Congratulations to Daniel Mendelsohn and Eve Babitz, whose respective essay collections Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones and I Used to Be Charming are longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. This year's judges are Jelani Cobb, Daniel Menaker, and Judith Thurman. Finalists for the award will be announced in January 2020, and the winner will be celebrated at the 2020 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony on March 2 in New York City. 

New York Review Comics will be at this year's Comic Arts Brooklyn book festival on Saturday, November 2 from 11am–7pm. Find us at table A3 in Pratt Institute's Activities Resource Center to browse our titles, all of which will be available at discounted prices. Admission to the festival is free. It's sure to be a lot of fun!

Also, be sure to catch Frank Santoro, author of the recent NYR Comics release Pittsburgh, in conversation with journalist Calvin Reid at Pratt Institute's ARC Building at 4pm. Learn more about the event here. Santoro will be signing copies of Pittsburgh at our table from 5–6pm.

New York Review Books will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival Children's Day on Saturday, September 21 from 10am–4pm at table #30, and at the festival's Literary Marketplace on Sunday, September 22 from 10am–6pm at booths #409 & 410. The Children's Day is being hosted at Metrotech Commons, and the Literary Marketplace at Brooklyn Borough Hall and its vicinity. We'll have a wide variety of our titles on sale at discounted prices — please come visit us!

Five of our authors will be participating in festival events on the 22nd: Maxim Osipov, Mark Alan Stamaty, Daniel Mendelsohn, Amit Chaudhuri, and Frank Santoro. Learn more about their events here.

The film adaptation of Anna Segher's Transit is coming to theaters and streaming services in the U.K. and Ireland on August 16. Directed by Christian Petzold, the writer-director of the 2014 film Phoenix, and released to wide acclaim in the U.S. in March 2019, Transit is a sharp and timely tale of exile, displacement, and longing in the midst of violence and war. Learn more about the film's release in the U.K. and Ireland here.

The reviews are in for the centerpiece of our summer season. Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, in a pioneering English translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, by all accounts more than lives up to its companion Life and Fate. If you still need convincing, see some of the most notable recent praise below.

"Stalingrad is Life and Fate’s equal. It is, arguably, the richer book – shot through with human stories and a sense of life’s beauty and fragility.” —Luke Harding, The Guardian

 "In the front-line posts, factories and power-plants of Stalingrad itself, with interludes in Moscow, Kazan and even in the German high command, Grossman knits a dozen plot strands into a single narrative. He shows how “a lacerating sense of historical change” cuts deep into the exhausted bodies and brooding minds of his characters. The battle scenes set in Stalingrad’s 'vast, rumbling smithy' have all the mesmeric thrill and dread that admirers will recall from “Life and Fate”. The lyricism, tenderness and pathos of the moments of respite touch the same heights.”—The Economist

"A fascinating afterword by translator Robert Chandler charts how this text was drawn together from early draft manuscripts and editions published both before and after Stalin’s death in 1953, which allowed restoration of previously excluded passages. The almost polyphonic breadth and rich nuance of Grossman’s prose is perfectly captured by Chandler’s translation, accomplished with his wife Elizabeth. At close on 1,000 pages, it’s a monumental achievement.” — Tom Birchenough, The Arts Desk

"[Stalingrad] is an astonishing example of the compromises between creativity and censorship. Observing the negation of Grossman’s art as it tries to burst into flame in spite of the dampening of the censor, you get a deeper appreciation for the empathy, truth and magnanimity of its sequel. Perhaps the most intriguing element of all is the overstory: the way the Grossman of this novel somehow became the dissident author of Life and Fate. In the space between the two novels, the idealised bronze figures on a Soviet war memorial were transmuted into living beings. And in the process, the empathic knowledge that his work came to embody seems to have altered the heart of its creator.”—Marcel Theroux, The Guardian

"Google 'great writers' and his name doesn’t come up; suggest him to a book group and all you will get are shrugs; bring his name up in a writing workshop and students stare blankly. And yet the writer I’m talking about, Vasily Grossman, should be remembered for taking on one of the hardest challenges literature ever faced — trying to make sense of the madness and horror that swept over the world in the years 1939-45 — and by some miracle of courage and compassion wresting from it art.”—W.D. Wetherell, The Valley News

Congratulations to Damion Searls who has won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gessine Cresspahl by Uwe Johnson.

"Searl's translation of this monumental work—which has been compared to the writings of Joyce, Faulkner, and Balzac—is the first complete edition of this novel in English," wrote the judges in their citation. "His sparkling translation captures the dizzying swirl of events, from the quotidian to the earth-shattering, with meticulous, acoustically spellbinding prose, and makes for riveting reading throughout its nearly 1,700 pages."

The Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize is funded by the Goethe-Institut New York.

Photo © Paul Barbera

The annual Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, which is awarded by Goethe-Institut New York, is given each spring to honor an outstanding literary translation from German into English published in the USA the previous year. We were overjoyed to see that three translators of NYRB Classics have landed on the shortlist for the 2019 prize:

Margot Bettauer Dembo, translator of The Seventh Cross by Anne Seghers

Tim Mohr, translator of Sand by Wolfgang Herrndorf

Damion Searls, translator of Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson

Warmest congratulations to all three of these wonderful translators!

The winner of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize will be announced this month.

 

Congratulations to two of our translators for winning incredible prizes this past month!

Sophie Yanow was awarded the prestigious Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translation of Dominique Goblet's graphic novel, Pretending is Lying. This is the first time that a translation of a graphic novel has been awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize.

Richard Sieburth was awarded the 2019 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for his translation of Henri Michaux’s A Certain Plume. "Tone and time are the chief catalysts of the prose poem," wrote the panel of judges, "and Richard Sieburth has shown Henri Michaux to be a master of both."