#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.

[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.

[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…

[translitsupplement]

In today’s mail

[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]

[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.

[kaggsy59]

"...I saw the hidden picture." #mydeath @NYRBClassics

One of my favourite publishers is NYRB Classics; they reissue a wonderful range of titles (and it would be very easy to start up a collection of their books), so I always search their catalogues eagerly to see what new works they’re bringing out. I was intrigued by one particular title in their autumn catalogue, by an author new to me, and it sounded like a book I would enjoy. Fortunately, the…

[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.

[dk-thrive]

Smell is important. It reminds a person of all the things he’s been through; it is a sheath of memories and security. 

— Tove Jansson, "The Summer Book." Thomas Teal, Translator. (NYRB Classics, August 8, 2012) (via The Hammock Papers)

[voidingintotheshout]

Currently starting Our Philosopher (aka Veilchenfeld) by Gert Hofmann. Here’s the blurb on the back. I’m not gonna transcribe all this. I like it so far.