Introductions - NYRB

Introductions

Use the links below to download the introductions, prefaces, and afterwords for many titles in the NYRB Classics series, in Adobe Acrobat format. Or click on the cover for more information about each book.

Monsieur Proust
By Céleste Albaret
Translated from the French by Barbara Bray
Foreword by André Aciman

This lovely book is as close as we can come to meeting Proust in person.

Seven Men
By Max Beerbohm
Introduction by John Updike

In Seven Men the brilliant English caricaturist and critic Max Beerbohm turns his comic searchlight upon the fantastic fin-de-siècle world of the 1890s—the age of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and the young Yeats, as well of Beerbohm's own first success.

Great Granny Webster
By Caroline Blackwood
Introduction by Honor Moore

This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the unsparing eyes of an orphaned teenage girl.

Corrigan
By Caroline Blackwood
Afterword by Andrew Solomon

With Corrigan Caroline Blackwood takes a long, hard look at our dearly beloved notions of saints and sinners, victims and villains, patrimony and present pleasure—and winks.

On the Yard
By Malcolm Braly
Introduction by Jonathan Lethem

A major American novel, and arguably the finest work of literature ever to emerge from a US prison, On the Yard is a book of penetrating psychological realism.

Manservant and Maidservant
By Ivy Compton-Burnett
Introduction by Diane Johnson

At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant.

A House and Its Head
By Ivy Compton-Burnett
Afterword by Francine Prose

A House and Its Head is Ivy Compton-Burnett's subversive look at the politics of family life, and perhaps the most unsparing of her novels.

The Anatomy of Melancholy
By Robert Burton
Introduction by William H. Gass

One of the major documents of modern European civilization, Robert Burton's astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in all its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century.

The Book of My Life
By Girolamo Cardano
Translated from the Italian by Jean Stoner
Introduction by Anthony Grafton

At once picaresque adventure and campus comedy, curriculum vitae and last will, The Book of My Life is an extraordinary Renaissance self-portrait.

A Month in the Country
By J.L. Carr
Introduction by Michael Holroyd

In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church.

The Invention of Morel
By Adolfo Bioy Casares
Translated from the Spanish by Ruth L.C. Simms
Introduction by Suzanne Jill Levine
Prologue by Jorge Luis Borges

Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.

English, August
By Upamanyu Chatterjee
Introduction by Akhil Sharma

A satirical look at Indian society by an internationally acclaimed writer.

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
By Nirad C. Chaudhuri
Introduction by Ian Jack

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is an astonishing work of self-discovery and the revelation of a peerless and provocative sensibility.

The Pure and the Impure
By Colette
Translated from the French by Herma Briffault
Introduction by Judith Thurman

The Pure and the Impure stands out as one of modern literature's subtlest reckonings not only with the varieties of sexual experience, but with the always unlikely nature of love.

Letters from Russia
By Astolphe de Custine
Introduction by Anka Muhlstein

The Marquis de Custine's record of his trip to Russia in 1839 is a brilliantly perceptive, even prophetic, account of one of the world's most fascinating and troubled countries.

The New Life
By Dante Alighieri
Translated from the Italian by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Preface by Michael Palmer

The New Life is the masterpiece of Dante's youth, an account of his love for Beatrice, the girl who was to become his lifelong muse, and of her tragic early death.

Summer Cooking
By Elizabeth David
Foreword by Molly O'Neill

Divided into such sections as Soup, Poultry and Game, Vegetables, and Dessert, her 1955 classic includes an overview of herbs as well as chapters on impromptu cooking for holidays and picnics.

A Book of Mediterranean Food
By Elizabeth David
Foreword by Clarissa Dickson Wright

Long acknowledged as the inspiration for such modern masters as Julia Child and Claudia Roden, A Book of Mediterranean Food is Elizabeth David's passionate mixture of recipes, culinary lore, and frank talk.

The Ten Thousand Things
By Maria Dermout
Translated and with an introduction by Hans Koning

The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.

