The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays

By Vasily Grossman
Edited by Robert Chandler
A new translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler
with Olga Mukovnikova

The Road brings together short stories, journalism, essays, and letters by Vasily Grossman, providing new insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer. The stories range from Grossman’s first success, “In the Town of Berdichev,” a piercing reckoning with the cost of war, to such haunting later works as “Mama,” based on the life of a girl who was adopted at the height of the Great Terror by the head of the NKVD and packed off to an orphanage after her father’s downfall. The Road also includes the complete text of Grossman’s harrowing report from Treblinka; “The Sistine Madonna,” a reflection on art and atrocity; as well as two heartbreaking letters that Grossman wrote to his mother after her death at the hands of the Nazis and carried with him for the rest of his life.

"Grossman’s unsparing, literary account of the horrific ways Nazi Germany implemented its ethnic-cleansing program at Treblinka was one of the first reports of a death camp anywhere in Europe and eventually provided prosecutors at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal with crucial background information. The surprise is that up until now an English-language translation of Grossman’s lengthy article has never been published in its entirety. That will soon change with the publication of The Road, a collection of some of Grossman’s best short stories and war-time articles, including ‘The Hell of Treblinka.’” —Tobias Grey, The Wall Street Journal

Poison Penmanship
The Gentle Art of Muckraking

By Jessica Mitford
Preface by Jane Smiley

Jessica Mitford’s diligence, unfailing skepticism, and acid pen made her one of the great chroniclers of the mischief people make in the pursuit of profit and the name of good. Poison Penmanship collects seventeen of Mitford’s finest pieces and fills them out with the story of how she got the scoop and, no less fascinating, how the story developed after publication.

"For my part, I can’t remember when I enjoyed a collection of journalism so much, or laughed out loud so often. Spirited, extremely witty and sharp and, perhaps most importantly, driven by a powerful sense of social justice, Mitford was, quite simply, one of the most useful journalists of the 20th century. That she could also make you laugh while exposing the shenanigans of the corrupt, or, as she preferred to call it, muckraking, makes this book indispensable….It is also useful as, and intended to be useful as, a manual for doing the kind of journalism she did. She is very interested in inspiring people to continue the tradition of muckraking, and just because the technology of journalism has changed, it doesn’t mean that techniques of getting interviewees to spill beans they would otherwise have preferred unspilled have changed, too. So as well as comments, or post-mortems, on every piece here, there is also an entertaining and helpful introduction in which she goes through the basics of her trade….And you can learn so much from her style, too. Never mind if you haven’t read any of her more substantial works; here, in essence, is her achievement.” —Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

Life and Fate
By Vasily Grossman
Introduced and translated by Robert Chandler

“#1 on Antony Beevor’s ‘Five Best of World War II Fiction’ list”
—The Wall Street Journal

“A war correspondent for the Red Army’s Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, a witness to the battle of Stalingrad and the first journalist to give an account of the Nazi extermination camps (after visiting Treblinka), Vasily Grossman was ideally placed to write arguably the greatest novel inspired by the second world war….Life and Fate sprawls across more than 850 pages and succeeds in portraying a remarkably broad cross-section of life in Stalin’s Soviet Union.”
— Phil Mongredien, The Observer (UK)

Everything Flows
By Vasily Grossman
Introduced by Robert Chandler
Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Anna Aslanyan

“Understandably bitter over the suppression of his [Life and Fate] the author worked on Everything Flows—a shorter, but even more eviscerating, meditation on the monstrous results of the Soviet experiment—until his death from cancer in 1964. This new translation brings his searing vision to light….Fortunately, the KGB couldn’t keep Grossman’s books under wraps forever. His testament stands as a fitting tribute to the millions of voices that were prematurely silenced.”
—Drew Toal, Time Out New York

Hons and Rebels
By Jessica Mitford
Introduction by Christopher Hitchens

“Stunning. Reads like extravagantly mannered fiction, except that it is all fabulously true…Miss Mitford is at once touching and wildly funny, and there is not one of her highly coloured characters that is not violently alive and uncomfortably kicking.”
—Tatler (UK)

“More than an extremely amusing autobiography…she has evoked a whole generation. Her book is full of the music of time.”
—Sunday Times (UK)

Andrew Roberts chose two NYRB Classics for his Five Best of “World War II First Hand Accounts” list in Saturday’s The Wall Street Journal. Both Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte and Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman are on the list.

On Kaputt, Roberts wrote “The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte was sent to Russia by the newspaper Corriere della Sera to cover Hitler’s glorious victory over the Bolsheviks, but instead he witnessed the drawn-out Nazi defeat on the Eastern Front. He recorded what he had seen in an autobiographical novel, ‘Kaputt,’ which he had to keep hidden until after the war.” First published in the US in 1946, Kaputt was released by NYRB Classics in 2005.

On Life and Fate, “Taking extensive notes throughout the war, Grossman—a Jew who felt deeply betrayed by the Bolsheviks’ growing anti-Semitism— incorporated the stories into his monumental autobiographical novel, Life and Fate, which has been likened to War and Peace in its scope and ambition.” Confiscated by the KGB, Life and Fate was not published in the US until 1980 and joined the NYRB Classics series in 2006. Life and Fate is one of the series’ bestselling titles.

