This week we celebrate the birthday of the wonderful James Thurber by calling attention to two of his timeless classics available from our Children’s Collection. They are the perfect gift for anyone from 8 to 80.

“Thurber’s grown-up kids’ books, The Wonderful O and The 13 Clocks, long out of print, are back—rich with ogres and oligarchs, riddles and wit. What distinguishes them is not just quixotic imagination but Thurber’s inimitable delight in language. The stories beg to be read aloud…Thurber captivates the ear and captures the heart.” —Newsweek

The 13 Clocks
By James Thurber
Introduction by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Marc Simont

“It’s one of the great kids’ books of the last century. It may be the best thing Thurber ever wrote. It’s certainly the most fun that anybody can have reading anything aloud.” —Neil Gaiman

The Wonderful O
By James Thurber
Illustrated by Marc Simont

“A tale for children, and a reminder for adults, of the joys of love, liberty, language and, not least, humor. It has pirates and treasure and magic and a message that especially in complacent times must not be forgotten…The Wonderful O is a book worth finding, wherever you can, and reading, as one of its characters concludes, ‘lest we forget.’” —The Wall Street Journal

By Jules Renard
A new translation from the French by Douglas Parmée
Illustrations by Pierre Bonnard

Nature Stories is a deliciously whimsical classic from the era of the great French Post-impressionist painters. Renard mingles wonder and humor in a series of brief portraits of subjects drawn from the natural world: dogs, cats, pigs, roses, snails, trees and birds of all sorts, humans of course, and even a humble potato.

 

 

Ranging from a sentence to several pages, Renard’s literary miniatures are masterpieces of compression and description, capturing both appearance and behavior through a choice of details that makes the familiar unfamiliar and yet surprisingly true to life. In Jules Renard’s world, plants and animals not only feel but speak and yet, for all the anthropomorphic wit and whimsy the author indulges in, they guard their mystery too. These creatures fascinate Renard, who in turn makes them fascinating to us.

 

 

Sly, funny, and touching, Nature Stories—here beautifully rendered into English by award-winning translator Douglas Parmée and accompanied by the wonderful ink-brush images of Pierre Bonnard that appeared in the 1904 edition—is a literary classic of inexhaustible freshness.

 

Read Douglas Parmée’s introduction

 

“There is no real equivalent for the French word esprit which is somewhere between and beyond humor and wit and which is essentially what these short commentaries on the bird and animal world display.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Renard’s way with the detail is unforgettable. Renard writes about spiders, about the moon, and the poetry he makes from the things his eyes tell him is joyful.” —Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm

NYRB Classics make fantastic book group selections. Often with introductions by contemporary writers, they are a fresh alternative for your next meeting. We’re especially excited for our two newest additions, After Claude by Iris Owens, categorized in The New York Times as “a fresh voice that made us want to laugh out loud, pass the book around, read funny bits to our friends,” and The Outward Room by Millen Brand—a book that in its day was more popular than Gone With The Wind. We invite you to check out our growing list of NYRB titles that have Reading Group Guides on our website.

New releases from NYRB Classics: now in its first English translation, Journey into the Past by the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig; a masterpiece of historical fiction, Yasushi Inoue’s Tun-huang; and a darkly comedic novel, After Claude, by Iris Owens. For a limited-time, each of the three November titles is available at 25% off.

 

Tun-huang

By Yasushi Inoue
Prefaces by the author and Damion Searls
Translated by Jean Oda Moy

 

A magical and vivid adventure story set among the bandits, scholars, and monks of the fabled Silk Road. All seems lost when Chao Hsing-te sleeps through the exams that are to launch his career. But then a beautiful woman hands him a scrap of paper, written in a mysterious language. When he follows her into the desert, everything changes for him.

