NYRB NEWS
November Events for Songs of Kabir
Friend,
You had one life,
And you blew it.
Mehrotra’s translation has been hailed by Eliot Weinberger as “simultaneously a work of long scholarship and a jazz performance of the Kabir tradition.”
November 2, 7pm:
McNally Jackson (52 Prince Street)
Arvind Mehrotra and Jason Grunebaum
November 3, 7pm:
Poets House (10 River Terrace at Murray Street)
25th Anniversary Program
Visit the NYRB Calendar for details.
October Events for Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
Join John Summers, editor of Masscult and Midcult: Essays Again the American Grain, for a series of discussions about Dwight Macdonald.
Dwight Macdonald
October 12th:
James Wolcott and John Summers at McNally Jackson Books, NYC
October 14th:
J.C. Gabel and John Summers at Stop Smiling Storefront, Chicago
October 20th:
Louis Menand and John Summers at Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge
October 22nd:
Andrew Ferguson, Chris Lehmann, and John Summers at Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington DC
Visit the NYRB Calendar for details.
The Autobiography of Irène Némirovsky, by Her Daughter
Now available in its first English translation is Élisabeth Gille’s The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter. Gille’s imagined autobiography of her mother was first published in France in 1992.
Élisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, Irène Némirovsky, a once popular novelist and Russian émigré from a wealthy family. Némirovsky had not considered herself Jewish, yet she died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew. To her daughter she was a tragic enigma and a stranger. It was to come to terms with that stranger that Gille wrote The Mirador, a fictional memoir of her mother.
In the first part of the book, dated 1929, the year the novel David Golder brought Némirovsky acclaim, she takes us back to her difficult childhood in Kiev and St. Petersburg. Her father is doting, her mother a beautiful monster, while Irène herself is bookish and self-absorbed. There are pogroms and riots, parties and excursions, then revolution, from which the family flees to France, a country of “moderation, freedom, and generosity,” where at last she is happy. Some thirteen years later Irène picks up her pen again. Everything has changed. Abandoned by friends and colleagues, she lives in the countryside and waits for the knock on the door.
The Mirador, written a decade before the publication of Suite Française made Irène Némirovsky famous once more (something Gille did not live to see), is a haunted and a haunting book, an unflinching reckoning with the tragic past, and a triumph not only of the imagination but of love.
“Now we can rediscover Némirovsky through this novel, a fictionalized biography written by her daughter…Gille writes in a style at once lyric and focused, periodically introducing her alter ego’s dispassionate reflections as an adult. As Gille concludes, Némirovsky ‘will remain thirty-nine for all eternity,’ and that painful realization resonates throughout this beautiful book.” —Library Journal
“We will never know whether the The Mirador is an accurate reflection of her mother’s feelings and observations. Nonetheless, the book stands as a nuanced, eloquent portrait of a complicated woman.” —Nora Krug, The Washington Post
Dime-Store Alchemy by Charles Simic
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In a work that is in various degrees biography, criticism, and sheer poetry, Simic tells the story of Cornell’s life and illuminates the hermetic mysteries of his extraordinary boxes, objects in which private obsessions were alchemically transformed into enduring works of art.
Full of unexpected riches, Dime-Store Alchemy is both an entrancing meditation on the nature of art and a perfect introduction to a major American artist. It is a book that can be perused at length or dipped into at leisure time and time again.
“Incisive, freewheeling, dramatic…a mixture of evocation and observation, as lucid and shadowy as the imagination it celebrates… Dime-Store Alchemy is a meeting of kindred spirits that is itself a work of art.” —Edward Hirsch, The New Yorker
Also by Charles Simic
Retail: $3.99
Charles Simic has said the secret to our identities lies not in grand events, but in the parentheses between events—and in these brief essays, we get a taste of this great poet’s parenthetical observations and recollections.
Confessions of a Poet Laureate is available as an e-book only. Please order from your favorite e-book seller.
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate on BBC Radio 4
For information about the broadcast please visit BBC Radio 4. Listeners outside the UK will be able to download a podcast for 30 days following the initial broadcast.
Jonathan Lethem on the late L. J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life
Lethem, who grew up a block from Davis and was best friends with Davis’s son, wrote the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of A Meaningful Life.
Hav by Jan Morris
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We are pleased to announce the publication of Hav, a novel by the great Jan Morris. Hav consists of two parts: Last Letters from Hav, originally published in 1985, and its sequel, Hav of the Myrmidons, published in 2006.
