spr ing 2013

ColleCtions

The New York reviewChildren’s ColleCtion

Pitch Dark

Renata adleR“What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here.”

Pitch Dark, Renata Adler’s follow-up to her prizewinning novel Speedboat, is a book of questions. It is also a book of false starts, red herrings, misunderstandings, and all-too-fleeting revelations. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in her affairwith a married lover, a fraught relationship that reverberates throughout the novel, as it moves from Kate’s house in rural Connecticut and her New York City brownstone apartment, to a small island off the coast of Washington, and to an utterly dark road in a remote corner of Ireland. Told in Adler’s celebrated frag-mented style, and constructed from the bare-bones language of everyday life, Pitch Dark transcends its parts to come to the kind of self-knowledge achievable onlyafter a relentless quest.

NYRB Classics • Literary Fiction • Paperback • 192 pages • 5 x 8978-1-59017-614-6 • $14.00 US / $17.00 CAN / £7.99 UK

Available as an eBook: 978-1-59017-634-4 US on sale: February 5, 2013

Photograph by Richard AvedonRenata Adler, writer, Saint Martin, French West Indies, March 25, 1978© 2008 The Richard Avedon Foundation

SPeeDboatRenata adleR“elegant, funny, vivid, brilliant, luminous, exquisite!” —The New York Times Book Review

It has been more than thirty-five years since Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, charged through the literary establishment, blasting genre walls and pointing the way for a newly liberated way of writing. This unclassifiable work is simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique. It is the story of every man and woman cursed with too much consciousness and too little comprehension, and it is the story of Jen Fein,a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Her voice is searching, cuttingly perceptive, and darkly funny as she breaks narrative convention to send dispatches back from the world as she finds it.

NYRB Classics • Literary Fiction • Paperback • 200 pages • 5 x 8978-1-59017-613-9 • $14.00 US / $17.00 CAN / £7.99 UK

Available as an eBook: 978-1-59017-633-7 US on sale: February 5, 2013

“nobody in this country writes bet-ter than Renata adler. She is lillian Hellman, young again; Joan didion with a tendency to giggle; albert Camus on one of his sunny days. . .Speedboat is superb.” —Harper’s

“Miss adler’s mind is analytical and her style ebullient. She also has an old-fashionedreal story to tell, a love story, although it is by no means told plain. You have to piece it together as you would if you had picked up a stranger’s private journal.You have to read between the lines and snatch at hints and fragments until the whole becomes clear, and the character of the narrator is filled out by the honest expression of her feelings, her opinions and penseés, her daily experiences. . . . nothing evolves, nothing derives. effects do not result from causes. episodes are recorded without any connection with each other. Fortunately, they are fascinating episodes.” —Muriel Spark, The New York Times

Renata Adler is an American journalist, critic, and novelist. Born in Milan and raised in Connecticut, she was educated at Bryn Mawr, Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Yale Law School. Adler began her writing career at The New Yorker in 1962 and remained on staff there for the next four decades. Her essay collections include A Year in the Dark and Toward a Radical Middle, both from 1969; Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS et al., Sharon v. Time (1986); and Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001). Speedboat was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist in 1976. Pitch Dark was published in 1983. She lives in New York City.

Guy Trebay writes on fashion and style for The New York Times. He was previouslya columnist and senior editor at The Village Voice, and has written for The New Yorker, Vibe, Condé Nast Traveler, Harper’s, Esquire, Vogue and other major publica-tions. His books include In The Place To Be: Guy Trebay’s New York.

These new editions of Speedboat and Pitch Dark will include interviews between Renata Adler and Guy Trebay discussing the genesis and composition of each book.

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“One of australia’s superlative essayists and the closest thing we have to a scholar-artist on the classical Chinese model . . . to see leys’s essays assembled is to appre-ciate, if you haven’t already, the range of philosophical, artistic and literary interests that sustain even his slightest productions.” —Geordie Williamson, The Australian

Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature, Leys was one of the first Westerners to expose the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. His interests and expertise are not, however, confined to China: he discusses European art, literature, history, and politics, and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now. No matter the topic Leys writes with unfailing elegance and intelligence, seriousness, and acerbic wit. Gathering the finest of Leys’s essays for an American audience for the first time, The Hall of Uselessness is an illuminating compendium from a brilliant and unorthodox writer and an exemplary global voice.

