Bøker utgitt av The New York Review of Books, Inc

"Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930, when Gaddis was at boarding school, and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death, these letters function as a kind of autobiography, and are all the more valuable because Gaddis was not an autobiographical writer. Here we see him forging his first novel, The Recognitions, while living in Mexico, fighting in a revolution in Costa Rica, and working in Spain, France, and North Africa. Over the next twenty years he struggles to find time to write the National Book Award-winning J R amid the complications of work and family; deals with divorce and disillusionment before reviving his career with Carpenter's Gothic; then teaches himself enough about the law to indite A Frolic of His Own, which earned him another National Book Award. Returning to a topic he first wrote about in the 1940s, he finishes his last novel, Agapåe Agape, as he lies dying"--

2022 National Book Awards Longlist for Nonfiction Essays about migration, displacement, and the hope for connection in a time of emotional and geopolitical disruption by a Soviet-born writer and former war correspondent.Called a “chronicler of a world on the move” by The New York Review of Books, Anna Badkhen seeks what separates and binds us at a time when one in seven people has left their birthplace, while a pandemic dictates the direst season of rupture in humankind’s remembering. Her new essay collection, Bright Unbearable Reality, comprises eleven essays set on four continents—roving everywhere from Oklahoma to Azerbaijan—and united by a common thread of communion and longing. In these essays, Badkhen addresses the human condition in the era of such unprecedented dislocation, contemplates the roles of memory and wonder in how we relate to one another, and asks how we can soberly and responsibly counter despair and continue to develop—or at least imagine—an emotional vocabulary against depravity. The subject throughout the collection is bright unbearable reality itself, a translation of Greek enargeia, which, says the poet Alice Oswald, is “when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.” Essays include:  •  In “The Pandemic, Our Common Story,” which takes place in the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia, one of the locations where humankind originated, the onset of the global pandemic catches Badkhen mid-journey, researching human dispersal 160,000 years ago and migration in modern times.  •  In “How to Read the Air,” set mostly in Philadelphia, Badkhen looks to the ancient Greeks for help pondering our need for certainty at a time of racist violence, political upheaval, and environmental cataclysm.  •  “Ways of Seeing” and the title essay “Bright Unbearable Reality” wrestle with complications of distance and specifically the bird’s eye view—the relationship between physical distance, understanding, and engagement.  •  “Landscape with Icarus” examines how and why children go missing, while “Dark Matter” explores how violence always takes us by surprise.

"Each chapter in this remarkable consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, as a boy, Henry James has his daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady. We encounter Brady again as he photographs Walt Whitman and then Ulysses Grant. Meanwhile, Henry James begins a lasting friendship with William Dean Howells, and also meets Sarah Orne Jewett, who in turn is a mentor to Willa Cather... Cohen brilliantly reanimates these unforgettable pairings and those of Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz; Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein; Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston; Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore; Richard Avedon and James Baldwin; and John Cage and Marcel Duchamp; Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell. Ultimately, Cohen reveals and long chain of friendship, rebellion and influence stretching from the moment before the Civil War through a century that had a profound effect on our own time. A Chance Meeting is an intimate and original act of biography and cultural history that makes its own contribution to the tradition about which Cohen writes."--

"An illuminating selection of writings on a wide variety of topics -- everything from technique, music theory, and daily routine to spirituality and systemic racism -- from the personal journals of Sonny Rollins, master of the tenor saxophone and 'jazz's greatest living improviser' (The New York Times). Sonny Rollins is one of the towering masters of American music, a virtuoso of the saxophone and an unequaled improviser whose live performances are legendary and who reshaped modern jazz time and time again over the course of a career lasting more than sixty years. Throughout the greater part of it, Rollins also maintained a notebook in which he sketched in words and images as he pondered art and life and his own search for meaning. The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins provides an unequaled glimpse into the mind and workshop of a musical titan, along with a wealth of insight and inspiration to readers. In the fall of 1959, Rollins famously took a break from performing and recording. He turned to practicing for long hours, often late at night, on the Williamsburg Bridge, and it was then for the first time that he began to turn regularly to his notebooks, which at the time and in the years to come proved for him an indispensable instrument of change in their own right. Here Rollins can tend towards the aphoristic, as in "Face the startling and intriguing reality that there is within me a force working hard for my own destruction, even as I try to improve." Elsewhere, music is front and center, as he mingles observations on embouchure, fingering, and technique with reflections on harmony and dissonance. Lists of daily chores, rehearsal routines, reflections on particular tours and recordings (including detailed notes on how Rollins wanted live albums to be edited), and a steady stream of notes on diet and health also find their way into the notebooks, as do ruminations on systemic racism and the way nightclub culture degrades jazz musicians. Rollins emphatically resists claims that jazz should be considered solely as an African American art form, protesting the diminishment that is caused to jazz musicians by labeling their work 'racial music.' 'The point to be absorbed here, ' he writes, 'is that any definition which seeks to separate Johann Sebastian Bach from Miles Davis is defeating its own purpose of clarification. The musings of Miles is then the bouncing of Bach both played against each other.' Carefully selected and including an informative introduction by critic and scholar Sam Reese, The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins makes a vital and fascinating document of American culture publicly available for the first time"--

