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In the past few decades, several major exhibitions and scholarly publications have revisited the distinguished career of American painter Philip Guston (1913–1980), a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 1949 and a resident there in 1960 and again in 1971. Once known as “Abstract Expressionism’s odd-man out,” a respected, but often misunderstood, member of the New York School, Guston is now celebrated for his magisterial paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s. Combining painterly virtuosity and narrative power, they cast a long shadow over the current landscape of contemporary art. In light of both a profusion of recent scholarship and the lasting currency of Guston’s vision among artists working today, the time appears right to take stock of his career. To that end, the American Acaedmy in Rome organized a two-day conference with an international roster of critics and art historians to discuss the significance and critical fortunes of Guston’s work, paying special attention to his life-long attentiveness to Italian art and culture. Emerging out of that symposium are the texts in Go Figure! They reflect a wide variety of perspectives, including reflections from leading specialists and several of Guston’s longtime friends and collaborators, as well as those by younger scholars, who have paved new ground in recent studies of Guston’s work. A conversation between Robert Storr and the artist Chuck Close, hosted by the Phillips Collection in 2011, yields further insights. This volume opens new avenues of inquiry complicating the conventional narrative about Guston’s purportedly dramatic shift from abstraction to figuration unveiled at the Marlborough show in 1970. More than one hundred years after his birth, Guston continues to fascinate and challenge artists and scholars alike, perhaps more than ever before.   Contributors include David Anfam, Dore Ashton, Bill Berkson, Chuck Close, Kosme de Barañano, Barbara Drudi, Susan Behrends Frank, David Kaufmann, David Lewis, Ara H. Merjian, Achille Bonito Oliva, Christoph Schreier, and Robert Slifkin. The book includes 53 color and black and white images.

Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in PoetryAmerican poet Elizabeth Willis has written an electrifying body of work spanning more than twenty years. With a wild and inquisitive lyricism, Willis—“one of the most outstanding poets of her generation” (Susan Howe)—draws us into intricate patterns of thought and feeling. The intimate and civic address of these poems is laced with subterranean affinities among painters, botanists, politicians, witches and agitators. Coursing through this work is the clarity and resistance of a world that asks the poem to rise to this, to speak its fury.

Walt Whitman worked as a nurse in an army hospital during the Civil War and published Drum-Taps, his war poems, as the war was coming to an end. Later, the book came out in an expanded form, including “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom''d,” Whitman''s passionate elegy for Lincoln. The most moving and enduring poetry to emerge from America’s most tragic conflict, Drum-Taps also helped to create a new, modern poetry of war, a poetry not just of patriotic exhortation but of somber witness. Drum-Taps is thus a central work not only of the Civil War but of our war-torn times.But Drum-Taps as readers know it from Leaves of Grass is different from the work of 1865. Whitman cut and reorganized the book, reducing its breadth of feeling and raw immediacy. This edition, the first to present the book in its original form since its initial publication 150 years ago, is a revelation, allowing one of Whitman’s greatest achievements to appear again in all its troubling glory.

In this sequel to The Scientist as Rebel (2006), Freeman Dyson—whom The Times of London calls “one of the world’s most original minds”—celebrates openness to unconventional ideas and “the spirit of joyful dreaming” in which he believes that science should be pursued. Throughout these essays, which range from the creation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century to the scientific inquiries of the Romantic generation to recent books by Daniel Kahneman and Malcolm Gladwell, he seeks to “break down the barriers that separate science from other sources of human wisdom.”  Dyson discusses twentieth-century giants of physics such as Richard Feynman, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Paul Dirac, and Steven Weinberg, many of whom he knew personally, as well as Winston Churchill’s pursuit of nuclear weapons for Britain and Wernher von Braun’s pursuit of rockets for space travel. And he takes a provocative, often politically incorrect approach to some of today’s most controversial scientific issues: global warming, the current calculations of which he thinks are probably wrong; the future of biotechnology, which he expects to dominate our lives in the next half-century as the tools to design new living creatures become available to everyone; and the flood of information in the digital age. Dyson offers fresh perspectives on the history, the philosophy, and the practice of scientific inquiry—and even on the blunders, the wild guesses and wrong theories that are also part of our struggle to understand the wonders of the natural world.

Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories brings together eighty-one brief texts spanning Robert Walser’s career, from pieces conceived amid his early triumphs to later works written at a psychiatric clinic in Bern. Many were published in the feuilleton sections of newspapers during Walser’s life; others were jotted down on slips of paper and all but forgotten. They are strung together like consciousness, idiosyncratic and vulnerable, genuine in their irony, wistful in their humor. Some dwell on childish or transient topics—carousels, the latest hairstyles, an ekphrasis of the illustrations in a picture book—others on the grand themes of nature, art, and love. But they remain conversational, almost lighter than air. Every emotion ventured takes on the weight of a sincerity that is imperiled as soon as it comes into contact with the outside world, which retains all of the novelty it had in childhood—and all of the danger.

Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazism. Not just a conservative but a rock-ribbed reactionary, he played the part of a landed gentleman, deplored democracy, and rejected the modern world outright. To Reck the Nazis were ruthless revolutionaries in Gothic drag, and helpless as he was to counter the spell they had cast on the German people, he felt compelled to record the corruptions of their rule. The result is less a diary than a sequence of stark and astonishing snapshots of life in Germany between 1936 and 1944. We see the Nazis at the peak of power, and the murderous panic with which they respond to approaching defeat; their travesty of traditional folkways in the name of the Volk; and the author's own missed opportunity to shoot Hitler. This riveting book is not only, as Hannah Arendt proclaimed it, "one of the most important documents of the Hitler period" but a moving testament of a decent man struggling to do the right thing in a depraved world.

An NYRB Classics OriginalSimon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao's Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now.The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys's essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude to the past to the mysteries of Belgium and Belgitude; offers portraits of André Gide and Zhou Enlai; takes on Roland Barthes and Christopher Hitchens; broods on the Cambodian genocide; reflects on the spell of the sea; and writes with keen appreciation about writers as different as Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Simenon. Throughout, The Hall of Uselessness is marked with the deep knowledge, skeptical intelligence, and passionate conviction that have made Simon Leys one of the most powerful essayists of our time.

Growing up in a small upper Midwestern town in the late 1930s, young Tommy MacAllister is scarcely aware of the Depression, much less the rumblings of war in Europe. For his parents and their set, life seems to revolve around dinners and dancing at the country club, tennis dates and rounds of golf, holiday parties, summers on the Island, and sparkling occasions full of people and drinks and food and laughter. But curious as he is and impatient to grow up, Tommy will soon come to glimpse the darkness that lies beneath so much genteel complacency: hidden histories and embarrassing poor relations; the subtle (and not so subtle) slighting of the “help”; the mockery of President Roosevelt; and “the commandment they talked least about in Sunday school,” adultery.     In Testing the Current William McPherson subtly sets off his wide-eyed protagonist’s perspective with mature reflection and wry humor and surrounds him with a cast of vibrant characters, creating a scrupulously observed portrait of a place and time that will shimmer in readers’ minds long after the final page is turned.

Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter . . . weak heart, brown hair,” a young man with an excellent education but permanently condemned to a low-paid job without security in the short or the long run.What’s to be done? Fabian and friends make the best of it—they go to work though they may be laid off at any time, and in the evenings they go to the cabarets and try to make it with girls on the make, all the while making a lot of sharp-sighted and sharp-witted observations about politics, life, and love, or what may be. Not that it makes a difference. Workers keep losing work to new technologies while businessmen keep busy making money, and everyone who can goes out to dance clubs and sex clubs or engages in marathon bicycle events, since so long as there’s hope of running into the right person or (even) doing the right thing, well—why stop?Going to the Dogs, in the words of introducer Rodney Livingstone, “brilliantly renders with tangible immediacy the last frenetic years [in Germany] before 1933.” It is a book for our time too.

