Bøker utgitt av The New York Review of Books, Inc

A New York Review Books OriginalTranscending divisions of creed, challenging social distinctions of all sorts, and celebrating individual unity with the divine, the poetry of Kabir is one of passion and paradox, of mind-bending riddles and exultant riffs. These new translations by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, one of India's finest contemporary poets, bring out the richness, wit, and power of a literary and spiritual master.

In this much-anticipated sequel to his critically acclaimed Makers of Modern Architecture (2007) longtime New York Review of Books contributor Martin Filler-"probably the best all-round architecture critic currently working in the United States," according to the architectural journalist David Cohn-offers another penetrating series of concise but authoritative studies on leading exponents of the building art from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. Exemplifying his belief that an architect's personality and character have a direct and profound bearing on this most public and social of art forms, Filler's lively melding of biographical and aesthetic perspectives gives these accessible yet scrupulously researched interpretations a rare human immediacy.From profiles of such universally admired masters as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier to emerging figures including Michael Arad, creator of New York City's National September 11 Memorial, and the international design collaborative Snøhetta, Filler's shifting focus remains consistently trained on the enduring values of great architecture. His panoramic vision encompasses the historically inspired Gilded Age urbanism of the celebrated New York bon vivant Stanford White as well as the expressive collages of ancient and modern elements orchestrated by the reclusive Venetian intellectual Carlo Scarpa. The increasing role of women in architecture is given special emphasis in this new collection, from the pioneering work in 1920s Germany of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, inventor of the standardized modern kitchen, to such innovative contemporary practitioners as Elizabeth Diller, Kazuyo Sejima, and Billie Tsien.

A New York Review Books Original   In 1908, deep in Siberia, it fell to earth. THEIR ICE. A young man on a scientific expedition found it. It spoke to his heart, and his heart named him Bro. Bro felt the Ice. Bro knew its purpose. To bring together the 23,000 blond, blue-eyed Brothers and Sisters of the Light who were scattered on earth. To wake their sleeping hearts. To return to the Light. To destroy this world. And secretly, throughout the twentieth century and up to our own day, the Children of the Light have pursued their beloved goal.   Pulp fiction, science fiction, New Ageism, pornography, video-game mayhem, old-time Communist propaganda, and rampant commercial hype all collide, splinter, and splatter in Vladimir Sorokin’s virtuosic Ice Trilogy, a crazed joyride through modern times with the promise of a truly spectacular crash at the end. And the reader, as eager for the redemptive fix of a good story as the Children are for the Primordial Light, has no choice except to go along, caught up in a brilliant illusion from which only illusion escapes intact.

When Bruce Duffy’s The World As I Found It was first published more than twenty years ago, critics and readers were bowled over by its daring reimagining of the lives of three very different men, the philosophers Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A brilliant group portrait with the vertiginous displacements of twentieth-century life looming large in the background, Duffy’s novel depicts times and places as various as Vienna 1900, the trenches of World War I, Bloomsbury, and the colleges of Cambridge, while the complicated main characters appear not only in thought and dispute but in love and despair. Wittgenstein, a strange, troubled, and troubling man of gnawing contradictions, is at the center of a novel that reminds us that the apparently abstract and formal questions that animate philosophy are nothing less than the intractable matters of life and death.

Soul of Wood made Jakov Lind’s reputation as one of the most boldy imaginative postwar writers and it remains his most celebrated achievement. In the title novella and six subsequent stories, Lind distorts and refashions reality to make the deepest horrors of the twentieth century his own. Set during World War II, “Soul of Wood” is the story of Wohlbrecht, a peg-legged veteran of World War I, who smuggles Anton Barth, a paralyzed Jewish boy, to a mountain hideout after the boy’s parents have been sent to their deaths. Abandoning the helpless boy to the elements, Wohlbrecht returns to Vienna, where, having been committed to an insane asylum, he helps the chief psychiatrist to administer lethal injections to other patients. But Germany is collapsing and the war will soon be over. The one way, Wohlbrecht realizes, that he can evade retribution is by returning to the woods to redeem “his” hidden Jew. Others, however, have had the same bright idea.

The man known as Blutch is one of the giants of contemporary comics, and Peplum may be his masterpiece: a grand, strange dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name and with the frozen maiden in tow, makes his way toward Rome-seeking power, or maybe just survival, as the world unravels.Thrilling and hallucinatory, vast in scope yet unnervingly intimate, Peplum weaves together threads from Shakespeare and the Satyricon along with Blutch's own distinctive vision. His hypnotic storytelling and stark, gorgeous art pull us into one of the great works of graphic literature, translated into English for the first time.This NYRC edition features new English hand-lettering and is an oversized paperback with French flaps and extra-thick paper.