Simon Leys is the pen name of the literary critic, essayist, historical novelist, and eminent Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans. Born in Belgium, he settled in Australia in 1970 and was a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. His works include Chinese Shadows (1977), The Death of Napoleon (1991), a new translation of the Analects of Confucius (1997), and The Angel and the Octopus (1999). A fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a member of the Académie Royale de Littérature Française (Belgium), he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino del Duca in 2004. He lives in Canberra, Australia.

the hall of USeleSSneSS:COlleCted eSSaYSSiMOn leYSan nYRB Classics Original

NYRB Classics • Essays · Paperback • 456 pages • 5 x 8 978-1-59017-620-7 • $18.95 US / $22.50 CAN / £12.99 UK

Available as an eBook: 978-1-59017-638-2 US on sale: March 19, 2013 • UK on sale: April 25, 2013

NYRB Classics • Memoir / Travel • Paperback • 160 pages • 5 x 8978-1-59017-618-4 • $14.95 US / $17.95 CAN / No UK rightsAvailable as an eBook: 978-1-59017-635-1 US on sale: February 19, 2013

“Vasily Grossman is the tolstoy of the USSR.” —Martin amis

Few writers had to confront as many of the last century’s mass tragedies as Vasily Grossman. He is likely to be remembered, above all, for the terrifying clarity with which he writes about the Shoah, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Terror Famine in the Ukraine. An Armenian Sketchbook, however, shows us a very different Grossman;it is notable for its tenderness, warmth, and sense of fun. Although the work’s many threads are deftly woven together, it has an air of absolute spontaneity, as though the author were simply chatting to the reader about his impressions of Armenia—its mountains, its ancient churches, its people—and even his various physical problems. An Armenian Sketchbook was published posthumously, as a result of the author’s refusal to accede to censors’ demands to cut fifteen lines. A bowdler-ized Russian text was published in 1967 and a complete text in 1988. This is the first English translation.

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964) worked as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star during World War II. His vivid yet sober “The Hell of Treblinka” was translatedand used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials. His novels Life and Fate and EverythingFlows, and a collection of stories, journalism, and essays, The Road, are all published by NYRB Classics.

Robert Chandler’s translations from Russian include several works by Vasily Grossmanand, with others, by Andrey Platonov; Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; and Alexander Pushkin’s Dubrovsky and The Captain’s Daughter. Chandler is also the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and the author of a biography of Pushkin.

an armenian Sketchbook

VaSilY GROSSMana new translation from the Russian and with an introduction by Robert Chandler

an nYRB Classics Original

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NYRB Classics • Literary Fiction / Ghost Story • Paperback • 272 pages • 5 x 8978-1-59017-616-0 • $14.95 US / No Canadian or UK RightsAvailable as an eBook: 978-1-59017-636-8 US on sale: March 12, 2013

“What makes The Green Man readable and re-readable is the skill with which amis, like Henry James before him, turns the narrative screw. it is, quite simply, a rattling good ghost story.” —The Times (london)

Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. As he says, “I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoreti-cally old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all his time thinking about it. It’s a pretty arresting thought.” He also happens to own and run a country inn that is haunted. The Green Man opens as Maurice’s father drops dead and continues as friends and family convene for the funeral. His problems are many and increasing: How to deal with his own declining health? How to reach out to a teenage daughter who watches TV all the time? How to get his best friend’s wife in the sack? How to find another drink? (And another.) And then there is always death.

The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best.

Michael Dirda, a weekly book columnist for The Washington Post, received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays. His most recent book, On Conan Doyle, received a 2012 Edgar Award for best critical/biographical work of the year. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, the online Barnes & Noble Review, and several other periodicals, as well as a frequent lecturer and an occasional college teacher.

the Green man

KinGSleY aMiSintroduction by Michael dirda

“One of the best—possibly the best—alternate-worlds novels in existence.”—Philip K. dick

“Buoyantly inventive from its ground-plan to its remotest pinnacles and twirly bits, Kingsley amis’s new novel has almost nothing expectable about it, except that it is a study of tyranny.” —John Carey, New Statesman

In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into alternate history, it is 1976 but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a quite extraordinary voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. After all, any sacrifice is worth it for the perfection of art.