Plot and counterplot lie at the heart of Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and The Marriage of Figaro, the three brilliant libretti that Lorenzo Da Ponte prepared for Mozart. They were also central to Da Ponte's own extraordinary life. His Memoirs record a fantastic variety of romantic, political, and professional intrigues, and tell of meetings with a host of remarkable men. In a life that took him from the canals of Venice to the streets of New York, Da Ponte was at different times priest, professional gambler, proprietor of a bordello, political agitator, court poet, impresario, grocery store owner, and the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. His Memoirs, a minor classic of Italian literature, are the picaresque and engrossing story of a man of enormous talent and unsurpassed flair who was, above all, an indefatigable survivor."I shall speak of things . . . so singular in their oddity as in some manner to instruct, or at least entertain, without wearying." —Lorenzo da Ponte

Gilbert Seldes, the author of The Stammering Century, writes: This book is not a record of the major events in Ameri­can history during the nineteenth century. It is concerned with minor movements, with the cults and manias of that period. Its personages are fanatics, and radicals, and mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements and figures with the primary forces of the century, and to supply a background in American history for the Prohibitionists and the Pente­costalists; the diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors and the Fundamen­talists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and possibly the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious excitements, and the relation of each of these to the others and to the orderly progress of America are the subject.The subject is of course as timely at the beginning of the twenty-first century as when the book first appeared in 1928. Seldes's fascinated and often sympathetic accounts of dreamers, rogues, frauds, sectarians, madmen, and geniuses from Jonathan Edwards to the messianic murderer Matthias have established The Stammering Century not only as a lasting contribution to American history but as a classic in its own right.

Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd was a runaway best seller when it was first published in 1960, and it became one of the defining texts of the New Left. Goodman was a writer and thinker who broke every mold and did it brilliantly—he was a novelist, poet, and a social theorist, among a host of other things—and the book’s surprise success established him as one of America’s most unusual and trenchant critics, combining vast learning, an astute mind, utopian sympathies, and a wonderfully hands-on way with words.For Goodman, the unhappiness of young people was a concentrated form of the unhappiness of American society as a whole, run by corporations that provide employment (if and when they do) but not the kind of meaningful work that engages body and soul. Goodman saw the young as the first casualties of a humanly re­pressive social and economic system and, as such, the front line of potential resistance. Noam Chomsky has said, “Paul Goodman’s impact is all about us,” and certainly it can be felt in the powerful localism of today’s renascent left. A classic of anarchist thought, Growing Up Absurd not only offers a penetrating indictment of the human costs of corporate capitalism but points the way forward. It is a tale of yesterday’s youth that speaks directly to our common future.

No one has written more feelingly and more beautifully than Nescio about the madness and sadness, courage and vulnerability of youth: its big plans and vague longings, not to mention the binges, crashes, and marathon walks and talks. No one, for that matter, has written with such pristine clarity about the radiating canals of Amsterdam and the cloud-swept landscape of the Netherlands. Who was Nescio? Nescio-Latin for "I don't know"-was the pen name of J.H.F. Grönloh, the highly successful director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company and a father of four-someone who knew more than enough about respectable maturity. Only in his spare time and under the cover of a pseudonym, as if commemorating a lost self, did he let himself go, producing over the course of his lifetime a handful of utterly original stories that contain some of the most luminous pages in modern literature. This is the first English translation of Nescio's stories.

This story of adventure, bravery, daring, friendship, and honor begins when Runcible, a Weimaraner, digs a hole from Cape Cod all the way to Japan. There he meets Taka-chan, a little girl who has been imprisoned by a fierce and fearsome sea dragon. The dragon is angry that Taka-chan’s father and his fellow fishermen no longer pay him proper respect, but he is willing to free Taka-chan on one condition: Runcible must seek out the most loyal creature in all Japan and lay a flower at his feet. So Taka-chan and Runcible set out on a quest of discovery that takes them to the bustling heart of Tokyo. From palace grounds to noodle shop, Runcible explores the city, stopping at nothing to solve the mystery that will release his new friend from her captivity.Taka-chan and I joins image and word in a tale that is as thrilling as it is poignant. Betty Jean Lifton, a lifelong student of Japanese folklore, and Eikoh Hosoe, a renowned Japanese photographer, have together created an enduring work of beauty that is fit to share a shelf with a classic like The Red Balloon.