 

“Re-reading Yasushi Inoue’s novel, Tun-huang, I once again delight in the fact that the author wrote the entire story without ever having set foot in Western China. At that time, of course, no Japanese or European scholars were allowed to travel to the area. And, yet, Tun-huang remains to my mind the most vivid account of the silk road oasis city ever published.” —Leanne Ogasawara, TangDynastyTimes.com

 

Read Yasushi Inoue’s Preface

 

 

After Claude

By Iris Owens
Introduction by Emily Prager

 

 

Funny and foulmouthed, Harriet tears around Greenwich Village insulting friend and foe alike. But when “the French rat” boyfriend Claude leaves her (or did she leave Claude?), Harriet is adrift. Girlfriends give advice but Harriet only takes offense, and it’s easy to understand why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is a bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women’s lives and hearts—until, in a surprise twist, she finds a savior in a dark room at the Chelsea Hotel.

 

“Spikey with mockery, carbon steel wit and mature observation.” —The Village Voice

 

Read Emily Prager’s Introduction

 

Journey into the Past

By Stefan Zweig
Introduction by André Aciman
A new translation by Anthea Bell

 

 

Investigating the strange ways in which love, in spite of everything—time, war, betrayal—can last, Zweig tells the story of Ludwig, an ambitious young man from a modest background who falls in love with the wife of his rich employer. The couple vow to live together, but Ludwig is dispatched on business to Mexico. While he is there the First World War breaks out and Ludwig is unable to return to Europe. Years later he does go back to Germany to find his beloved a widow and their mutual attraction as strong as ever. But is it possible for love to survive precisely as the impossible?

 

“Journey into the Past is vintage Stefan Zweig—lucid, tender, powerful and compelling.”
—Chris Schuler, The Independent

 

Read Anthea Bell’s Afterword

Just released from The New York Review Children’s Collection is Supposing by Alastair Reid, with brand new illustrations by Bob Gill. Supposing is available at a limited-time 25% discount. Or purchase it with Alastair Reid’s Ounce Dice Trice, and get 40% off their combined retail prices.

Supposing…

By Alastair Reid
Illustrated by Bob Gill

When you were a child, with a mind made for musing, what destiny would you pick, if you had your own choosing?

It would be a potent dose of some seriously silly prose, with pages full of all the wonder and plunder a creative mind could construe—a book that when you opened it up, turned out to be all about you.

The New York Review Children’s Collection is thrilled to publish Supposing, a follow-up to Alastair Reid’s Ounce Dice Trice, about which Daniel Pinkwater said on NPR’s Weekend Edition: “I want every children’s book editor and also every primary and middle school teacher and librarian in America to read this book. It is the antidote to plotting, plot-driven, two-line synopsizable, anti-imagination books….[Ounce Dice Trice] can be read cover to cover, back to front, middle to end, upside down, any way you like.”

Now with new illustrations by Bob Gill, Supposing is a modern classic that is perfect for children who have a truly imaginative take on the places they could possibly, potentially, go.

“A 1960 text from Reid is paired to all-new illustrations from Gill that realize one child’s beguiling hypotheses…. The sophisticated minimalism of the illustrations at their best work with the text to prompt wild flights of fancy…. As fascination with cause and effect is a classic phase of childhood, this book would seem to have a natural place in both bedrooms and classrooms…. the concept will beguile them.” —Kirkus Reviews

“There’s an understated but fitting whimsy in Gill’s artwork.” —Publishers Weekly

NYRB presents
A Month of Writers on Writers
at Barnes & Noble
150 East 86th Street, Upper East Side

Monday, November 1st at 7PM
The author of Sex and the City, Candace Bushnell, and arts critic Terry Teachout discuss two cult dark comedic classics, The Dud Avocado and The Old Man and Me, by Elaine Dundy.

Monday, November 15th at 7PM
Author Luc Sante and National Book Award-winner Norman Rush discuss the dark psychological novels of Georges Simenon, one of the greatest and most prolific writers of the 20th-century.

Monday, November 22nd at 7PM
Literary critic Morris Dickstein and author and poet Honor Moore discuss the writer John Williams and his 1965 novel Stoner, which Dickstein has called “a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving that it takes your breath away.”

Monday, November 29th at 7PM
Author André Aciman and journalist Joan Acocella discuss the mid-century Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig and, in particular, his recently discovered and just published novella, Journey Into the Past.

