NYRB Classics
The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories
Saki, illustrated by Edward Gorey
An NYRB Classics Original
The whimsical, macabre tales of British writer H. H. Munro—better known as Saki—skewer the banality and hypocrisy of polite English society between the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of World War I. Saki’s heroes are enfants terribles who marshal their considerable wit and imagination against the cruelty and fatuousness of a decorous and doomed world.
Here, Saki’s brilliantly polished dark gems are paired with illustrations by the peerless Edward Gorey, available for the first time in an English-language edition. The fragile elegance and creeping menace of Gorey’s pen-and-ink drawings perfectly complements Saki’s population of delicate ladies, mischief-making charges, spectral guests, sardonic house pets, flustered authority figures, and delightfully preposterous imposters.
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Featured Titles
Junket Is Nice
Dorothy Kunhardt
The New York Review Children’s CollectionPat the Bunny author Dorothy Kunhardt’s first book is as simple and lovable as the ones for which she is most famous. No one can guess what the old man eating his bowl of junket (a kind of custard) can possibly be thinking. The speculation becomes increasingly absurd until a little boy bicycles up and gets it right on his first try.
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Turtle Diary
Russell Hoban, introduction by Ed Park
NYRB ClassicsA man and a woman, each isolated, desperate and despairing—and utter strangers to the other—are simultaneously seized with the desire to liberate turtles from the London Zoo. Hoban confronts the dangers of modern life, its disconnect from nature and solipsistic atomization, with a dark eye and a generous spirit.
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We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975
Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven
NYRB ClassicsThis new selection, the first in English to draw on Sartre’s entire Collected Essays as well as unpublished work, includes appreciations of Faulkner, Bataille, and Giacometti; sketches of the US from his visit in the 1940s; reflections on politics; portraits of Camus and Merleau-Ponty; and a candid reckoning with his own career.
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The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage
edited by Robert B. Silvers, with prologues by Ian Buruma
NYRB CollectionsFifty years of the best international reportage published in The New York Review of Books. Includes entries from Susan Sontag, Alma Guillermoprieto, Mark Danner, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and others. Each essay includes a prologue by Ian Buruma that provides context and brings the story into the present day.
More »Announcements
NYRB celebrates early summer birthdays
June 19, 2013
Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), born on June 22, labored in anonymity in a French war office, but he was also a critic, publisher, journalist, anarchist, and “literary instigator.” Also born on June 22 was Dutch author Nescio, or Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh (1882-1961), a writer whose growing reputation and cult readership have marked him as a figure in world literature.
Yoram Kaniuk, 1930–2013
June 13, 2013
It is with great sadness that NYRB notes the death of celebrated Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk. One of the Dor Tashach—the “1948 generation” of writers who came of age during birth of the State of Israel—Kaniuk was fearless about taking on controversial issues. In his early career, his style ran contrary to those of his peers; rather than embracing realism, he reveled in a stream-of-consciousness more akin to surrealism. He valued self-criticism over self-righteousness.
Happy Birthday to authors published by The New York Review Children's Collection
June 13, 2013
June 11 was the birthday of Betty Jean Lifton, author of Taka-chan and I: A Dog’s Journey to Japan by Runcible. On June 14 we celebrate the birthday of Penelope Farmer, the author of Charlotte Sometimes.
NYRB celebrates two literary birthdays in May!
May 17, 2013
May 20th marks the birthday of Honoré de Balzac, the inventor of the modern realistic novel. With his keen eye for detail and his unflinching assessment of character, Balzac has been considered a literary forbearer of Flaubert, Proust, and James. On May 22nd we celebrate the birthday of the multitalented Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930).
NYRB Poets Event at Unnameable Books
May 15, 2013
Unnameable Books and NYRB Poets will celebrate the publication of Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think with translators Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich. The reading, which will be followed by a reception, will take place at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn on Friday, May 17, at 7pm.
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