An NYRB Classics OriginalThe first great twentieth-century novel of dictatorship, and the avowed inspiration for García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme, Tyrant Banderas is a dark and dazzling portrayal of a mythical Latin American republic in the grip of a monster. Ramón del Valle-Inclán, one of the masters of Spanish modernism, combines the splintered points of view of a cubist painting with the campy excesses of 19th-century serial fiction to paint an astonishing picture of a ruthless tyrant facing armed revolt. It is the Day of the Dead, and revolution has broken out, creating mayhem from Baby Roach's Cathouse to the Harris Circus to the deep jungle of Tico Maipú. Tyrant Banderas steps forth, assuring all that he is in favor of freedom of assembly and democratic opposition. Mean­while, his secret police lock up, torture, and execute students and Indian peasants in a sinister castle by the sea where even the sharks have tired of a diet of revolutionary flesh. Then the opposition strikes back. They besiege the dictator's citadel, hoping to bring justice to a downtrodden, starving populace. Peter Bush's new translation of Valle-Inclán's seminal novel, the first into English since 1929, reveals a writer whose tragic sense of humor is as memorably grotesque and disturbing as Goya's in his The Disasters of War.

An NYRB Classics OriginalRobert Sheckley was an eccentric master of the American short story, and his tales, whether set in dystopic city­scapes, ultramodern advertising agencies, or aboard spaceships lighting out for hostile planets, are among the most startlingly original of the twentieth century. Today, as the new worlds, alternate universes, and synthetic pleasures Sheckley foretold become our reality, his vision begins to look less absurdist and more prophetic. This retrospective selection, chosen by Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich, brings together the best of Sheckley's deadpan farces, proving once again that he belongs beside such mordant critics of contemporary mores as Bruce Jay Friedman, Terry Southern, and Thomas Pynchon.

Sir Thomas Browne is one of the supreme stylists of the English language: a coiner of words and spinner of phrases to rival Shakespeare; the wielder of a weird and wonderful erudition; an inquiring spirit in the mold of Montaigne. Browne was an inspiration to the Romantics as well as to W.G. Sebald, and his work is quirky, sonorous, and enchanting. Here this baroque master's two most enduring and admired works, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, appear in a new edition that has been annotated and introduced by the distinguished scholars Ramie Targoff and Stephen Greenblatt (author of the best-selling Will in the World and the National Book Award-winning The Swerve). In Religio Medici Browne mulls over the relation between his medical profession and his profession of the Christian faith, pondering the respective claims of science and religion, questions that are still very much alive today. The discovery of an ancient burial site in an English field prompted Browne to write Urne-Buriall, which is both an early anthropological examination of different practices of interment and a profound meditation on mortality. Its grave and exquisite music has resounded for generations.

"Pussy Riot are Vvedensky's disciples and his heirs. Katya, Masha, and I are in jail but I don't consider that we've been defeated.... According to the official report, Alexander Vvedensky died on December 20, 1941. We don't know the cause, whether it was dysentery in the train after his arrest or a bullet from a guard. It was somewhere on the railway line between Voronezh and Kazan. His principle of 'bad rhythm' is our own. He wrote: 'It happens that two rhythms will come into your head, a good one and a bad one and I choose the bad one. It will be the right one.' ... It is believed that the OBERIU dissidents are dead, but they live on. They are persecuted but they do not die." - Pussy Riot [Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's closing statement at their trial in August 2012]"I raise[d] my hand against concepts," wrote Alexander Vvedensky, "I enacted a poetic critique of reason." This weirdly and wonderfully philosophical poet was born in 1904, grew up in the midst of war and revolution, and reached his artistic maturity as Stalin was twisting the meaning of words in grotesque and lethal ways. Vvedensky-with Daniil Kharms the major figure in the short-lived underground avant-garde group OBERIU (a neologism for "the union for real art")-responded with a poetry that explodes stable meaning into shimmering streams of provocation and invention. A Vvedensky poem is like a crazy party full of theater, film, magic tricks, jugglery, and feasting. Curious characters appear and disappear, euphoria keeps company with despair, outrageous assertions lead to epic shouting matches, and perhaps it all breaks off with one lonely person singing a song.A Vvedensky poem doesn't make a statement. It is an event. Vvedensky's poetry was unpublishable during his lifetime-he made a living as a writer for children before dying under arrest in 1942-and he remains the least known of the great twentieth-century Russian poets. This is his first book to appear in English. The translations by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich, outstanding poets in their own right, are as astonishingly alert and alive as the originals.