The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard
By Arthur Conan Doyle
Introduction by George MacDonald Fraser

The Brigadier's wonderful comic adventures, long established in the affections of Conan Doyle's admirers as second only to those of the incomparable Holmes, are sure to find new devotees among the ardent fans of such writers as Patrick O'Brian and George MacDonald Fraser.

A Handbook on Hanging
By Charles Duff
Introduction by Christopher Hitchens

With barbed insouciance, Charles Duff writes not only of hanging but of electrocution, decapitations, and gassings; of innocent men executed and of executions botched; of the bloodlust of mobs and the shabby excuses of the great.

Troubles
By J.G. Farrell
Introduction by John Banville

Troubles is a hilarious and heartbreaking work by a modern master of the historical novel.

The World of Odysseus
By M.I. Finley
Introduction by Bernard Knox

The World of Odysseus provides a vivid picture of the Greek Dark Ages, its men and women, works and days, morals and values.

Paris Stories
By Mavis Gallant
Selected and with an introduction by Michael Ondaatje

Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. Together they compose a secret history, at once intimate and panoramic, of modern times.

Varieties of Exile
By Mavis Gallant
Selected and with an introduction by Russell Banks

Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the qualms and quandaries of people who, whether from choice or necessity, have no place to call home.

Life and Fate
By Vasily Grossman
Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Robert Chandler

An epic tale of World War II that interweaves a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
By Peter Handke
Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim
Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides

"In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, the author confronts his mother’s suicide in a compelling story that is like an explanation of a recurrent dream, a dream so vividly expressed it becomes our dream." —Chicago Sun Times

Sleepless Nights
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Introduction by Geoffrey O'Brien

An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

Seduction and Betrayal
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Introduction by Joan Didion

Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso performance, a major writer's reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.

Eustace and Hilda
By L.P. Hartley
Introduction by Anita Brookner

The three books gathered together as Eustace and Hilda explore a brother and sister's lifelong relationship. Hilda, the older child, is both self-sacrificing and domineering, as puritanical as she is gorgeous; Eustace is a gentle, dreamy, pleasure-loving boy.

The Go-Between
By L.P. Hartley
Introduction by Colm Tóibín

The Go-Between is a masterpiece—a richly layered, spellbinding story about past and present, naiveté and knowledge, and the mysteries of the human heart.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
By James Hogg
Introduction by Margot Livesey

This work of black humor, acute psychological insight, and, in the end, deeply compassionate humanity is one of the masterpieces of literature in English.

The Other House
By Henry James
Introduction by Louis Begley

The savage conclusion of The Other House makes it one of the most disturbing and memorable of Henry James's depictions of the uncontrollable passions that lie beneath the polished veneer of civilized life.

The Outcry
By Henry James
Introduction by Jean Strouse

Henry James's final novel is an effervescent comedy of money and manners.

The Glass Bees
By Ernst Jünger
Translated from the German by Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan
Introduction by Bruce Sterling

In The Glass Bees the celebrated German writer Ernst Jünger presents a disconcerting vision of the future.

The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard
Edited and with an introduction by W.H. Auden

Auden's inspired and incisive response to a thinker who had done much to shape his own beliefs is a fundamental reading of an author whose spirit remains as radical as ever more than 150 years after he wrote.

An African in Greenland
By Tete-Michel Kpomassie
Translated from the French by James Kirkup
Introduction by Al Alvarez

"Kpomassie is indisputably a man of extraordinary charm; he is also sharp and perceptive and honest—unencumbered by a sense of obligation to his hosts that might have prevented him from telling us what they are really like."— Katherine Bouton, The Nation

The Radiance of the King
By Camara Laye
Translated from the French by James Kirkup
Introduction by Toni Morrison

Allegorical, Kafkaesque and African in a unique way... An exploration of exile, quest and reconciliation with a power greater than logic or reason.—The New York Times

Nonsense Novels
By Stephen Leacock
Introduction by Daniel Handler

Nonsense Novels sends up the silliest conventions of the ghost story, the detective story, the rags-to-riches story, the adventure story, the shipwreck story, and, of course, the story itself. Among other things.

