Publishing on July 7, Linda Rosenkrantz’s groundbreaking 1968 Talk is set over the course of a summer spent at the beach. The book offers all the pleasure and startling insight of eavesdropping on the witty and raw conversation between the most intimate of friends.

NYRB is pleased to receive praise for Talk from Anna Wiener writing for The New Republic:

“[A]n unconventional novel that is equal parts experimental literature, confessional memoir, and art project…Talk has re-entered the literary frame after an almost 50-year respite, and its attendant conflicts of art, love, friendship, and connection are still fresh.” —Anna Wiener, The New Republic

Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, and Kevin Nguyen, editorial director of The Oyster Review, both named Talk a “Top 10 Summer Books Pick” on NPR’s On Point:

“The wonderful New York Review Classics—everything that they publish is worthy of interest, I’m always curious to see what they’re coming out with…and in this case it’s a novel made up entirely of dialogue between two women best friends, Marsha and Emily, and a friend of theirs, Vincent—a close friend of Marsha’s, a gay guy—and its just about them yakking about being in their late-twenties…It’s fun, they talk about sex, psychoanalysis, LSD. It’s a real ‘60s book.” —Lorin Stein, on NPR’s On Point

“NYRB Classics [is] probably one of the best publishes out there…[Talk] reminded me a lot of Renata Adler’s Speedboat, which was also written in the 70s…It moves so quickly and so frankly that it still feels very modern.” —Kevin Nguyen, on NPR’s On Point

Join us for events with Linda Rosenkrantz this July:

Arcana: Books on the Arts Sunday, July 5, 4 p.m., 8675 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, CA

Skylight Books Friday, July 10, 7:30 p.m., 1818 N Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles

BookCourt Tuesday, July 14, 7 p.m., 163 Court St., Brooklyn, NY

BookHampton Sunday, July 19, 4 p.m., 41 Main Street, East Hampton, NY

Book signings to follow all of the above events.

On Thursday, June 25, at 7 p.m., Elizabeth Willis will read from her NYRB Poets collection, Alive, for the opening reading of the 23rd Annual Poets House Showcase, which is part of this year’s River To River festival in New York City.

Poets House is located at 10 River Terrace, New York. The reading will take place in Kray Hall and is free and open to the public.

In The House of Twenty Thousand Books, journalist Sasha Abramsky chronicles the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and works of Jewish history.

The House of Twenty Thousand Books will go on sale September 1, 2015. NYRB is pleased to receive the following praise for Abramsky’s forthcoming book:

“This is a fierce and beautiful book. It burns with a passion for ideas, the value of history, the need for argument. As a memoir of a grandfather it is sui generis. I loved it.” —Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

“Memoir of Jewish intellectual life and universal history alike, told through a houseful of books, their eccentric collectors, and the rooms in which they dwelled…In this entertaining, deeply learned book, Sasha Abramsky adds materially to Chimen and Mimi’s 20,000 volumes. On another level, the book, like that grand library, is a narrative of the broad sweep of Jewish diaspora history…If you finish this brilliant, realized book thinking you need to own more books, you’re to be forgiven. A wonderful celebration of the mind, history, and love.” —Kirkus starred review

“Abramsky’s tale begins after his grandfather Chimen’s death, with his family faced with the daunting task of cleaning out a London house filled to bursting with books, many of them rare, on Marxism, socialism, and Judaica. Doing so stirred the desire to make sense of this literary and familial legacy, which Abramsky chronicles in a loving but clear-eyed manner.” —Publishers Weekly

Watch a book trailer for The House of Twenty Thousand Books here.

This week, Ian Buruma won the 2015 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for his collection Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War. This fall, NYRB will reissue Buruma’s classic The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan.

Donald Nicholson-Smith won the 28th Annual Translation Prize of the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation for fiction for his translation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The Mad and the Bad. NYRB Classics also publishes Nicholson-Smith’s translation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Fatale.

Please join us for these exciting June events with Elizabeth Willis, author of the NYRB Poets collection Alive: New and Selected Poems, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, translator of the NYRB Classic Songs of Kabir.

On Thursday, June 4th, at 7 p.m. Elizabeth Willis will read from Alive and the poets Magdalena Zurawski and Rod Smith will each read from their own work at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, 126A Front Street, Brooklyn, NY. For more information, please visit the Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop event page here.

On Saturday, June 6th, at 1 p.m., Arvind Krishna Mehrotra speaks with Fabiano Alborghetti (Directory of the Vulnerable), John W. Evans (The Consolations), and Tess Taylor (The Forage House) about the global reach of poetry at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA. For more information, visit the 2015 Bay Area Book Festival website here.

On Wednesday, June 10th, at 6:30 p.m. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra will discuss South Asian art and literature with art historian Sonal Khuller and fiction writer Prajwal Parajuly at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 East Prospect, Seattle, WA. For more information and advance tickets ($10 regular, $6 SAM members, $7 students/seniors) visit the Seattle Art Museum event page here.

On Thursday, June 25th, at 7 p.m. Elizabeth Willis will read from Alive for the opening reading of the 23rd Annual Poets House Showcase, which is part of this year’s River To River festival in New York City. The reading will be held at Kray Hall in Poets House, 10 River Terrace, New York, NY.

On Wednesday, May 20, at 8 p.m., Elizabeth Willis, author of the NYRB Poets collection Alive: New and Selected Poems, and Peter Richards will read from their latest work at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, 131 E. 10th Street, New York.

On Thursday, May 21, at 7 p.m., join translators and authors Jason Weiss, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Sylvia Molloy as they discuss the life and work of Silvina Ocampo, the author of Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories and the collection of poetry Silvina Ocampo, both published by New York Review Books.

For more information, visit our events page.