We are pleased to announce two new May releases from NYRB Classics: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, Bohumil Hrabal’s stunning confessional novel and the first work from a Czech writer to be included in the NYRB Classics series; and Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, a sharp and touching meditation inspired by the beloved author’s confrontation with cancer and the questions of how to overcome despair in the face of loss.
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We are pleased to announce these April releases from NYRB Classics: Milton Rokeach’s classic and unforgettable psychological narrative, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti; Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater, a haunting novel about a woman with a philandering screenwriter husband and a brood of children; and now in English for the first time, Fatale, a thriller by a master of French crime novels, Jean-Patrick Manchette.
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I’m nothing
Says Kabir
I’m not among the living
Or the dead
It is true, in a way—true at least that next to nothing is known about Kabir, a mysterious figure from medieval North India who is one of the world’s great religious poets. During his life, which is said to have extended for well over a hundred years, Kabir was celebrated as a poet and as a sant, or holy man, and many legends, some as unlikely as his reputed lifespan, have grown up around his name. It is generally accepted, however, that he came from a low-caste Hindu family that had recently converted to Islam and that he was a weaver—someone, in other words, very much on the outside of good society. Kabir’s songs have come down to us both through a number of written sources—none, however, that can be traced to Kabir’s hand—as well as through a lively, extensive, and very varied tradition of oral performance, and they continue to be sung in the fields and on the streets of India. Some of the songs are otherworldly, others are biting send-ups of the world and its ways, while Kabir’s God is a shapeshifter whose only true and always unseizable form is the form prepared within the heart of the true devotee. In Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s wonderful new translation, Kabir’s work takes on a startling and unforgettable new shape in the English of our time.
L. J. Davis was a remarkable writer with a caustic sensibility that was very much his own. He was also a true character, scabrously funny and perfectly free of false piety.
Join NYRB Classics editor Edwin Frank as he moderates a conversation between Robert Walser translators Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky on Wednesday, April 6th at 1PM. $10 includes a bratwrust lunch.
Two NYRB Classics are finalists for the 2011 Best Translated Award in Fiction: Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, and Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis.
Monday, March 21, 2011; 6:30 p.m.
Sophia Jansson, the niece of the late Tove Jansson and the chairman of Oy Moomin Characters, Ltd, will speak about her famous aunt in conversation with Thomas Teal, translator of Jansson’s novels, and Aili Flint, the head of Columbia University’s Finnish Studies Program.
In a December 17, 2010, entry on The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, writer Blake Eskin said that Vasily Grossman’s NYRB Classic Everything Flows was a book that really “got under his skin.” Two NYRB titles recently appeared in The New Yorker’s printed pages, and we’re confident that in their own unique ways, they’re equally books that will long stay with you.
We’re pleased to announce these March releases from NYRB Classics: Vladimir Sorokin’s thrilling apocalyptic epic, Ice Trilogy, now translated in its entirety for the first time; Tove Jansson’s beautiful novel, Fair Play, in an award-winning translation; and J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You, released in an edition that restores the previously expurgated text. For a limited time, these March titles, as well as all NYRB Classics by Tove Jansson, Vladimir Sorokin, and J. R. Ackerley, are available at 25% off.