On Monday, June 9th, at 7:30 p.m., Greenlight Bookstore will host a panel discussion about BAM’s upcoming production of The Old Woman, adapted from a short story by Daniil Kharms, co-founder of the OBERIU.

OBERIU—the Russian abbreviation for “Union of Real Art”—was an early 20th century underground avant-garde collective founded by Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. The panelists are: Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich, translators of Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think; Mark Krotov, editor of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms; and panel moderator Ian Dreiblatt.

Greenlight Bookstore is located at 686 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY. For more information, call 718-246-0200 or visit the Greenlight Bookstore website.

In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank will be discussing the literature of the Great War with professor Christopher Winks and translator Richard Greeman at The Commons in Brooklyn on Thursday, June 5, 2014.

For information about the discussion and the panelists, visit the The Commons event page here.

NYRB Classics recently published Gabriel Chevallier’s novel of World War I, Fear and will be publishing Hungarian artist Béla Zombory-Moldován’s recently-discovered memoir, The Burning of the World, which follows the author to the front lines, in August 2014. In March 2014, our all-ebook imprint NYRB Lit published Traitor, Stephen Daisley’s novel about the Battle of Gallipoli.

Last week, NYRB Classics was delighted to accept the 2014 Read Russia Prize for Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Autobiography of a Corpse on behalf of translator Joanne Turnbull. Awarded each spring, the Read Russia Prize celebrates the best English translations of Russian literature.

An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, and Happy Moscow by Andrei Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, were also nominated for the prize. An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler, made the shortlist.

We are pleased to announce that four titles published by New York Review Books are on the long list for the 2014 PEN Literary Awards.

Martin Filler’s second volume of Makers of Modern Architecture has been nominated for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Nominated for the PEN Translation Prize are three NYRB Classics:

• An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman and translated by Elizabeth and Robert Chandler
• Transit by Anna Seghers and translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo
• Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozo

The PEN shortlist will be announced on June 17 and the 2014 PEN Literary Award winners will be named on July 30.

On Tuesday, May 20 at 7:00 pm, Daniel Mendelsohn will discuss his collection Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture with editor and author Choire Sicha at BookCourt in Brooklyn.

Mendelsohn has earned acclaim over the last decade in his writings for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. He has been called “one of the greatest critics of our time” by Poets & Writers. Waiting for Barbarians highlights Mendelsohn’s ability to range across cultural and historical topics, from the film Avatar, to Susan Sontag’s journals, demonstrating Mendelsohn’s “sweep as a cultural critic is as impressive as his depth.”

For more information about the event, visit our calendar.

On Wednesday, April 23, at 7 p.m., National Book Award winner and Harvard University professor Stephen Greenblatt will discuss Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge.

There is no doubt that Shakespeare read Montaigne—though how extensively remains a matter of debate—and that the translation he read was that of John Florio, a fascinating polymath, man-about-town, and dazzlingly inventive writer himself.

Shakespeare’s Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt, features an adroitly modernized text, an essay in which Greenblatt discusses both the resemblances and real tensions between Montaigne’s and Shakespeare’s visions of the world, and Platt’s introduction to the life and times of the extraordinary Florio.

For more information, visit our calendar.

On Tuesday, April 15, at 6 p.m., join Peter Brooks, the book’s editor, and translator Linda Asher for a reading and discussion of the NYRB Classics title, The Human Comedy: Selected Stories, at Labyrinth Books in Princeton. 

Characters from every corner of society and all walks of life—lords and ladies, businessmen and military men, poor clerks, unforgiving moneylenders, aspiring politicians, artists, actresses, swindlers, misers, parasites, sexual adventurers, crackpots, and more—move through the pages of The Human Comedy, Balzac’s magnum opus, an interlinked chronicle of modernity in all its splendor and squalor. This NYRB edition collects nine newly translated works of The Human Comedy’s short fiction.

For more information, visit the Labyrinth Books website.

On Wednesday, March 26, at 5:30 p.m., Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern will discuss their book, No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, New York.

During the twelve years of the Third Reich, very few Germans took the risk of actively opposing Hitler’s tyranny and terror, and fewer still did so to protect the sanctity of law and faith. In No Ordinary Men, Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern focus on two remarkable, courageous men who did, the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his close friend and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi.

Carnegie Council is located at Merrill House, 170 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10065. The event is $25 for non-members, and free of charge for students with a valid ID and for Carnegie New Leaders. This special offer is limited to a small number of seats—first come first served—and registration in advance is required. Registration is available on the Council’s website.