The Waste Books
By Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Translated and with an introduction by R.J. Hollingdale

The record of a brilliant and subtle mind in action, The Waste Books are above all a powerful testament to the necessity, and pleasure, of unfettered thought.

The Towers of Trebizond
By Rose Macaulay
Introduction by Jan Morris

Traveling overland from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond, the narrator and her companions have a series of hilarious encounters with potion-dealing sorcerers, recalcitrant policemen, and an ever-recurring busload of Southern evangelists.

Mawrdew Czgowchwz
By James McCourt
Introduction by Wayne Koestenbaum

James McCourt's entrancing send-up of the world of opera has been a cult classic for more than a quarter-century. This comic tribute to the love of art is a triumph of art and love by a contemporary American master.

Miserable Miracle
By Henri Michaux
Translated from the French by Louise Varese
Introduction by Octavio Paz

In Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug.

Madame de Pompadour
By Nancy Mitford
Introduction by Amanda Foreman

Nancy Mitford's delightfully candid biography re-creates the spirit of eighteenth-century Versailles with its love of pleasure and treachery.

The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
By Alvaro Mutis
Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
Introduction by Francisco Goldman

Maqroll the Gaviero (the Lookout) is one of the most alluring and memorable characters in the fiction of the last twenty-five years.

The Root and the Flower
By L.H. Myers
Introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald

This enthralling visionary trilogy is, as Penelope Fitzgerald remarks in her introduction, a "strange masterpiece," and one of the unsung glories of modern literature.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other
By Darcy O'Brien
Introduction by Seamus Heaney

A classic coming-of-age story—a novel that combines keen insight and devastating wit to hilarious and heartbreaking effect.

The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
By Iona and Peter Opie
Introduction by Marina Warner

The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is a pathbreaking work of scholarship that is also a splendid and enduring work of literature.

Letters: Summer 1926
By Boris Pasternak
Marina Tsvetayeva
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Margaret Wettlin, Walter Arndt, Jamey Gambrell
Preface by Susan Sontag
Appendix and epilogue by Jamey Gambrell

Letters: Summer 1926 takes the reader into the hearts and minds of three of the twentieth century's greatest poets at a moment of maximum emotional and creative pressure.

The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese
By Cesare Pavese
Translated and with an introduction by R.W. Flint

Now there can be no excuse for not reading Pavese, one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century. The new translations and the introduction by R.W. Flint are admirable. —Susan Sontag

The Moon and the Bonfires
By Cesare Pavese
Translated from the Italian by R.W. Flint
Introduction by Mark Rudman

The Moon and the Bonfires is a novel of intense lyricism and tragic import, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that has been unavailable to American readers for close to fifty years.

The Stories of J.F. Powers
By J.F. Powers
Introduction by Denis Donoghue

Powers wrote about many things: baseball and jazz, race riots and lynchings, the Great Depression, and the flight to the suburbs. His greatest subject, however—and one that was uniquely his—was the life of priests in Chicago and the Midwest.

Witch Grass
By Raymond Queneau
Translated and with an introduction by Barbara Wright

A wild philosophical farce that slips and slides from the bland routine of daily life through a series of comic run-ins before ending with an apocalyptic surprise.

Renoir, My Father
By Jean Renoir
Translated from the French by Randolph and Dorothy Weaver
Introduction by Robert L. Herbert

In this delightful memoir, Jean Renoir, the director of such masterpieces of the cinema as Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, tells the life story of his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the great Impressionist painter.