When Last Letters from Hav was first published, travel agents heard from clients who wanted to travel to Hav, a place that many thought was real. Morris has written that she was even asked by someone from the Map Room of the Royal Geographical Society “to put him straight about Hav’s location.” But Hav is not real. It is wholly the product of Jan Morris’s prodigious imagination.
In Last Letters from Hav Morris tells of Hav’s glorious past and quaint twentieth-century life. This place, rumored to be the site of Troy, was captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin. Chopin, Mark Twain, Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence, Hitler, and Princess Diana have all visited Hav. A Mediterranean city-state, it is home to architectural marvels and an annual rooftop race. As Morris takes the reader through Hav’s streets, we hear its centuries-old morning trumpet call and the songs of its muezzin, we see the texture of the goods on offer at its markets, and we smell the coffee and smoke drifting from its cafés.
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Morris brings the story up-to-date in Hav of the Myrmidons, when she returns to Hav in 2005. She sees an almost unrecognizable land, stripped of its chaotic and contradictory splendor, renamed, and rebuilt. Sanitized and monetized, it is ruled by a group of fanatics who have rewritten its history to reflect their own view of the past.
Last Letters from Hav was short-listed for The Booker Prize in 1985. Hav was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2007.
Read Ursula K. Le Guin’s introduction (pdf)
Also by Jan Morris
Conundrum
Conundrum is a pioneering memoir exploring the borders of gender and early sex-reassignment surgery.
The Mangan Inheritance
By Brian Moore
Introduction by Christopher Ricks
After splitting with his glamorous film star wife, the once promising poet James Mangan is adrift until he comes across an old daguerreotype of a man bearing a remarkable resemblance to him. Realizing that this could be a photograph of the great 19th-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan, rumored to be his ancestor, the 20th-century Mangan sets off for Ireland determined to uncover the truth behind this discovery and his family’s shadowy past. Equal parts suspenseful and contemplative, the story pulses with cinematic energy, chilling intrigue, and the tragedy of thwarted self-discovery. The Mangan Inheritance is, in short, Brian Moore at his best and most inventive, thus rendering it impossible to put down or to forget.
Retail: $15.95 | Special Offer: $11.96 (25% off)
Also by Brian Moore
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
Afterword by Mary Gordon
“…Judith Hearne, the Catholic spinster drifting into alcoholism and isolation, is the lyric embodiment of repressed, claustrophobic Belfast, a descendant of the ageing spinsters of James Joyce’s Dubliners.” —Joyce Carol Oates, TLS
Buy both Brian Moore novels at 40% off
Retail: $30.90 | Special offer $18.54
Mr. Fortune
By Sylvia Townsend WarnerIntroduction by Adam Mars-Jones
Brilliant and subversive, Mr. Fortune combines Sylvia Townsend Warner’s two short novels, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot and its sequel, The Salutation.
The story of a London bank-clerk-turned-minister who sets his heart on serving on a remote island, a place that turns out to be not at all what he expected, shows why John Updike described Townsend Warner as “a witty, poetic, clairvoyant writer.”
Retail: $14.95 | Special Offer: $11.21 (25% off)
Also by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Lolly Willowes
Introduction by Alison Lurie
A classic story of cool feminist intelligence about an aging spinster’s struggle to break away from her controlling family.
Summer Will Show
Introduction by Claire Harman
This thrilling novel brings 19th-century Paris to life will the tale of a proper Victorian aristocrat’s political and emotional awakening among the barricades.
Buy all 3 Sylvia Townsend Warner books at 40% off
Retail: $47.85 | Special Offer $28.71
The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story
By Glenway WescottIntroduction by Michael Cunningham
A work of classical elegance and concision, Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk stands with Faulkner’s The Bear as one of the best American short novels.
The events of this novel take place during a single afternoon: an American
expatriate and sometime novelist is staying with a friend outside of
Paris, when a well-heeled, itinerant Irish couple drops in, with Lucy,
their trained but restless hawk.
Also by Glenway Wescott
Apartment in Athens
Introduction by David Leavitt
Set in Nazi-occupied Athens, this novel stages an intense and unsettling drama of accommodation and rejection, resistance and compulsion.
Buy both Glenway Wescott books at 40% off
Retail: $28.95 | Special Offer: $17.37
The Radiance of the King
By Camara LayeIntroduction by Toni Morrison
Translated from the French by James Kirkup
Clarence, a white man, has been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa. He demands to see the king, only to learn the king has left for the south of his realm. Traveling through an increasingly phantasmagoric landscape, Clarence is gradually stripped of his pretensions, until he is sold to the royal harem as a slave.
“A classic work of modernism—a signal work in the African canon and one that every lover of literature will admire and enjoy.”
— Henry Louis Gates Jr.