How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of aclassic piece of counterfactual fiction to equal Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, and critic, widely regarded as one of the greatest satirical writers of the twentieth century. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award; from that point on he would publish roughly a book a year. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. Lucky Jim and The Old Devils are published in the US by NYRB Classics. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Awardfor best science fiction novel in 1976.

the alteration

KinGSleY aMiS

NYRB Classics • Science Fiction • Paperback • 232 pages • 5 x 8978-1-59017-617-7 • $14.95 US / No Canadian or UK RightsAvailable as an eBook: 978-1-59017-637-5 US on sale: March 12, 2013

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“Surreal, disenchanted, on the edge of amoral, Malaparte broke literary ground for writ-ers from Ryszard Kapuscinski to Joseph Heller.” —Frederika Randall, Wall Street Journal

“a scrupulous reporter? Probably not. One of the most remarkable writers of the 20th century? Certainly.” —ian Buruma

“It is a shameful thing to win a war.” Curzio Malaparte’s service as an Italian liaison officer with the Allies during the invasion of Italy was the basis for this searing and surreal novel, in which the contradictions inherent in any attempt to simultaneously conquer and liberate a people beset the American forces as they make their way up the peninsula. Like Céline, another anarchic satirist and disillusioned veteran of two world wars, Malaparte paints the world in a fun-house mirror that speaks the truth, creating terrifying, grotesque, and often darkly comic scenes that will not soon be forgotten.

Curzio Malaparte, the pseudonym of Kurt Erich Suckert (1898–1957), was bornin Prato and served during World War I. An early supporter of the Italian Fascist movement and a prolific, outspoken journalist, he eventually incurred Mussolini’s displeasure and spent time in prison. During World War II Malaparte worked as a correspondent, mostly on the eastern front, and this experience provided the basis for his two most famous books, Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949), both available from NYRB Classics. Malaparte’s political sympathies veered to the left after the war. He continued to write, while also involving himself in the theater and the cinema.

the Skin

CURziO MalaPaRtetranslated from the italian by david Moore

NYRB Classics • Literary Fiction • Paperback • 360 pages • 5 x 8978-1-59017-622-1 • $15.95 US / $18.95 CAN / £9.99 UK

US on sale: April 23, 2013 • UK on sale: May 30, 2013

NYRB Classics • History • Paperback • 480 pages • 5 x 8978-1-59017-619-1 • $18.95 US / $22.50 CAN / £12.99 UK

Available as an eBook: 978-1-59017-639-9 US on sale: April 9, 2013 • UK on sale: May 16, 2013

“Hazard presented arguments with clarity and passion.” —Justin Champion, The Times(london)

“Hazard displays a profound, and contagious, sympathy for the intellectual move-ment he describes.” —History Workshop Journal

Paul Hazard was one of the master historians of the twentieth century, and The Crisis of the European Mind is by common consent his masterwork, an ambitious studyin intellectual history whose breadth of learning and authority is widely acknowledged to this day. The period from 1680 to 1715 was a turning point in Western history: the beginning of an intellectual revolution that would lead to the Enlightenmentand beyond that to romanticism. With clarity as well as a sharp eye for historical detail, Hazard depicts the progressive erosion of the respect for tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage that had characterized classicism. He shows how a new awareness of the countries beyond Europe encouraged a critical re-evaluation of European institutions and how the growth of modern science and scientific method threatened the accepted intellectual order, while also prompting prosecution of free inquiry. Throughout, Hazard conveys the excitement of a revolution, the impact of which continues to be felt in our own time.

Paul Hazard (1878–1944) was an eminent French historian of ideas and a pioneeringscholar of comparative literature. His reputation rests on two major works of intellec-tual history: La Crise de la conscience européenne, from 1935, and its sequel, concernedwith European thought in the eighteenth century, published posthumously in 1946.

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Human-ities at Princeton University. His most recent book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe.

the criSiS of the eUroPean minD

PaUl HazaRdintroduction by anthony Grafton

translated from the French by J. lewis May

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“david Mendel was an exceptionally talented individual, a polymath whose career was never confined to his profession of cardiology . . . as skilled with his tongue andpen as he was with a stethoscope. . . His informal and easy style of writing did notdisguise the wisdom and humanity of the content.” —desmond Julian, The Independent

“People come to us for help. They come for health and strength.” With these simple words David Mendel begins the wise, witty, and deeply humane Proper Doctoring,a book about what it means (and takes) to be a good doctor, and for that reason very much a book for patients as well as doctors—which is to say a book for everyone. In crisp, clear prose, he introduces readers to the craft of medicine and shows how to practice it. Discussing matters ranging from the most basic—how doctors should dress and how they should speak to patients—to the taking of medical histories, the etiquette of examinations, and the difficulties of diagnosis, Mendel moves on to consider how the doctor can best serve patients facing prolonged illness or death. Throughout he keeps in sight the fundamental moral fact that the relationship between doctor and patient is a human one before it is a professional one.

