NYRB NEWS
Stefan Zweig in ‘The New Yorker’
If you’d like to know more about the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, read Leo Carey’s “A Critic At Large” column in the August 27 issue of The New Yorker (subscription required).
NYRB Classics is publisher of five of Zweig’s works: the novellas Chess Story, Journey Into the Past, and Confusion; his only full length novel, Beware of Pity; and his unfinished novel, The Post-Office Girl.
During the 1930s, Zweig was one of the best-selling writers in Europe, and was among the most translated German-language writers before World War II. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife.
Into the Heart of Hurricane Season
June too soon.
July stand by.
August look out you must.
September remember.
October all over.
—Old Mariner’s Rhyme
Good riddance to hurricane season, we’ll all be glad when its over and done, but in the meantime if you find yourself ill at ease, why not hunker down and pick up a novel from NYRB Classics? After stowing the masts and battening down the hatches, check out these two hurricane-infused novels, A High Wind in Jamaica and In Hazard, both by Richard Hughes. However…. Hopefully we all manage to stay dry this hurricane season.
More July literary birthdays!
The weather’s not cooling down, but neither are our celebrations of literary birthdays!
Attention Francophiles: Bastille Day is (almost) here!
There is further cause to celebrate Bastille Day as NYRB now has several French history titles with another due this fall. Additionally, Richard Howard was this year’s co-recipient of the French-American Foundation & Florence Gould Foundation Translation Award for When the World Spoke French by Marc Fumaroli.
Nancy Mitford’s dazzling histories—The Sun King, Madame de Pompadour, and Voltaire In Love (October 2012)—cover the court life of Louis the 14th; unveil the personal life of Louis the 15th’s famous mistress; and yield an Enlightenment era love affair between two of France’s greatest minds. Moving into the Napoleonic era, Philippe-Paul de Ségur’s Defeat gives a firsthand account of Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia. Novels in Three Lines is a scandalously witty account of everyday life in 1906 France, by critic and anarchist Félix Fénéon. And, last on the timeline, but certainly not least, Richard Cobb’s street level view of France from the mid-thirties to the early fifties in his Paris and Elsewhere.
Happy 4th of July from NYRB!
In 1830, Daniel Webster cried out, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” However, by 1855, as disunion seemed imminent, there were eighty-nine places taking their name from “Union,” while “Liberty” had just thirty-seven (poor “Freedom” was the namesake of just thirteen, and those were mostly in the north). Further, “In 1862 Union touched one hundred ten. Liberty had added only seven; Freedom only one.”
If you were to add up all of the Liberty’s, Freedom’s, and Independence’s, they would not equal the Union’s.
However, there’s no Union Day, which we suspect Independence takes as some small consolation.
Whether you choose to celebrate liberty, freedom, justice (which apparently is a very unpopular choice of place name), or even union (you’d hardly be the first) tomorrow, we hope you’ll do it with Names on the Land and NYRB in mind.
Summer is here—and so are these literary birthdays!
Summer’s officially arrived, and there’s no better way to welcome it than to acknowledge these late June and early July literary birthdays!
June 28 is the birthday of Luigi Pirandello, who was born in Sicily in 1867. A poet, writer of stories, a playwright, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was an inspiration to writers as varied as Eugène Lonesco and T.S. Eliot. His The Late Mattia Pascal is the story of a man who is declared dead in his boring provincial town, and takes it as an opportunity to move on to another, only to find, in the pages of Pirandello’s black humor, that changing towns does not mean he can change himself.
Then comes July 1 and the birthday of Jean Stafford. Born in 1915, Stafford was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American short story writer and novelist. The Mountain Lion is the story of two siblings who find that the love they have built for each other in their dreary childhood home is challenged when they visit their uncle at his ranch in Colorado. The book was hailed by The New York Times as “one of the best novels about adolescence in American literature.”
Fun Summer Reading for Kids
Children can spend summer vacations at the beach, playing in the the backyard, or visiting family and friends, but they can also spend summer traipsing through time, talking to animals, and traveling to far off lands—all without venturing beyond the covers of a book from The New York Review Children’s Collection.
These 20 titles, for kids of all ages, are available at 30% off through July 6, 2012.
Click here to view the list and order.
More June literary birthdays…
On June 15, we celebrate Maria Dermoût (1888-1962). Born on a sugar plantation in the Dutch East Indies and educated in Holland, Dermoût returned to the Indies and captured this exotic experience with remarkable realism in her novel The Ten Thousand Things.
The hugely influential French philosopher, novelist, playwright, and pampheleteer Jean-Paul Sartre was born on June 21, 1905; we’re celebrating by announcing the November 2012 publication of We Have Only This Life to Live, a new collection that draws from Sartre’s entire Collected Essays as well as his unpublished work.