#nyrb classics

[sawreadreviewed]

Tatyana Tolstaya is up there with Agnes Varda, Katherine Mansfield, and Kanai Mieko for me (which tells you all you need to know about my taste). I really liked The Slynx - most especially because it brought me to White Walls, which I am in love with. That perfect balance of the mundane and the glorious. Watch out, though, because Tolstaya doesn’t mind breaking your heart. Pictured: White Walls with a yet more mate.

[kaggsy59]

"You are the voice of your unknown" #MonsieurTeste #PaulValery @nyrblassics

I’m still playing catch up with my reviews here on the Ramblings, and today’s book would have been a perfect contender for the Novellas in November event! However, I ran out of time and slots on the blog, so it will have to sit here instead. The title is “Monsieur Teste” by Paul Valery, translated by Charlotte Mandell and introduced by Ryan Ruby; and it’s a fascinating and thought-provoking read…

[grandhotelabyss]

If you haven't yet read it, the Edwin Frank interview in the point mag is up your alley, I think. Blake Smith, god bless him, might have steered me in the wrong direction about nyrb classics

Thanks! Yes, a lot of good stuff in there. I like how they start by talking about The Hall of Uselessness, also one of my favorite NYRBs. And then the last few answers: all the civilized, knowingly world-weary complaints (the novel is dead, the MFA programs are awful) at once uttered and dismissed as obvious, not worth repeating. (My case for the continued relevance of the novel is one neither the interviewer not Frank state, however: it's not for the present but the future. Otherwise how will our successors know we were here, how we lived?) I am still thinking about this, which is maybe too European for me:

Writers are not truth-tellers, they are witnesses to the event of their own gift, finally impersonal. Which consumes them. Which may sound romantic. It is, in fact, the least romantic thing in the world.

I like the part about Ulysses:

Ulysses is a place and climate and you have to allow yourself to live there to get a real sense of it. That’s one of the ways it’s essentially different from, say, Mrs. Dalloway, which remains a representation of experience, something that exists at an appreciable, ponderable remove. Ulysses by contrast is an experience in its own right and like experience remains in many ways private, to the author, to the reader: it’s not there to be made sense of entirely, though it is certainly there to enjoy and wonder at. Notoriously, Woolf hated the book—she thought it was, I’m pretty sure this is her word, “underbred,” pointlessly dirty and showy. Woolf thought it was offensive among other things that Joyce imposed his privacy on his audience. Pun intended.

A piece of advice I took to heart years ago came from the critic and poet Donald Davie, who said about Pound’s Cantos: Read them fast. Read them till patterns begin to form in the blur. Don’t nail down the references and try to add them all up.

Read it fast: as advice for Ulysses, this can't be overstated. (It's what Ellen Chandler tells Ash del Greco in Major Arcana: "I recommend just letting it wash over you the first time".) I'll have to try it with The Cantos someday. And, speaking of Pound, the passages on anti-Semitism, on Bellow and Cohen. And about how "the imaginative horizon of the modern world is female." And about the paradox of our inheriting an avant-garde tradition. And his statement, which I myself am always saying: "it's a stagnant period."

I'm not sure the conversation disproves Blake's point about the high-handed attitude with which a certain style of forgotten classic, often in translation, is suddenly forced on us—I don't need to see the hideous phrase "blue lard" again for a while—but it's good to know what a civilized sensibility lies behind the enterprise.

[translitsupplement]

In today’s mail

[nateglogan]

MY FAVORITE POETRY OF 2024 (Prologue) This was a bit of a different reading year for me. There were plenty of new books that I enjoyed, but I was mostly dipping into (not rereading cover to cover) books I've read before. Also, I've been reading a lot for my Jewish studies, which is time I wasn't reading fiction or poetry. So while I did read a fair amount, the total of that isn't reflected in this annual end-of-year book post.

On the ground level, this was another good year for me. My second full-length poetry collection, Wrong Horse, was published by Moria Books in January. In October, a chapbook of "spooky" poems, There's Nothing Out There, was published by above/ground press. I had ten poems published across five magazines and six more poems accepted for publication and appearing next year. My second book hasn't gotten as many reviews as I'd hoped so far, but I think its release did help me be part of more readings this year, which was very fun (special shout out to the folks who came out for the Wrong Tour dates).

Of course, I wasn't able to read all I wanted to this year--a good problem to have for the future. And, as always, these books are just my favorites, not a best of list.

FAVORITE FULL-LENGTH POETRY COLLECTIONS OF 2024 Wrong Norma by Anne Carson (New Directions) This is Not a Place of Honor by John Leo (Night Gallery) The Ruins of Nostalgia by Donna Stonecipher (Wesleyan)

FAVORITE CHAPBOOK OF 2024 Swim Lessons by Elizabeth Taddonio (self-released)*

FAVORITE POETRY COLLECTION OF LAST YEAR (2023) I DIDN’T READ UNTIL THIS YEAR (2024) Ablation by Danika Stegeman (11:11 Press)

FAVORITE POEM PUBLISHED IN 2024 "On Love" by Sara Nicholson in Little Mirror

FAVORITE NOVEL PUBLISHED IN 2024 I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger (Grove Atlantic)

DID MY FAVORITE FICTION WRITER PUBLISH A NEW BOOK IN 2024 BECAUSE IF SHE DID I READ IT Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams (Tin House)

BOOK THAT MESSED ME UP IN 2024 Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars tr. Alan Brown (NYRB Classics, 2004)

REMAINING TBR FROM THIS YEAR (2024) James by Percival Everett (Knopf) Falling Fine: Selected and New Poems by Matt Hart (Ledge Mule) You Like It Darker by Stephen King (Scribner)**

CURRENTLY READING Collected Poems by Louis Jenkins (Will O' the Wisp Books)

—

*A collection of nonfiction essays.