David Mendel (1922–2007) was a British cardiologist, teacher, and writer. For morethan two decades he was a senior lecturer and a consultant in cardiology at St. Thomas’sHospital, London, before retiring from medicine in 1986. He subsequently obtained a degree in Italian from the University of Kent and regularly wrote and broadcast for the BBC about Italian topics, especially the chemist and writer Primo Levi.

ProPer DoctorinG

daVid Mendel

NYRB Classics • Medicine • Paperback • 208 pages • 5 x 8978-1-59017-621-4 • $15.95 US / $18.95 CAN / £8.99 UK

Available as an eBook: 978-1-59017-643-6 US on sale: May 7, 2013 • UK on sale: June 20, 2013

NYRB Classics • Literary Fiction • Paperback • 360 pages • 5 x 8978-1-59017-625-2 • $15.95 US / $18.95 CAN / No UK rightsAvailable as an eBook: 978-1-59017-640-5 US on sale: May 7, 2013

“Transit is Seghers’ best full-length novel. . . [a]nd Transit may be the greatest Exilroman ever . . .” —Dialog International

Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, the nameless 27-year-old German narrator of Anna Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseilles. There he listens to refugees’ stories and pieces togetherthe story of Weidel, a writer and suicide whose mysterious final manuscript has shattered the narrator’s “deathly boredom.” Several years before Waiting for Godot,Seghers wrote this existential, political thriller exploring the significance of literature and the agonies of boredom and waiting with extraordinary compassion and insight.

Anna Seghers (1900–1983) was one of the most important German women writers of the twentieth century. Born in Mainz of Jewish descent, she received a doctorate in art history and began to publish novels and stories. After the 1940 Nazi invasion of France, Seghers and her family sailed from Marseilles to Mexico. The Seventh Cross (1939), published in the US in 1942, was the basis for the 1944 film and one of the first depictions of Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Peter Conrad was born in Australia, and since 1973 has taught English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. He has published nineteen books on a variety of subjects. including, most recently, Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins (2007), and is a prolific writer of features and reviews for many magazines and newspapers.

Margot Dembo has translated Judith Hermann, Robert Gernhardt, Joachim Fest, and many other authors. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translator’s Prize (1994) and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize (2003). She lives in New York City.

tranSit

anna SeGHeRSintroduction by Peter Conrad

newly translated from the German by Margot dembo

an nYRB Classics Original

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“they dazzle and delight.” —Graham Greene

The whimsical, macabre tales of Saki deftly, mercilessly, and hilariously skewer the banality and hypocrisy of polite upper-class English society between the end of Queen Victoria’s reign and the beginning of World War I. Their heroes are clever, amoral children and other enfants terribles who marshal their considerable wit and imagination against the cruelty and fatuousness of a decorous and doomed world.

This selection of Saki’s most polished dark gems comes paired with illustrations by the peerless Edward Gorey, whose fine-lined pen-and-ink drawings evoke, in all their fragile elegance and creeping menace, Saki’s Edwardian drawing rooms and garden parties, overly delicate ladies and their mischief-making charges, flustered authority figures, and all manner of delightfully preposterous imposters.

Saki was the pen name of the British writer Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916). In addition to his short stories, of which he was an acknowledged master, he also wrote a full-length play with Charles Maude, The Watched Pot; a historical study of the Russian Empire; a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; a parody of Alice in Wonderland; and a fantasy about German-occupied England, When William Came.

The celebrated American writer and artist Edward Gorey (1925–2000) published The Unstrung Harp in 1953, followed by more than a hundred extraordinary books, including The Curious Sofa and The Epiplectic Bicycle. Gorey also provided drawings to countless books by other writers, of which New York Review Books has published H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, Rex Warner’s Men and Gods, and two children’sbooks by Rhoda Levine, Three Ladies Beside the Sea and He Was There From the Day We Moved In.

the UnreSt-cUre anD other StorieS

SaKiillustrated by edward Gorey

an nYRB Classics Original

NYRB Classics • Short Stories • Paperback • 320 pages • 5 x 8 • B/W Illustrations978-1-59017-624-5 • $15.95 US / $18.95 CAN / No UK RightsUS on sale: June 4, 2013

NYRB Classics • Literary Fiction • Paperback • 208 pages • 5 x 8978-1-59017-646-7 • $14.95 US / $17.95 CAN / No UK RightsAvailable as an eBook: 978-1-59017-647-4 US on sale: May 14, 2013

“Crackles with witty detail, mordant intelligence and self-deprecating irony.” —Time

Life in a city can be atomizing, isolating. And it certainly is for William G. and Neaera H., the strangers at the center of Russell Hoban’s surprisingly heartwarming novel Turtle Diary. William, a clerk at a used-book store, lives in a rooming house after a divorce that has left him without home or family. Neaera is a successful writer of children’s books, who, in her own estimation, “looks like the sort of spinster whodoesn’t keep cats and is not a vegetarian.” Entirely unknown to each other, they are both drawn to the turtle tank at the London zoo with “minds full of turtle thoughts.” And then comes the day when Neaera walks into William’s bookstore, and together they form an unlikely partnership to make a crazy dream become a reality.

