On Tuesday, March 25, at 7 p.m., join NYRB Classics for a celebration of Catalan literature, including Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook, and the return of The Bridge at McNally Jackson. Series curators Sal Robinson and Bill Martin will host an evening of translation from the Catalan, featuring Mary Ann Newman, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and translator of The Gray Notebook, Peter Bush.

The Gray Notebook is a diary chronicling the life of a twenty-one-year old Josep Pla from March 1918 to November 1919. Readers accompany Pla through the tumultuous city streets of Barcelona in an era of social unrest, through the apathetic completion of his law degree, to the local cafés brimming with unforgettable characters—all scenes recorded with a lucidity and exactitude unique to Pla. Pla carefully records the playful and witty remarks of the literary circles in his small and big cities, the wildly cynical remarks of his friends in the beachside town of Palafrugell, and the antics of the pretentious group of writers and intellectuals on the streets of Barcelona.

An NYRB Classics Original and translated into English for the first time by Peter Bush, Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook is a masterpiece of modern literature.

McNally Jackson is located at 52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012. For more information, visit the McNally Jackson website.

NYRB is thrilled to receive excellent reviews in The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal for Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, the third and long-awaited volume of Leigh Fermor’s epic trek across Europe.

In The New York Times Book Review, Robert F. Worth wrote:

“…an unforgettable book, full of strange encounters with a prewar Balkan cast of counts, prostitutes, peasants, priests and castrati. The great pleasure of all, as usual, is Leigh Fermor’s own infectious, Rabelaisian hunger for knowledge of almost every kind…. For anyone who has tried to document a journey, reading him is a humbling and thoroughly inspiring experience.”

And in The Wall Street Journal, Robert D. Kaplan wrote:

“Fermor’s books, nearly all of them chronicles of his journeys across Europe and the former Ottoman Near East, demonstrate how travel writing, to be legitimate, must act as a vehicle to liberate geography, history, art and culture from their desiccated academic moorings. Fermor combined style with elaborate erudition on nearly every page…Rarely was his description of a landscape not pitch-perfect.”

NYRB Classics is the US publisher of books written by Patrick Leigh Fermor, including A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, the first two volumes of Leigh Fermor’s legendary adventure.

On Tuesday, March 11, at 7 p.m., join National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Award finalist Daniel Mendelsohn for a reading and discussion his latest essay collection, now in paperback, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.

Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture brings together twenty-four of Mendelsohn’s essays, covering a wide range of subjects. Mendelsohn, trained as a classicist and the author of two internationally best-selling memoirs, moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters to trenchant takes on pop spectacles—none more explosively controversial than his dissection of Mad Men.

Politics and Prose Bookstore is located at 5015 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20008. For more information, visit Politics and Prose’s website.

In various interviews, as well as in the closing credits of the film, Wes Anderson cites the works of Austrian novelist, poet, and translator Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) as the inspiration for his latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. In the Hollywood Reporter article, Anderson was quoted joking that the film is “more or less plagiarism” of Zweig’s work, and saying, “I think people in Europe are surprised [Americans] don’t know this writer.”

The Grand Budapest Hotel, which kicked off the Berlin Film Festival, opens on March 7.

NYRB Classics has several titles by Zweig: Chess Story, Confusion, Journey Into the Past, The Post-Office Girl, and Beware of Pity.

On May 6, Other Press will publish George Prochnik’s biography of Zweig, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World.

NYRB is thrilled to announce that Ruchama King Feuerman’s In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist has been selected as a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards in Fiction.

Set in Jerusalem, In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist is the story of a former Lower East Side haberdasher, now an assistant to an elderly rabbi; Mustafa, a physically deformed Arab janitor who works on the Temple Mount; and the beautiful Tamar, a young American woman searching for a righteous man.

Deemed “The best novel I read all year” by Barton Swaim ofThe Wall Street Journal, In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist was first published as an NYRB Lit series eBook, and will be available in paperback in March 2014.

NYRB is saddened by the death of Mavis Gallant, beloved author of the NYRB Classics Paris Stories, Varieties of Exile, and The Cost of Living, this past week.

Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal and worked as a journalist at the Montreal Standard before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing fiction. After traveling extensively she settled in Paris, where she lived until the end of her life. She was the recipient of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story and the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement.

Mavis Gallant will be remembered as an enduring and legendary author, a contributor to The New Yorker for close to fifty years, and as a writer whose work brims with innovation, insight, heartbreak, mystery, and wit.

On Saturday, March 1, at 4 p.m., NYRB will join Archipelago and New Directions for a literary press mingle at The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 Tenth Avenue, Seattle.

Part of AWP week, the event will be a low-key conversation about books with editors, publishers, and publicists from the three presses. Books from each press will be for sale, including highlighted titles: William H. Gass’s On Being Blue from NYRB Classics, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book One from Archipelago, and Emily Dickinson’s Gorgeous Nothings from New Directions. Refreshments will be provided.

For more information, visit The Elliott Bay Book Company’s website.

New York Review Books and The New York Review of Books will be at the 2014 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, February 26 through March 1, in Seattle. A selection of fiction and nonfiction, including William H. Gass’s On Being Blue , Renata Adler’s novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark, as well as titles from the NYRB Poets series, including Pierre Reverdy and A.K. Ramanujan’s The Interior Landscape: Classical Tamil Love Poems, will be available at discounted prices. Also, attendees can pick up a free copy of the latest issue of The New York Review of Books.

We will be located at booth 308 in the Washington State Convention Center and hope that all those attending the AWP Conference will stop by.