**Some of stories in this collection I was able to read via audiobook. I was most interested in the "sequel" to Cujo, "Rattlesnakes," which I did listen to and thought was better than Cujo.

[thehappyscavenger]

[voidingintotheshout]

From Pitch Dark (NYRB Classics version) by Renata Adler. A book, for the record, I did not like. The highlighted part of the above picture will be included below.

They were rich, they were publicly generous. In private, they were miserly beyond belief. They were slumlords, but they were on the boards of a lot of charities, and therefore, oddly placed to do a lot of good. And this they did. So that, on balance, one has to say, I don’t know what. There was all the difference in the world between the beneficiaries of what they were on the boards of, and anyone who actually depended on them. They had a mettlesome, inconsiderate, pious, bullying rapacity; And yet they wanted, as the last straw, to be thought poetic. So, one by one, he told the wives of his tenants that he was in love with them. He had no ear whatever for language. He likes to say, I’m very sensitive. Meaning quick to anger. He spoke of heighth, of nuclear, of walking with he and I. When his best friend was dying, he said, he’s being fed intravenously. 

[roughghosts]

“Here, on this mountain, there’s the living and the dead.” The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgü

Years later, as I leaf through the notebooks, I see that these people and I, who didn’t speak each other’s languages, had understood one another. I don’t know what language we had I common, nor do I want to know. Our common language didn’t change them but it changed me. I’m sure of it. Every passing day returns to me the traces of our shared life in that mountain village; I see them. I live…

[dynamobooks]

Lisa Tuttle: My Death (2004)

[literatureaesthetic]

some recent purchases | i've been really into translated fiction this year, so i decided to add a couple more to my tbr!!

[bauliya]

POV you’re NYRB classics. you take an out of copyright book that you don’t have to pay for and solicit a foreword from a fan (aka academic) who does it for exposure and passion. you slap on an out of copyright artwork on the cover that is free. you price that book for three times the cost it is available for a couple of shelves over. people buy it so fast it’s sold out.

Like apple wishes it had its customers in as much of a chokehold as the publishing industry does. POV you’re penguin. you sell 50k copies of a book. you want more money. so you hire a cover designer for a few weeks for a few thousand dollars a couple years later. and a significant chunk of people who bought the original BUY THE NEW ONE! this is like if people regularly purchased 7 iPhones to have all the colors.

[nedlittle]

young man with a horn - dorothy baker

[alt]

[kaggsy59]

"…what need is there for reasons when blindness overcomes us?" @NYRB #onthemarblecliffs

Back in 2016, I revisited a translated work that I’d first read back in my 20s; the book was “On the Marble Cliffs” by Ernst Junger, and it was a fascinating, if potentially controversial, book. German author Junger fought in both First and Second World Wars; he was a member of an elite, yet held himself apart from the Nazi regime. His work survived without being burnt, he was not particularly…

[thebookwormdaydreamer]

Highly recommend not taking recs from booktok or booktwt to be honest. Doing your own research regarding the kind of books you want to read is extremely rewarding and also personally, I think it helps you develop your taste in books outside of what’s popular or trending.

Sometimes bookish social media can feel like one big book club so it’s easy to fear missing out on something, but reading only what’s popular can lead to reading stuff you don’t enjoy.

[momjeans97]

top 10 books i read in 2022 (out of the 41 i read in total):

Sylvia Townsend Warner Lolly Willowes

Richard Yates The Easter Parade

Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go

Richard Yates Revolutionary Road

Harvey Swados A Radical's America

James Hogg The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

John Williams Stoner

Don Carpenter Hard Rain Falling

Richard Yates Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

Clarice Lispector The Passion According to G. H.

[drunkwhenimadethis]

Thinking about the magnificent zucchini cream pasta with guanciale my bb made for dinner tonight. Ten out of ten—sublime actually. I don’t talk about my relationship on here anymore because I learned my lesson but together the days are just wonderful. I for the last time used my sister’s work discount because she’s moving on from there (congratulations 💋 ) and so I did a book haul. Fiction, NYRB & Penguin Classics. Some Jungian analysis. One dictionary. Also in a little way it was to celebrate my newest job. I officially finished my first week. Now with two jobs, because I would feel guilty leaving my first job after only two months and plus it’s simple, flexible, and everyone is nice, I’m very busy and I don’t have a day off until the end of the month. But I’m happy and I feel lucky and I like my situation. I watched Age of Innocence (1993) last night and I adored it, very lush and with sets and transitions I haven’t seen in a movie in a long time. I had so many thoughts about the characters that I was like okay, I have to read the book. And so that was one that I ordered tonight. I’ve been enjoying pistachio butter, Nutella, sweetened black or green ginger tea (no milk). Also mortadella. I started a short semi-fiction inspired by envy, competition, and social rules in southern Italy, but again, very little will/power in my body atm