"In the biographical note accompanying one of her books, Cristina Campo said of herself: "She has written little and would like to have written less". That little is almost all collected in this book and will impose an observation on every perceptive reader: these pages belong to the most beautiful Italian prose has been shown in the last fifty years. Cristina Campo was unforgivable, in the sense that the word has in the essay that gives the title to this book: like Marianne Moore, like Hofmannsthal, like Benn, like Weil, she had the "passion for perfection". She could not otherwise have written the pages that are read here on Chopin or on the fairy tale, on the Arabian Nights or about language. "I salute a wisdom among the strangest today" Ceronetti once wrote from Campo. Perhaps the time has come for readers to realize that in Italy, among so many promoters of their own mediocrity, this "trappist of perfection" also lived"--

"The narrator of this creepy but feministically delicious novella, an early 21st-century novelist decides to write the biography of Helen Ralston, an all-but-forgotten 20th-century novelist she has long admired. In the late 1920s, Helen studied painting with W.E. Logan. Logan painted her as Circe, and Helen painted herself as an island titled My Death. When they parted for good, both turned to writing. Willy became famous; Helen did not. The narrator of My Death intends to do something about that. But first she must solve the mystery of Helen's relationship with Willy and why Helen titled her self-portrait My Death"--

The first-ever collection of comics by Ed Subitzky—comedy writer, National Lampoon legend, Atari spokesperson, “The Impostor” on The David Letterman Show, and an enduring influence on an entire generation of cartoonists and humorists.For the entire run of National Lampoon, Ed Subitzky bent, broke, and reimagined what a cartoon could do: A cartoon that hypnotizes you. A cartoon that goes to prison. A cartoon that folds up and flies away. Framed by an interview with Mark Newgarden, this first-ever collection of Subitzky’s work is a portrait of one of the funniest, most prolific humorists of the ’70s and ’80s.

"Amelia Rosselli is one of the great poets of postwar Italy, and recognized as such throughout Europe. She was also a musician and musicologist, close to John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and she waged a lifelong battle against depression. The child of Carlo Rosselli, a major figure in the resistance to Mussolini who was assassinated with his brother Nello in 1937, Rosselli grew up in exile and went to high school in Scarsdale, making her fluent in English. English poetry, especially the lyrics and sonnets of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, became a prime reference for her own poetry, which mingles formal experimentation with memories of traditional forms to evoke the struggles of an embattled conscience. Rosselli's English poems, some of which were published by John Ashbery in the 1960s, are a major part of her body of work and are invariably included in Italian editions of her collected works.Sleep, the title under which Rosselli herself gathered these poems, is the first publication of her haunting and utterly original English oeuvre by an English publisher"--

"A compelling record of one year in the life of a writer, including observations about movies, art, music, friendship, travel, and family. The essay is the most pluckily pedestrian and blithely transgressive of literary genres, the one that is most at large and in need, picking through the accumulated disjecta of daily life and personal and social history to take what it needs and remake it as it sees fit. It is, at its lively best, quite indifferent to the claims of style, fashion, theory, and respectability, provoking and inspiring through the pleasure of surprise. In 2016, Philip Lopate, who has been writing essays and thinking about the essay for decades now, turned his attention to one of the essay's offshoots, the blog, a form by that time already thick, as he knew, with virtual dust. Lopate committed to writing a weekly blog about, really, whatever over the course of a year, a quicker pace of delivery than he'd ever undertaken and one that carried the risk of all too regularly falling short. What emerged was A Year and a Day, a collection of forty-seven essays best characterized as a single essay a year in the making, a virtuosic (if never showy) demonstration of the essay's range and reach, meandering, looping back, pressing reset, forging on. Lopate's topics along the way include family, James Baldwin, a trip to China, Agnes Martin, Abbas Kiarastomi, the resistable rise of Donald Trump, death, desire, and the tribulations, small and large, of daily life. What results is at once a self-portrait, a picture of the times, and a splendid new elaboration of what the essay can be"--

"First published in Italian under the title Teorema by Garzanti Editore"--Title page verso.

