirers among the jury.”

To see the other winners of the 2018 PEN Literary Awards, click here.

2018 is in full swing now, but we're still excited that several books from NYRB made the "best-of" lists at the end of last year. Here's a handful of the selections:

In The New Statesman's "Best Books of the Year, 2017," Geoff Dyer writes, "My favourite discovery this year was the reissue of Eve Babitz's Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh and LA. First published in 1977, it’s a collection of linked, neurotically funny, autobiographical stories about the kind of stuff you would expect from southern California in the 1970s. The sensual pleasures of the prose are overseen by a blue-sky metaphysics....There’s no satire here – that would be too easy. It is more like a series of intoxicated love letters that have the potential to become an endlessly postponed suicide note."

In Bookforum's "Hit Parade: Writers Choose the Best Books of the Year," Sheila Heti writes, “One of my favorite books from 2017 is the reprint of Difficult Women, by David Plante. Though some reviewers found Plante’s book ‘morally indefensible,’ this objection sounds more like a veiled judgment of his subjects.... It’s funny, original, and risky, and it concludes with an index comparing the three subjects on such matters as abortion, alcohol, and animals; an amusingly absurd end.”

In NPR.com's "2017's Great Reads," Etelka Lehoczky writes, "Here's a terrific example of the current wave of great comics from Europe. Dominique Goblet's approach [in Pretending is Lying] is postmodern, with a scruffy, anything-goes mix of styles and moods, but it's marked everywhere by her forays into photography. She intersperses her tale – an autobiographical account of family, a lover, truth, lies and brutality – with images that look like photos."

And Chris Raschka's The Doorman's Repose made Publishers Weekly's "Best Middle Grade Books of the Year"—here's what they say: “Raschka brings readers to Manhattan's Upper East Side in this delightful novel told through linked stories, set in and around a fictional apartment building. With a quasi-sentient elevator and stories about mice families and city-mandated opera singers, it's an off-kilter vision of New York City that feels simultaneously true in its bones."

Here's to more good books in 2018! 

We were saddened to hear of the death of the writer Jean d'Ormesson yesterday. Author of The Glory of the Empire, which won the Grand Prize for fiction from the Académie française, d'Ormesson wrote over thirty books, very few of which have ever been translated into English. Daniel Mendelsohn wrote about the author and his genre-defying Glory of the Empire in the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of the book:

The temptation to take both the book and its author lightly is one that has been encouraged by d’Ormesson himself, a genial celebrity of the French literary world who enjoys hinting that he never really mastered the serious stuff. “I remained rather good in history and literature, but was always little more than a zero in philosophy,” he wrote in a 1966 memoir called Au revoir et merci, referring to his high-school days in the 1930s at the prestigious École normale supérieure....d’Ormesson’s autobiographical writings are filled with blithe references to his intellectual shortcomings. “I was, alas, an excellent mediocrity,” he laments apropos of his school days; “my life was a little bit useless, like my writing,” he comments somewhere else. Above all, he claims to be chagrined by his failure to master the “queen of sciences.” “Like a man who can possess every woman with the exception of the one he wants, I did a little history, a little German,a little French, but only philosophy, which wouldn’t have me, fascinated me."

D’Ormesson has surely been too hard on himself. To be sure, many of the pleasures provided by The Glory of the Empire are those afforded by popular literature and popular history both: In and of itself, the “history” that d’Ormesson invents, filled with all the high drama, grand gestures, and memorable characters you get in everyone from Herodotus to Arnold Toynbee, makes for a gripping page-turner. And yet, forty-five years after its first publication, what strikes you about The Glory of the Empire is what you could call its philosophical dimension: a clear-eyed vision of history and the pitfalls of writing history that a thinker of more strident ideological and intellectual pretensions might never have achieved.

Read the entire introduction here.

This month, on November 27, the NYRB Classics Bookclub at Books are Magic in Brooklyn will be discussing Dorothy Baker's novel Cassandra at the Wedding. David Jelinek, an art teacher and scholar of Baker's work, will be moderating. Jelinek's admiration for Baker's writing goes beyond scholarship, however. Her novels changed his life. Jelinek was kind enough to write a bit about his experience. Just click through for more:

I owe a lot to the NYRB Classics, not the least of which is my marriage to Denise. She and I met ten years ago in the lunchroom of the school where we both teach; we were also married, though obviously not to one another. We shared favorite authors: Proust and Wilde. In the summer of our first year teaching together, the school conveniently asked us both to chaperone students on a European expedition, and the Fates seated us together on the airplane over. At the time, I was reading Stephan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl. Denise asked if she could read along from my copy. I said yes. On the way back, we did the same with Cassandra at the Wedding. Neither novel is particularly happy, but sometimes hope is born from inopportune circumstances, such as being married to the wrong person. We kept reading.