Hadrian the Seventh
By Fr. Rolfe
Introduction by Alexander Theroux

It is extraordinarily alive, even though it has been buried for twenty years. Up it rises to confront us. . . Only a first-rate book escapes its date. . .The book remains a clear and definite book of our epoch, not to be swept aside. —D. H. Lawrence

Classic Crimes
By William Roughead
Introduction by Luc Sante

Displaying a meticulous command of evidence and unerring dramatic flair, Roughead brings to life some of the most notorious crimes and extraordinary trials of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and Scotland.

Alfred and Guinevere
By James Schuyler
Introduction by John Ashbery

Schuyler has a pitch-perfect ear for the children's voices, and the story, told entirely through snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere's diary, is a tour de force of comic and poetic invention.

The Wine-Dark Sea
By Leonardo Sciascia
Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni
Introduction by Albert Mobilio

Sciascia examines the contradictions—sometimes comic, sometimes deadly, and sometimes both—of Sicily's turbulent history and day-to-day life.

Equal Danger
By Leonardo Sciascia
Translated from the Italian by Adrienne Foulke
Introduction by Carlin Romano

District Attorney Varga is shot dead. Then Judge Sanza is killed. Then Judge Azar. Are these random murders, or part of a conspiracy?

The Day of the Owl
By Leonardo Sciascia
Translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun and Anthony Oliver
Introduction by George Scialabba

This short, beautifully paced novel is a mesmerizing description of the Mafia at work.

To Each His Own
By Leonardo Sciascia
Translated from the Italian by Adrienne Foulke
Introduction by W.S. Di Piero

To Each His Own is one of the masterworks of the great Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia—a gripping and unconventional detective story that is also an anatomy of a society founded on secrets, lies, collusion, and violence.

The Golovlyov Family
By Shchedrin
Translated from the Russian by Natalie Duddington
Introduction by James Wood

This is a tragic story, deeply moving, and by means of the figures that pass through it, relentlessly depicts the Russia that so inevitably prepared the Revolution. The book is a classic in its own country, and it is obvious why. —The Spectator

Dirty Snow
By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by Marc Romano and Louise Varese
Afterword by William T. Vollmann

Dirty Snow, widely acknowledged as one of Simenon's finest books, is a study of the criminal mind comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me.

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan
By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by Marc Romano and Lawrence G. Blochman
Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

An actor and a divorcée meet in a deserted New York City bar. With little in common save loneliness, middle age, and a presentiment of escape, they improvise a love story.

The Middle of the Journey
By Lionel Trilling
Preface by Monroe Engel

Published in 1947, as the cold war was heating up, Lionel Trilling’s only novel was a prophetic reckoning with the bitter ideological disputes that were to come to a head in the McCarthy era.

Virgin Soil
By Ivan Turgenev
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett
Introduction by Charlotte Hobson

This rich and complex book, at once a love story, a devastating, and bitterly funny social satire, and, perhaps most movingly of all, a heartfelt celebration of the immense beauty of the Russian countryside.

The Tenants of Moonbloom
By Edward Lewis Wallant
Introduction by Dave Eggers

Edward Lewis Wallant's astonishing comic tour de force is a neglected masterpiece of 1960s America.

The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story
By Glenway Wescott
Introduction by Michael Cunningham

A work of classical elegance and concision, The Pilgrim Hawk stands with Faulkner's The Bear as one of the finest American short novels: a beautifully crafted story that is also a poignant evocation of the implacable power of love.

The Fountain Overflows
By Rebecca West
Introduction by Andrea Barrett

Seen through the merciless, loving eyes of young Rose, one of four musically gifted siblings, Wests 1957 novel is a vital, witty, and devastating family portrait.

To the Finland Station
By Edmund Wilson
Foreword by Louis Menand

Wilson combines his polymathic talents as critic, journalist, historian, and novelist, making this one of the greatest works by twentieth-century America's greatest man of letters.

Black Sun
By Geoffrey Wolff

Black Sun is master biographer Geoffrey Wolff's picture of a brilliant and self-destructive man who sought to make his life into a work of art.

The Colour Out of Space
Edited by D. Thin

This new collection features some of the greatest masters of extreme terror.