To read more about Andrew Roberts’ book picks, click here.

Be sure to stop by the NYRB booth (#25-26) at the Brooklyn Book Festival—a wide selection of NYRB Classics and Little Bookroom titles will be on sale at discounted prices. Plus, Karen Seiger will sign copies of her new book, Markets of New York City: A Guide to the Best Artisan, Farmer, Food and Flea Markets, from 1-3PM at the booth.

And, don’t miss the event sponsored by The New York Review of Books:
The Economic Crisis and What To Do About It
11AM at St. Francis College Auditorium (180 Remsen Street)
Free and Open to the Public

A conversation with Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, moderated by Jeff Madrick—all frequent contributors to The New York Review of Books. Introduced by Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books.

Tickets are free and will be distributed one hour before the start of the program from the Brooklyn Book Festival Information Booths.

For more information, visit www.brooklynbookfestival.org.

New York Review Books would like to wish you a Labor Day unlike Steve Hogan’s. The protagonist of Georges Simenon’s dark psychological thriller Red Lights, Steve is one of the millions of Americans hitting the highway on the Friday before Labor Day weekend. He and his wife, Nancy, are traveling from New York City to Maine, where their children are at summer camp. But somewhere in the midst of the thick traffic and heavy drinking of the trip, Steve “goes into the tunnel”: a mental fugue characterized by pathological uncertainty, dangerous strangers, and the uncanny.

Red Lights, one of the prolific Simenon’s nearly two hundred novels, is remarkable for its flawless American flavor. It combines the distinctive ingredients of the romans durs—chilling clarity, a strange departure from normal life, and a moment of rapture that will ensure the plot’s downfall—with the sensory detail of the American public holiday.

Simenon’s thriller, heralded by New York Magazine as “a truly chilling road trip novel,” was also named by Men’s Journal as one of the “15 Best Thrillers Ever Written.” Red Lights is a gripping read with an extra shot of spine-chill this September 6; we dare you to read it.

“The day promised to be exceptionally torrid.”

So Albert Cossery begins his novel, The Jokers, a tale that, from its opening sentence, is packed with charged wit and barbed satire. The Jokers, an NYRB Classics Original appearing in its first English translation, has been making headlines since its July publication.

The San Francisco Chronicle includes The Jokers on its list of July “Grabbers”: new books with gripping first sentences. And Benjamin Moser, in the August edition of Harper’s Magazine, writes a resounding description of the novel:

“We’re in a country much like Cossery’s native Egypt, which he left in 1931 to spend most of the rest of his life in a Parisian hotel. There, at a rate of one novel per decade (one sentence per week, he claimed), he composed a body of work whose primary theme is the relation of power to powerlessness.

The Jokers describes how a motley group of fainéants conspire to bring down an odious governor by printing and distributing posters that praise him so extravagantly that even the police, whose job it is to ensure oleaginous devotion to their boss, grow concerned…As the conspirators begin to score successes against the governor, who is increasingly enchanted by his own propaganda, Cossery introduces a Dostoevskyan figure, Taher, whose former friend Karim, the author of the seditiously ass-kicking poster, was once, like Taher, a hardened revolutionary. Now Karim dedicates himself to political tomfoolery and leisurely dalliances with prostitutes; Taher is outraged that the police think he and his comrades would have anything to do with such frivolity. ‘They make us look ridiculous to the police. And I don’t like that. We’re not pranksters!’”

The “grabbing” satirical edge of Cossery’s novel invites mayhem, laughter, and reflection—it promises, in other words, to be an exceptionally torrid read.

We are thrilled to announce that Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion is now on sale.

Stafford, a writer perhaps best known for her marriages to Robert Lowell, Oliver Jensen, and A.J. Liebling, was the heralded author of three novels and many short stories. The Mountain Lion, her second novel, is a devastating, unconventional coming-of-age story.

Ralph and his younger sister Molly, a pair of imaginative, precocious adolescents growing up in a genteel suburb of Los Angeles, are an inseparable pair. Fiercely independent and more than a little wild, they have no patience for the restrictions of polite society and are delighted by the opportunity to spend summers on their uncle’s Colorado mountain ranch. However, the exhilaration of the Colorado landscape, vividly depicted in Stafford’s mandarin prose, quickly becomes overwhelming as Ralph and Molly begin their unsettling transformation into adulthood. In her afterword, Kathryn Davis writes that their poignant, brutal metamorphosis is what sets The Mountain Lion apart from other texts:

The Mountain Lion is often characterized as a coming-of-age story, but it is not a conventional coming-of-age story. This book is not a conventional anything. It is one of a kind. It is freakish—like the girl at its heart—a marvel…[Its] details—not so much realistic as unreal—accumulate and grow in intensity as the novel unfolds, the world they limn increasingly disturbing, creating in the reader a similarly queer and horrible feeling…It is a story about the impossibility of growing up and the impossibility of remaining a child.

“If not the best novel of the 1940s, The Mountain Lion is a very fine book indeed, a classic of childhood rage and bewilderment told in a superbly controlled colloquial prose.” — Elaine Showalter

This gripping story, out of print for more than a decade, is filled with transformative power and intense insight.