Russell Hoban (1925–2011) was the author of more than seventy books for chil-dren and adults. During the 1960s Hoban and his wife, Lillian, produced as many as six books in a single year, including six stories about Frances the badger, Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, and The Sorely Trying Day (published by the New York Review Children’s Collection). Among Hoban’s novels for adults are Turtle Diary, Riddley Walker, and The Bat Tattoo.

Ed Park is a founding editor of The Believer. His debut novel Personal Days (2008) was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, and other publications. He teaches at the Columbia University Writing Program and lives in New York City.

tUrtle Diary

RUSSell HOBanintroduction by ed Park

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“the premier literary intellectual magazine in the english language.” —Esquire

For the past fifty years, The New York Review of Books has covered virtually every international revolution and movement of consequence by dispatching the world’s most brilliant writers to write eyewitness accounts. The New York Review Abroad not only brings together twenty-eight of the most riveting of these pieces but includesepilogues that update and reassess the political situation. Among the pieces included are:

• Susan Sontag’s personal narrative of staging Waiting for Godot in war-torn Sarajevo

• Ryszard Kapuscinski’s terrifying description of being set on fire while running roadblocks in Nigeria

• Caroline Blackwood’s coverage of the 1979 gravediggers’ strike in Liverpool— a noir mini-masterpiece

• Timothy Garton Ash’s minute-by-minute account from the Magic Lantern theater in Prague in 1989, where the subterranean stage, auditorium, foyers, and dressing rooms had become the headquarters of the revolution

Among other writers whose New York Review pieces will be included are Tim Judah, Amos Elon, Joan Didion, William Shawcross, Christopher de Bellaigue, Mark Danner,Mary McCarthy, Nadine Gordimer, Stephen Spender, and Yasmine El Rashidi.

Robert B. Silvers is the editor of The New York Review of Books, which celebrates itsfiftieth anniversary in 2013. He was a founding co-editor with Barbara Epstein, with whom he worked from 1963 until her death in 2006.

Ian Buruma, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. His latest book is Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.

the new york review abroaDFiFtY YeaRS OF inteRnatiOnal RePORtaGeedited by Robert B. Silvers

With introductory updates by ian Buruma

New York Review Books • Nonfiction/Politics • Hardcover • 432 pages • 5½ x 8¼978-1-59017-631-3 • $27.95 US / $33.00 CAN / £17.99 UK

Available as an eBook: 978-159017-632-0 US on sale: February 12, 2013 • UK on sale: March 22, 2013 ColleCtions

NYRB Classics • Biography • Paperback • 288 pages • 5 x 8978-1-59017-623-8 • $15.95 US / No Canadian or UK RightsAvailable as an eBook: 978-1-59017-642-9 US on sale: June 18, 2013

“it is written with all the author’s skill, is really hard to put down once its rhythmand energy take hold, and yet imparts an astounding quantity of information.”—The Guardian

The Prussian king Frederick II (1712–1786) is perhaps best known for successfully defending his tiny country against the three great European powers of France, Austria, and Russia during the Seven Years’ War, a feat that allowed Great Britain to limit its engagement on the Continent and emerge as the world’s leading colonial power, as summed up in William Pitt’s famous claim that “America was won in Germany.”

But in his youth, tormented by a spectacularly cruel, dyspeptic father, this future military genius was drawn first to the flute and French poetry, and throughout his long life counted nothing more important than the company of good friends and great wits, as was especially evident in his loving yet vexing relationship with Voltaire. Maddening to his rivals but beloved by nearly everyone he met, Frederick was—notwithstanding a penchant for merciless teasing—arguably the most humane of enlightened despots.

In Frederick the Great, a richly entertaining biography of one of the eighteenth century’s most fascinating figures, Nancy Mitford’s trademark wit and charm find the ideal subject.