I admired Dorothy Baker’s writings so much that I bought her other three novels; this required some Internet sleuthing and bidding, as the books were out of print. Baker’s short stories were even more of a struggle to find, as they appear in defunct magazines, lost literary collections and university archives. (Admittedly, the excuse of having to travel to Stanford and Berkeley was none too taxing.) I wrote to NYRB to get Baker’s first novel, Young Man with a Horn, republished and cried a little when it was.

Cassandra is Baker’s masterpiece. It reads like an American version of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona without so much of the Sturm und Drang. Yes, there’s drama, but it uncoils slowly, just as Cassandra journeys to the family ranch or gets drunk during the course of a day. There’s a bit of O’Neill here: “Long Day’s Drive into the Hills”. But there’s wonderfully humorous scenes as well.

The book is dedicated, in memoriam, to the painter David Park. Baker and he were good friends, and Park drew the trumpet that appears on the original cover of Young Man. A playful inscription to him reads, “To David, without whom this book could never have been wrote.” Dorothy was “one of the wittiest people ever,” her daughter Joan emailed, “Sort of a Dorothy Parker type.” David Park’s compositions now grace the NYRB covers of both Baker novels.

With the ability to look at a subject from differing perspectives, Park’s early paintings and Cassandra are influenced by Cubism. Add identical twins, Cassandra and Judith, who co-narrate the story, and the view becomes kaleidoscopic, a fly looking at its own reflection. Early in the novel, Cassandra gazes in the bar mirror and is unsure who is reflected: Cass, Cassie, Judith, Jude or Judy. Indeed, the two women even have alternating names.

It’s a tale told from varying voices narrating the same events, much like Kurosawa’s Rashomon, but also like a duet. The twins share a piano; Dorothy and David were also musical. “One of my fondest memories is David banging out jazz on the piano with my mother belting out the lyrics. What they lacked in talent, they compensated for in volume!” Young Man is loosely based on the life of composer and cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, a native of Davenport, Iowa. Oddly enough, I found myself in Davenport a few years back, asked to officiate at the wedding of Denise’s sister (not that I’m an expert on marriage). My second priority was to locate Bix’s home. Standing outside it, I felt a rush similar to when I held a photograph of Dorothy from Stanford’s library archive.

Darryl Pinckney, editor of The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, will be participating in a few events to mark the publication of this collection. Come out and celebrate the work of this remarkable essayist.

Tuesday, October 17, 7pm
Barnard Hall, Sulzberger Parlor, 3009 Broadway, NYC
With Susan Minot and Saskia Hamilton

Wednesday, October 18, 7:30pm
Brooklyn Public Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn
With Margo Jefferson, Stephanie Danler, and Ian Buruma

Wednesday, November 1, 7pm
Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 W 21st St, NYC
With Sigrid Nunez, co-presented by 192 Books

Sunday, November 19, 11am
92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Ave, NYC

Paul Eprile, translator of Jean Giono's Melville—and, previously, Giono's Hill—will be doing a few events to mark the US publication of Melville. We hope to see you at one of them.

A Reading of Melville
Tuesday, October 17, 8pm
City of Asylum, 40 W North Ave, Pittsburgh

Translating Jean Giono: A Conversation
with Alyson Waters and Emmanuelle Artel
Monday, October 23, 7pm
La Maison Française of New York University, 16 Washington Mews, New York

A Discussion of Jean Giono 
with Edmund White
Tuesday, October 24, 7pm
192 Books, 192 10th Ave, New York

We were excited to find our new book The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, included on Lit Hub's list of "15 Books You Should Read this October." Lit Hub features editor Jess Bergman writes, "[T]his cross-section of Hardwick’s 50-year career renders questions of whether criticism can be art obsolete: Taking in her complicated, flyaway sentences...you know you couldn’t possibly be looking at anything else." 

If you're getting a head start on holiday shopping, take a look at Publishers Weekly's 2017 Holiday Gift Guide, which includes Chris Raschka's The Doorman's Repose. 

On the weekend of September 16th and 17th, NYRB will have booths at the Brooklyn Book Festival and the Brooklyn Book Festival Children's Day. 

The Brooklyn Book Festival Children's Day will be held at MetroTech Commons on Saturday, September 16th, from 10-4. We will have a selection of our children's books available at discounted prices. Also, join us for events with Maira Kalman and Chris Raschka:

At 11am, an event with Maira Kalman, author of Max Makes a Million and Hey Willy, See the Pyramids, will be held at the Picture Book Stage at MetroTech Commons.

At 1pm, Chris Raschka will read from his book The Doorman's Repose and children will be invited to draw and decorate packages that they imagine could be delivered to the doorman's building. The event will be held at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, 6 Metro Tech Center, 4th floor.

At 3pm, Chris Rascka will join Katy Wu, Liniers, Gregg Schigiel, George O’Connor, Misa Saburi, Alix Delinois and Ruth Chan for "Illustrator Smackdown!," a dramatic and hilarious live action drawing competition. 

The Brooklyn Book Festival will be held on Sunday, September 17th, from 10-6:30, at Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza, 209 Joralemon Street. Find us at booth numbers 409 and 410, where we will have discounted books and free issues of The New York Review of Books.