New York Review Books

I was a child backyard cook. I made salads of dandelion heads or clover leaves and even baked up a mud pie or two. But truth be told, I wasn’t very inventive. Like an overworked parent serving macaroni and cheese night after night, I tended to fall back on a few favorite dishes that required little thought. Is it any wonder that my dolls, and eventually even the tiniest neighborhood ants, turned down my invitations to dine?

If only Marjorie Winslow’s Mud Pies and Other Recipes had been in print in those days! Maybe then I’d have ended up like Sara Moulton—a former editor at Gourmet with several cooking shows to her credit. Her grandmother gave her Mud Pies when she was a girl, and she’s cited it as an inspiration: “even though it was a pretend cookbook, it somehow persuaded me that real cooking must be fun.”

Like any good cookbook, Mud Pies presents you with a range of recipes: some so simple you wonder why you hadn’t thought them up yourself—”Mud Pies à la Mud”—of course!; a few that are nothing short of inspired, see “Dandelion Soufflé,” which directs you to place a pile of fluffy dandelion seeds on a plate “located in a light breeze” noting, “You will never have leftovers with this dish.”; and several that are perhaps more aspirational than practical, like “Putty Fours”—acorn shells stuffed with putty, which “may take days to harden.”

But Mud Pies recognizes that most of its audience will be beginning cooks, and tells us reassuringly, “If a recipe calls for a cupful of something, you can use a measuring cup or a teacup or a buttercup. It doesn’t much matter. What does matter is that you select the best ingredients available, set a fine table, and serve with style.”

Mud Pies and Other Recipes was first published in 1961, but Marjorie Winslow was ahead of her time. Even before the days of conscientious reducing and recycling, she reminded us that “cooking utensils should, whenever possible, be made from something that would otherwise be thrown away.” What’s more, though the children pictured in Erik Blegvad’s fine drawings, in their peter-pan collars and sweater-vests, would look at home on the set of Mad Men, there are nearly as many little boys as little girls “frying” up water and serving the results to a bevy of toy soldiers, teddy bears, and baby dolls. Winslow’s table was an inclusive one. Pick up Mud Pies and Other Recipes for yourself, give it to a girl or boy, and prepare to get your hands dirty.

Sara Kramer,
Managing Editor

Read the foreword to Mud Pies and Other Recipes (pdf)

The World As I Found It

By Bruce Duffy
Introduction by David Leavitt

Irreverently trespassing on the turf of history, biography, and philosophy, The World As I Found It re-imagines the lives of three very different men, the philosophers Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

At the center of the book is Wittgenstein, one of the most magnetic philosophers of our time: brilliant, tortured, mercurial, and forging his own solitary path. Playing in counterpoint are his two reluctant mentors: Bertrand Russell, past his philosophical prime yet eager to break new ground as a public intellectual, educational theorist, and sexual adventurer; and G. E. Moore, the great Cambridge don who was devoted to the pleasures of the table and pure thought, until, late in life, he discovered real fulfillment in marriage and fatherhood.

Bruce Duffy’s novel depicts times and places as various as Vienna 1900, the trenches of World War I, Bloomsbury, and the colleges of Cambridge, while the complicated main characters appear not only in thought and dispute but in love and despair.

“By turns wicked, melancholy, and rhapsodic, The World As I Found It is an astonishing performance, a kind of intellectual opera in which each abstraction gets its own artist.”
—John Leonard, Newsday

The Outward Room

By Millen Brand
Afterword by Peter Cameron

The Outward Room is a spare, deft novel that traces one woman’s path from mental illness to trust, recovery and love.

Harriet Demuth, having suffered a nervous breakdown after her brother’s accidental death, has been committed to a mental hospital. Convinced that only she and she alone can refashion her life, Harriet escapes from the hospital, hopping a train by night and riding the rails to New York City. It’s the 1930s, the midst of the Great Depression, and initially Harriet is lost among the city’s multitudes. She runs out of money and is living an increasingly hard existence when she meets John, a machine-shop worker. Slowly she begins to recover her sense of self and Harriet and John fall in love. The story of that love, told with the lyricism of Virginia Woolf and the realism of Theodore Dreiser, is at the heart of Millen Brand’s remarkable novel.

“As devoid of sentimentality as a blizzard, and yet a great love story—a real love story.” —Sinclair Lewis