Nancy Mitford (1904–1973) was the eldest of the “Mitford girls,” the sisters who captured the attention of the English public and press with their literary talents and unpopular politics. Nancy Mitford herself was known for her novels, for her forays into social science, and for her biographies of famous figures from French history, including Madame de Pompadour, The Sun King, and Voltaire in Love, all available from NYRB Classics.

freDerick the Great

nanCY MitFORd

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announcing a new Series:the new nYRB Poets series will continue the eclectic, adventurous spirit of nYRB Classics with a focus on the most vital, various, and universal form of literature: poetry. Featuring the work of poets from around the world, classical and modern, ancient and contemporary, in elegant, pocket-size editions, it will introduce readers to the countless different shapes that poetry can assume, from simplest song to lyrical essay to visual image to scientific treatise, among much else. Poetry explores the boundaries of feeling, knowledge, and expression like no other art. the new nYRB Poets series will offer an unparalleled opportunity for readers to explore its limitless possibilities.

Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-born American poet from New York City. His books include OBERIU: AnAnthology of Russian Absurdism and three original poetry collections: Iterature, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza,and Enter Morris Imposternak, Pursued by Ironies.

Matvei Yankelevich is the author of Alpha Donut andBoris by the Sea, and the translator of Today I Wrote Nothing:The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. He is one of the founding editors of Ugly Duckling Presse, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit publishing collective.

NYRB Poets • Poetry • Paperback • 96 pages • 4¼ x 7978-1-59017-630-6 • $12.95 US / $15.95 CAN / £8.99 UK

Available as an eBook: 978-1-59017-645-0US on sale: April 2, 2013 • UK on sale: May 9, 2013

Don Share is an American poet and the senior editor ofPoetry magazine in Chicago. His selection and transla-tion of poems by Hernández received the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and the Premio Valle InclánPrize for Translation from the U.K. Society of Authors. His latest collection of original poems, Wishbone, was published by Black Sparrow Press in 2012.

NYRB Poets • Poetry • Paperback • 96 pages • 4¼ x 7978-1-59017-629-0 • $12.95 US / No Canadian or UK Rights US on sale: April 2, 2013

alexanDer vveDenSkyan invitation for me to thinkedited and translated from the Russian by eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich

“I raise[d] my hand against concepts,” wrote Alexander Vvedensky, “I enacted a poetic critique of reason.” This weirdly and wonderfully philosophical poet was born in 1904, grew up in the midst of war and revolution, and reached his artistic maturity as Stalin was twisting the meaning of words in grotesque and lethal ways. Vvedensky—with Daniel Kharms the major figure in the shortlived underground avant-garde group OBERIU (a neologism for “the union for real art”)—responded with a poetry that explodes stable meaning into shimmering streams of provocation and invention. A Vvedensky poem is like a crazy party full of theater, film, magic tricks, jugglery, and feasting. Curious characters appear and disappear, euphoria keeps company with despair, outrageous assertions lead to epic shouting matches, and perhaps it all breaks off with one lonely person singing a song. A Vvedensky poem doesn’t make a statement. It is an event.

Vvedensky’s poetry was unpublishable during his lifetime—he made a living as a writer for children before dying under arrest in 1942—and he remains the least known of the great twentieth-century Russian poets. This is his first book to appear in English. The translations by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich, outstanding poets in their own right, are as astonishingly alert and alive as the originals.

miGUel hernÁnDezSelected and translated from the Spanish by don Share

Miguel Hernandez was born into a family of goatherders in the out-of-the-way Spanish province of Alicante in 1910, and after a little schooling and some private lessons with the local priest, became a goatherd himself. Along the way, however, he had picked up an extraordinary, precocious passion for poetry, especially the vibrant, earthy and mystical poetry of Spain’s Golden Age, and at the age of 23 he published a collection of poems whose genius was immediately recognized by Neruda and Lorca. Hernandez was a poet of brilliant verbal and formal gifts and of elemental passion. In the ten short years that remained to him before his death in 1942 in one of Franco’s prisons, he moved back and forth between Madrid and his native village, fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, and wrote burning incantatory poems alongside profoundly delicate ones about desire and love, about marriage, about the birth of a child and the death of a child, about the death of a friend, about war and hunger and prison and hope and death. Throughout, Hernandez’s unmistakably personal poetry never loses sight of the common world: “Help me to be a man: don’t let me be beast,/Starving, enraged, forever cornered./A common animal with working blood,/ I give you the humanity that this song foretells.”

Poet Don Share’s selection and award-winning translations of this great modern Spanish poet—enormously admired by William Carlos Williams and Philip Levine, among others—makes him available in English as never before.

