NYRB NEWS
Amsterdam Stories in the Bay Area and Boston
If you live in the Bay Area or in Boston, don’t miss translator Damion Searls discuss his translation of Amsterdam Stories by Nescio, a writer whose growing reputation and cult readership have marked him as a figure in world literature.
Tuesday, May 8th at 7:00 pm
with translator Damion Searls and writer Peter Orner
City of Palo Alto Library — Downtown Branch
Wednesday, May 9th at 7:00 pm
with translator Damion Searls
Co-sponsored by Books Inc and Palo Alto City Library
Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, Berkeley
Thursday, May 10th at 7:30 pm
with translator Damion Searls and Jeroen Dewulf, Director of Dutch Studies Program, UC-Berkeley
Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge
Wednesday, May 23rd at 7:00 pm
NYRB is traveling to Bukovina—and we want you to come for the trip
“Czernopol—less an invented place than the distilled essence of a number of post-imperial Eastern European cities, including the author’s own birthplace — is a smug little latter-day Sodom, squalid and venal and defiantly backward, except in one crucial respect. ‘Laughter in Czernopol,’ the narrator tells us, ‘had been elevated to an art form, a folk art of unparalleled authenticity…well endowed with the most vivid references, not to mention all manner of innuendos.’ As you can perhaps imagine, this makes the town a lively place to visit.”—The New York Times Sunday Book Review
On May 6th, NYRB invites you to make that lively visit to Bukovina—Gregor von Rezzori‘s home, and the real-life inspiration for the fictional Czernopol. Bukovina is the simultaneously colorful and chaotic backdrop to Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography, and An Ermine in Czernopol. Michael Cunningham, Deborah Eisenberg, Daniel Kehlmann, and Edmund White will come together for this discussion, moderated by NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank, at the 2012 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, to travel through the magically whimsical and irrevocably lost Bukovina—and to take you there with them.
Sunday, May 6, 2012 at 1PM
Museum of Jewish Heritage
36 Battery Place
New York City
Tickets: $15/$10 PEN Members/NYRB readers/Museum members and students with valid ID.
Co-sponsored by Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, and New York Review of Books Classics
The Dud Avocado on “All Things Considered”
April isn’t the cruelest month for literary birthdays
T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, but that’s only because he isn’t one of the literary giants who celebrated his birthday beneath April showers!
We start off with Henry James, one of the greatest American writers, who was born April 15, 1843. Several of his works—The New York Stories of Henry James; The Ivory Tower; The Other House; and The Outcry—are published in the NYRB Classics series.
April 16, 1922, was the day Kingsley Amis was born, and we’re celebrating by announcing that we’ll be publishing several of his works over the next few years, starting with Lucky Jim and The Old Devils, both scheduled to publish in September 2012.
And finally, April 23 marks the 448th birthday of William Shakespeare. Mark Van Doren (1894-1972), beloved Columbia University professor and esteemed poet, penned a series of remarkably witty, perceptive essays about each of Shakespeare’s plays and many of his poems, which were compiled in Shakespeare.Celebrate the publication of Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories
For the very first time, Amsterdam is in New York!
Nescio, the pseudonym for successful banker and family man J.H.F. Grönloh, has long been considered the finest of Dutch prose writers. But his powerful passages on the landscapes of the Netherlands and the very pulse of the city of Amsterdam have remained unavailable to English speaking readers. Until now.
Join NYRB Classics in celebrating a major literary event: the publication of Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories, translated from the Dutch by Damion Searls, and with an introduction by acclaimed novelist Joseph O’Neill.
On April 16, at 7:30 PM, Damion Searls and Joseph O’Neill will read from and discuss Amsterdam Stories at:
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton Street (at South Portland)
Brooklyn, NY 11217
718.246.0200
Free and Open to the Public.
On April 24, at 7 PM, Damion Searls will read from and discuss Amsterdam Stories at:
192 Books
192 10th Avenue at 21st Street
New York City
This event is free and open to the public, but space is limited, so please call 212.255.4022 to make a reservation.
New York may no longer be Dutch, but this Dutch author is well worth celebrating—and we hope you’ll join us in doing just that!
And, please check the NYRB Calendar for events with Damion in Boston and the Bay Area.
Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April
The first English translation of stories by the great Dutch writer Nescio
Nescio wrote of madness and sadness, youth and youth lost, and courage and vulnerability with a beauty that few before or after have managed. His depictions of the Dutch landscape and scenes of Amsterdam—its canals, its streets, and its people—have no equal on any page.
Richard Howard and Marina Harss are finalists for French to English translation awards
Earlier this month the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation announced the finalists for their 25th Annual Translation Prize for excellence in translations of French works into English published in 2011.
We are thrilled that Richard Howard, translator of Marc Fumaroli’s When The World Spoke French, and Marina Harss, translator of Elizabeth Gille’s The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter, have been nominated for this prestigious award.
There will be one Fiction and one Non-Fiction prize presented at the annual Awards Ceremony on May 23rd, in New York. Each winning translator will receive a $10,000 cash prize funded by the Florence Gould Foundation.