In this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote, “Many adults have sought over the years to recall the strange, emotionally rich adventure told in The Abandoned. It is these readers—and bookish current children ages 10 and older—who will most appreciate the book’s handsome reissue.” Gurdon goes on to suggest that this 1950 novel “will perhaps snag in the imagination of a new generation of readers.”

Tonight, April 5, at 7pm, Renata Adler, author of Speedboat and Pitch Dark (recently released by NYRB Classics) will join David Shields for a conversation with Daily Beast books editor Lucas Wittman at the Strand bookstore.

David Shields has been a vocal champion of Renata Adler’s writing. In How Literature Saved My Life, his most recent book, he writes, “I yield to no one in my admiration for Renata Adler’s first novel Speedboat; it is, I think, one of the most original and formally exciting American novels to have been published in the last twenty-five years.”

Speedboat and Pitch Dark, reissued by NYRB Classics last month to widespread acclaim, have already dazzled a new generation of readers across the country.

For more information, click here.

On March 27, Join NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank and translators Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich as we celebrate the work of Alexander Vvedensky, one of the most influential poets and thinkers of twentieth-century Russia. An Invitation for Me to Think is the first book of Vvedensky’s poems to appear in English.

The book launch, co-sponsored by Read Russia and New York Review Books, will be held at 6:30 at Pravda Bar in New York City.

For more information, please click here.

An Invitation for Me to Think is one of the first two volumes in the new NYRB Poets series.

On Sunday, February 24, at 1:00 pm, New York Review of Books contributor Geoffrey O’Brien will introduce a Film Forum screening of Elio Petri’s The Tenth Victim, a movie based Robert Sheckley’s 1953 story “The Seventh Victim,” which is included in NYRB Classics’s collection of Sheckley’s fiction, Store of the Worlds.

The screening is the first of several 2013 events celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of The New York Review of Books. The 1965 film stars Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress.

The finalists for the coveted Man Booker International Prize 2013 have been announced. We are delighted that two NYRB Classics authors are among them: Intizar Husain and Vladimir Sorokin.

Sorokin, who was born in Russia in 1955, is the author of The Queue and The Ice Trilogy, both available as NYRB Classics, and Days of the Oprichnik. Trained as an engineer for the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, Sorokin turned to writing and became a major presence in Moscow’s literary underground in the 1980s. Banned in the Soviet Union, his work has since been translated into more than twenty languages and awarded several prestigious prizes, including the Andrei Biely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature in 2001. Sorokin lives in Moscow.

Intizar Husain (b. 1925) is a journalist, short-story writer, and novelist, widely considered the most significant living fiction writer in Urdu. He is the author of the story collections Leaves, The Seventh Door, A Chronicle of the Peacocks, and An Unwritten Epic. Basti, a novel in which the psychic history of Pakistan is traced through the story of a single man, was published as an NYRB Classic in December. Pankaj Mishra called it “a haunting modernist echo chamber of voices from Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic traditions.” Husain currently lives in Lahore, Pakistan.

Also nominated for the Man Booker International Prize is Lydia Davis, whose translation of Vivant Denon’s No Tomorrow is also available from NYRB Classics.

“Duly recognized as a flawless literary achievement when it was published in 1984, this superb, long-out-of-print first novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic McPherson has finally been reissued,” begins The Atlantic’s review of NYRB Classics most recent release, Testing the Current.

If you are in the DC area on January 26th, don’t miss your chance to hear from author William McPherson at Politics and Prose Bookstore at 6PM, where he will discuss Testing the Current with Michael Dirda, author and book columnist for The Washington Post.

For more information, please visit the event website here.

Date & Time: January 26, 2013, 6PM

Politics and Prose Bookstore
5015 Connecticut Ave, NW
Washington, DC
(202) 364-1919

Today the National Book Critics Circle announced its book award finalists for the publishing year of 2012. Among the nominees for the best book of Criticism is Waiting for the Barbarians by Daniel Mendelsohn.

In this acclaimed collection, Mendelsohn brings together twenty-four of his recent essays on a wide range of subjects, from Avatar to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud and from the Titanic to Susan Sontag’s Journals.

Trained as a classicist, Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Greek myth in the Spider-Man musical, Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectacles—none more explosively controversial than his dissection of Mad Men.

“Our most irresistible literary critic…Much of the fun of reading Mendelsohn is his sense of play, his irreverence and unpredictability, his frank emotional responses…He forces the [essay] form in directions Francis Bacon never imagined.” —The New York Times Book Review

“a scrumptious stylist…He writes better movie criticism than most movie critics, better theatre criticism than most theatre critics and better literary criticism than just about anyone…practically every sentence of this book [is] an eye-opener.” —The Observer (UK)

“Mendelsohn’s work is absolutely vital in both senses of the word—it breaths with an exciting intelligence often absent in similar but stodgier writing, and it should be required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” —The Daily Beast