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“a rare book of irresistible nonsense. . . ” —The New York Times

“. . . noble nonsense that, like lear’s, could be at once ridiculous and poignant.”—Barbara Bader, American Picture Books

What is junket? Well, junket is a delicious custard that makes a lovely dessert.

Why is the old man with a red beard and red slippers eating such an enormous bowl of junket, and what could he possibly be thinking about while he feasts?

That’s a good question! And one that the old man poses to the crowds and crowds of people that gather to watch him eat his enormous bowl of junket. In fact, almost everyone in the whole world wants to know the answer to this riddle.

And only one little boy has the answer.

Junket is Nice is a silly, delightful story from the author of Pat the Bunny.

Dorothy Kunhardt (1901–1979) was an influential American author of books designed for small children, best known for Pat the Bunny (1940), the best-selling American children’s book of all time and the second-best-selling children’s book in the United States after Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Her first book, Junket is Nice, appeared in 1933 and was soon followed by other children’s classics, including Now Open the Box, Lucky Mrs. Ticklefeather, Brave Mr. Buckingham, and Tiny Animal Stories. Kunhardt wrote nearly fifty books in all, including (with her son, Philip B. Kunhardt Jr.) Twenty Days, an account of the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, and several other historical works about nineteenth-century America.

JUnket iS nice

dOROtHY KUnHaRdt

The New York Review Children’s Collection • Juvenile Fiction • Hardcover • Ages 3–772 pages • 9¾ x 6¾ • Color Illustrations978-1-59017-628-3 • $14.95 US / $17.95 CAN / £8.99 UK

US on sale: May 21, 2013 • UK on sale: June 27, 2013The New York reviewChildren’s ColleCtion

The New York Review Children’s Collection • Juvenile Fiction • Hardcover • Ages 8–14312 pages • 5½ x 8½ • 978-1-590147-626-9 • $15.95 US / $18.95 CAN / No UK RightsAvailable as an eBook: 978-1-59017-644-3 US on sale: February 5, 2013

“in portraying Jennie, a london tabby, Paul Gallico has given us not only a cat’s-eye-view of the cosmos, but also a cat immortal.” —Saturday Review of Literature

Peter is a lonely, bored, unhappy London boy, though one thing, he is sure, would make up for everything: how he would love to have a cat! Impossible, the grown-ups all agree, but Peter goes on yearning until one day, on his way out the door, he sees a stray tabby in the street, right in the path of a speeding car. He dashes out to save the cat, is hit by the car himself, and when he comes to, finds himself trans-formed into a cat and under the care of Jennie, the tabby whose life he saved. The two have all sorts of perilous adventures together, in the course of which Jennie slowly reveals the past experiences that have left her with a hardened distrust of and ingrained contempt for human beings. But Peter still believes that cats and people belong together, and dreams of a home where he and Jennie will at last be able to settle down.

Paul Gallico’s The Abandoned is a book that will delight and move lovers of cats and adventure alike.

Paul Gallico (1897–1976) was a popular, prolific sportswriter, columnist, short-storywriter, children’s author, and screenwriter. Born in New York City, he graduated from Columbia University and began his career at the New York Daily News, where he became nationally famous for his madcap adventures with sports stars. Among his forty-one books are the novella The Snow Goose (1941), Mrs. ’Arris Goes to Paris (1958) and its four sequels, several books about cats, and the novel The Poseidon Adventure (1969), the basis for the hugely successful 1972 film.

the abanDoneD

PaUl GalliCO

The New York reviewChildren’s ColleCtion

The New York reviewChildren’s ColleCtion

18 19

alSO BY PalMeR BROWn

SomethinG for chriStmaS This is the story of a little mouse’s search for a very special gift for a very special person. Nothing seemed just right. Then the little mouse realized that the very best present of all was already at hand. Once again Palmer Brown has written and illustrated an entrancingly lovely story, filled with the true spirit of Christmas.

978-1-59017-462-3 • HC • 40 pp • Ages 3–7Color Illustrations • $12.95 US / $14.95 CAN / £ 6.99 UK

cheerfUlCheerful is a city mouse who spends his days frolicking in the church where he lives with his siblings, Solemnity, Faith, and Hope—but he longs for the country, where mice run free.Palmer Brown’s filigreed drawings turn this simple story into an instrument of enchantment as glorious as a stained-glasswindow and as sweet as the sugar-spun Easter egg that conveys Cheerful to his pastoral home.