"A daring novel, once widely censored, about the scrappy, harrowing, and inventive lives of Rome's unhoused youth by one of Italy's greatest film directors. Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first novel and remains his best-known work of fiction. He'd moved to Rome a few years before, after finding himself embroiled in a provincial sex scandal, and the impact of the city on Pasolini-its lively, aggressive dialect, its postwar squalor and violence-was accompanied by a new awareness that for him respectability was no longer an option: "Like it or not, I was tarred with the brush of Rimbaud ... or even Oscar Wilde." Urgently looking for teaching work, walk-on parts in films, literary journalism, anything to achieve independence and security, he was drawn to other outcasts who cared nothing for bourgeois values, who lived intensely, carelessly, refusing to be hampered by scruple and convention. This was the context in which he began to work on a novel, and though socialism was the intellectual and artistic fashion of the day and Pasolini was a socialist, his book was completely free of any sentimental or patronizing concern for the plight of the underprivileged. Pasolini revels in the vitality of the squalor he so lavishly and energetically evokes. In Boys Alive, he devotes his native lyricism and vast literary resources to conjuring up an urban inferno as vast and hideous as it is colourful and dynamic. There is no grand plot, but Pasolini's narrative voice moves like a heat-seeking missile, infallibly locking onto situations of great intensity, conflict and comedy. Possessing nothing, his young characters fight to survive and to live. At all costs they must have fun; boredom is death. And if food and fun must be paid for, then money will be found: looting, hustling, scavenging, stealing. Once found it is immediately squandered on sharp clothes and shoes, drunk away, gambled away, or simply lost. Boasting and exhibitionism are the norm, and every boy aspires to be the toughest, the shrewdest, the most unscrupulous punk on the block. As each new episode begins-a warehouse heist, an evening's gambling, a search for sex-the reader can only tremble, waiting for disaster to strike. Everything is up in the air. Nothing is predictable. Tim Parks' new translation of Pasolini's early masterpiece brings out the salt and intelligence of this vital and never less than scandalous work of art"--

A collection of Norse myths describing the exploits of the Aesir gods and goddesses, beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the day of reckoning.

A moving graphic memoir about home, childhood, and family by the author of Storeyville and Pompeii. Pittsburgh is the story of a family, and a city. Frank Santoro faces a straightforward yet heart-rending reality: His parents, once high-school sweethearts, now never speak to each other—despite working in the same building. Stuck in the middle, he tries to understand. The result is this book. Using markers, pencils, scissors, and tape, with a variety of papers, drawing in vivid colors and exuberant lines, Santoro constructs a multi-generational retelling of their lives. Framed by his parents’ courtship and marriage, and set amid the vital but fading neighborhood streets, the pages of Pittsburgh are filled with details both quotidian and dramatic—from his childhood mishaps to his father’s trauma in Vietnam—interspersed throughout with the mute witness of the family dog, Pretzel. Santoro, the acclaimed author of Storeyville and Pompeii, has created his masterpiece. Pittsburgh is an extraordinary reimagining of the comics form to depict the processes of memory, and a powerful, searching account of a family taking shape, falling apart, and struggling to reinvent itself, as the city around them does the same.

"Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Children is a masterpiece not only of the nineteenth century but of the whole of Russian literature, a book full to bursting with life. It is a novel about the relations between the young and the old, about love, families, politics, religion, about strong beliefs and heated disagreements, illness and death. It is about the clash between liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. At the time of its publication in 1862, the book aroused indignation in its critics who felt betrayed by Turgenev's refusal to let his novel serve a single ideology; it also received spirited defense by those who saw in his diffuse sympathies a greater service to art and to humanity. Fathers and Children is not a practical manifesto but a lasting work of art and a timely book for our present age, newly and ably translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater"--

A futuristic punk ventures through a madcap, dystopian fantasia in this astounding work of comics literature by a celebrated artist and illustrator.Gary Panter is one of America's great creative forces: illustrator for the trailblazing punk magazine Slash, set designer for the legendary TV show Pee-wee's Playhouse, and one of the wildest, most innovative comics artists of all time. Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise is a leap into the uproarious life of Panter's ever-cheerful punk everyman, Jimbo, and a perfect introduction to Panter's ever-shifting style. Amid a jumbled cityscape of rundown NYC streets and futuristic LA freeways, Jimbo crowd surfs at a riot, makes amends with Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, and rescues his pal Smoggo's sister from giant cockroaches, all while the world teeters between extravagance and apocalypse. Veering between the crude and the elegant, the wise and the funny, Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise proves Panter is a master of cartooning, and still way ahead of the rest of us.

The second part of an infamous memoir about life in the time of Napoleon by a rebellious literary celebrity. In 1800, François-René de Chateaubriand sailed from the cliffs of Dover to the headlands of Calais. He was thirty-one and had been living as a political refugee in England for most of a decade, at times in such extreme poverty that he subsisted on nothing but hot water and two-penny rolls. Over the next fifteen years, his life was utterly changed. He published Atala, René, and The Genius of Christianity to acclaim and epoch-making scandal. He strolled the streets of Jerusalem and mapped the ruins of Carthage. He served Napoleon in Rome, then resigned in protest after the Duc d’Enghien’s execution, putting his own life at tremendous risk.Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1800–1815—the second volume in Alex Andriesse’s new and complete translation of this epic French classic—is a chronicle of triumphs and sorrows, narrating not only the author’s life during a tumultuous period in European history but the “parallel life” of Napoleon. In these pages, Chateaubriand continues to paint his distinctive self-portrait, in which the whole history of France swirls around the sitter like a mist of dreams.

"The Dutch poet Nachoem Wijnberg is one of the most inventive, surprising, entertaining, and thought-provoking poets writing today. He is also remarkably productive, so that up to now only a small portion of his extensive body of work has appeared in English translation and none of it in America. This new selection of poems draws on all nineteen volumes Wijnberg has published to date and also includes uncollected work, constituting an indispensable introduction to this wry, off-kilter, spellbinding modern master. Wijnberg, not only a poet but a professor of business studies-hence his persistent concern with questions of value, real and false-writes only in the plainest language while displaying a formidable erudition. His poems engage economics, philosophy, and history; he writes Chinese poems and Jewish poems and classic songs; he tells stories that may or may not be parables; he writes from where the mind meets the heart. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," Emily Dickinson enjoins. Wijnberg for his part has said, "Alienation is the last thing I am trying to achieve. The world is strange enough as it is and my poems help in dealing with that strangeness by bringing it close and as far as possible trying to understand it.""--

Describes the life of a deer in the forest as he grows into a beautiful stag.

"A work from the Johnson Contruction Co."

Bob, Son of Battle, is a sheepdog so canny and careful of his flock, so deeply devoted to his master, James Moore, and so admired for his poise and wisdom by the residents of a small village in the rugged mountains of England's North Country, that young though he is, he is already known as Owd Bob. In a recent contest, Bob has proved himself a matchless sheepdog, and if he wins the trophy two more times, he'll be seen as equal to the legendary sheepdogs of yore. But Bob has a real rival: Red Wull, with his docked tail and bristling yellow fur, a ferocious creature, just like his diminutive master, Adam McAdam, a lonely Scot, estranged not only from his English neighbors but from his son, David. McAdam just can't stop belittling this strapping young man, all the more so since David began courting Moore's beautiful daughter Maggie. But what McAdam really wants is for his beloved Wullie to wrest the prize from Bob once and for all. The story takes a darker turn when a troubling new threat to the local flocks emerges. A dog has gone rogue, sneaking out at night to feast on the flesh and blood of the sheep he is bound to protect. Again and again, new sheep fall prey to this relentless predator; again and again, he slips away undetected. This master hunter can only be among the boldest and sharpest of dogs . . . Bob, Son of Battle has long been a beloved classic of children's literature both in America and in England. Here the celebrated author and translator Lydia Davis, who first read and loved this exciting story as a child, has rendered the challenging idioms of the original into fluent and graceful English of our day, making this tale of rival dogs and rival families and the shadowy terrain between Good and Bad accessible and appealing to readers of all ages.