978-1-59017-501-9 • HC • 72 pp • Ages 3–7Color Illustrations • $12.95 US / $15.95 CAN / £7.99 UK

beyonD the PawPaw treeS: tHe StORY OF anna laVinia

Beyond the Pawpaw Trees is a tour through a land as strange and wonderful as Oz, filled with people as delightfully batty as any in Alice’s looking glass. It is a place to which you will want to return again and again, to read of Anna Lavinia’s adventuresand to marvel over author and illustrator Palmer Brown’s fine, filigreed drawings.

978-1-59017-461-6 • HC • 140 pp • Ages 4–8B/W Illustrations • $14.95 US / $16.95 CAN / £9.99 UK

the Silver nUtmeG: tHe StORY OF anna laVinia and tOBY

The Silver Nutmeg continues the adventures begun in Beyond the Pawpaw Trees; it features loads of sense and a little nonsense,but best of all, fans of Palmer Brown’s intricate drawings will find every page a delight for the eyes.

978-1-59017-500-2 • HC • 144 pp • Ages 4–8B/W Illustrations • $15.95 US / $17.95 CAN / £9.99 UK

The New York Review Children’s Collection • Juvenile Fiction • Hardcover • Ages 3–756 pages • 5½ x 8½ • Color Illustrations 978-1-59017-627-6 • $12.95 US / $15.95 CAN / £7.99 UK

US on sale: April 16, 2013 • UK on sale: May 30, 2013

“Exquisitely adorable creatures fit to rival Peter Rabbit. ” —The New York Times

“Brilliant . . . it may prove the special treasure of many.” —New York Herald Tribune

A grandfather clock makes a lovely home for a family of mice, if you don’t mind the noise. And there Hickory lives, with his parents, his brother Dickory, and his sister Dock. But Hickory is a restless, fearless mouse, and he longs to smell fresh air and nibble on wild strawberries in the fields. So one day in early spring, with the smells of honeysuckle and clover guiding him, he strikes out on his own. Soon he discovers that a meadow can be a lonely place, even with all the beetles and caterpillars. It’s not until Hop the grasshopper comes around that Hickory finds a true companion. But, Hop warns, when the days get shorter and the goldenrod begins to fade, the “song she sings will soon be done.” How Hickory and Hop confront and eventually accept the end of summer forms the core of Palmer Brown’s poignant and beautiful story.

Hickory is the story of a friendship, but it is also a field guide to the common plantsand flowers of spring, summer, and autumn, beautifully rendered in Palmer Brown’scolorful and joyous drawings.

Palmer Brown (1920–2012) was born in Chicago and attended Swarthmore and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and illustrator of five books for children: Beyond the Pawpaw Trees and its sequel, The Silver Nutmeg, Something for Christmas, Cheerful, and Hickory (all available from The New York Review Children’sCollection).

hickory

PalMeR BROWn

The New York reviewChildren’s ColleCtion

20 21

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The catalog cover image by Edward Gorey appears in The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories by Saki (page 13).

aUthor & title inDex

18 Abandoned, The

2, 3 Adler, Renata

17 Alexander Vvedensky An Invitation for Me to Think

7 Alteration, The

6, 7 Amis, Kingsley

4 Armenian Sketchbook, An

21 Beyond the Pawpaw Trees

20, 21 Brown, Palmer

15 Buruma, Ian

4 Chandler, Robert

21 Cheerful

10 Conrad, Peter

8 Crisis of the European Mind, The

10 Dembo, Margot

6 Dirda, Michael

14 Frederick the Great

18 Gallico, Paul

13 Gorey, Edward

8 Grafton, Anthony

6 Green Man, The

4 Grossman, Vasily

5 Hall of Uselessness, The

8 Hazard, Paul

20 Hickory

12 Hoban, Russell

19 Junket Is Nice

19 Kunhardt, Dorothy

5 Leys, Simon

9 Malaparte, Curzio

8 May, J. Lewis

17 Miguel Hernández

14 Mitford, Nancy

11 Mendel, David

9 Moore, David

15 New York Review Abroad, The

17 Ostashevsky, Eugene

12 Park, Ed

3 Pitch Dark

11 Proper Doctoring

13 Saki

10 Seghers, Anna

17 Share, Don

21 Silver Nutmeg, The

15 Silvers, Robert B.

9 Skin, The

21 Something for Christmas

2 Speedboat

10 Transit

2, 3 Trebay, Guy

12 Turtle Diary

13 Unrest-Cure and Other Stories, The

17 Yankelevich, Matvei

n e w y o r k r e v i e w b oo k swww.nyrb.com