Eliza Fay’s origins are obscure; she was not beautiful, rich, or outlandishly accomplished. Yet the letters she wrote from her 1779 voyage across the globe captivated E. M. Forster, who arranged for their British publication in 1925. The letters have been delighting readers ever since with their truth-is-stranger-than-fiction twists and turns, their earthy humor, and their depiction of an indomitable woman. When the intrepid Mrs. Fay departed from Dover more than two hundred years ago, she embarked on a grueling twelve-month journey through much of Europe, up the Nile, over the deserts of Egypt, and finally across the ocean to India. Along the way her party encountered wars, territorial disputes, brigands, and even imprisonment.Fay was a contemporary of Jane Austen, but her adventures are worthy of a novel by Daniel Defoe. These letters—unfiltered, forthright, and often hilarious—bring the perils and excitements of an earlier age to life.

It is 1900, give or take a few years. The Vajkays—call them Mother and Father—live in Sárszeg, a dead-end burg in the provincial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father retired some years ago to devote his days to genealogical research and quaint questions of heraldry. Mother keeps house. Both are utterly enthralled with their daughter, Skylark. Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives. Now Skylark is going away, for one week only, it's true, but a week that yawns endlessly for her parents. What will they do? Before they know it, they are eating at restaurants, reconnecting with old friends, attending the theater. And this is just a prelude to Father's night out at the Panther Club, about which the less said the better. Drunk, in the light of dawn Father surprises himself and Mother with his true, buried, unspeakable feelings about Skylark. Then, Skylark is back. Is there a world beyond the daily grind and life's creeping disappointments? Kosztolányi's crystalline prose, perfect comic timing, and profound human sympathy conjure up a tantalizing beauty that lies on the far side of the irredeemably ordinary. To that extent, Skylark is nothing less than a magical book.

A New York Review Books Original There's a certain street—via Saterna—in the middle of Milan that just doesn't show up on maps of the city. Orfi, a wildly successful young singer, lives there, and it's there that one night he sees his gorgeous girlfriend Eura disappear, "like a spirit,” through a little door in the high wall that surrounds a mysterious mansion across the way. Where has Eura gone? Orfi will have to venture with his guitar across the borders of life and death to find out.Featuring the Ashen Princess, the Line Inspector, trainloads of Devils, Trudy, Valentina, and the Talking Jacket, Poem Strip—a pathbreaking graphic novel from the 1960s—is a dark and alluring investigation into mysteries of love, lust, sex, and death by Dino Buzzati, a master of the Italian avant-garde.

The elusive French luminary Joseph Joubert is a great explorer of the mind's open spaces. Edited and translated by Paul Auster, this selection from Joubert's notebooks introduces a master of the enigmatic who seeks "to call everything by its true name" while asking us to "remember everything is double." "Joubert speaks in whispers," Auster writes. "One must draw very close to hear what he is saying."

Corrigan is at once a mordant comedy of manners and a very modern morality play. Since her husband's death, the increasingly frail Mrs. Blunt has had only her trips to his grave to look forward to. Her raucous housekeeper's conversation, and cooking, are best forgotten. Nadine, her daughter, is an infrequent, uneasy visitor. Then one day a charming, wheelchair-bound Irishman shows up at Mrs. Blunt's door in search of charitable contributions. Corrigan is an arch manipulator, Mrs. Blunt is his mark, and before long we realize that they are made for each other. As the two grow ever more entrenched, Nadine fears for her mother's safety (or is it for her own inheritance?). 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.

Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city—and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity, expression, and love. Once installed in her new quarters, Rachel plants a garden, takes up writing, and impresses everyone she meets with her extraordinary optimism. But as Rachel sings and jokes the days away, her new neighbors begin to wonder if she might be taking her transformation just a bit too far.In Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister to Jane Gardam's oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own.

Victorine is thirteen, and she can't get the unwanted surprise of her newly sexual body, in all its polymorphous and perverse insistence, out of her mind: it is a trap lying in wait for her at every turn (and nowhere, for some reason, more than in church). Meanwhile, Victorine's older brother Costello is struggling to hold his own against the overbearing, mean-spirited, utterly ghastly Hector L'Hommedieu, a paterfamilias who collects and discards mistresses with scheming abandon even as Allison, his wife, drifts through life in a narcotic daze. And Maude Hutchins's Victorine? It's a sly, shocking, one-of-a-kind novel that explores sex and society with wayward and unabashedly weird inspiration, a drive-by snapshot of the great abject American family in its suburban haunts by a literary maverick whose work looks forward to-and sometimes outstrips-David Lynch's Blue Velvet and the contemporary paintings of Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin.

The Murderess is a bone-chilling tale of crime and punishment with the dark beauty of a backwoods ballad. Set on the dirt-poor Aegean island of Skiathos, it is the story of Hadoula, an old woman living on the margins of society and at the outer limits of respectability. Hadoula knows about herbs and their hidden properties, and women come to her when they need help. She knows women's secrets and she knows the misery of their lives, and as the book begins, she is trying to stop her new-born granddaughter from crying so that her daughter can at last get a little sleep. She rocks the baby and rocks her and then the terrible truth hits her: there's nothing worse than being born a woman, and there's something that she, Hadoula, can do about that.Peter Levi's matchless translation of Alexandros Papadiamantis's astonishing novella captures the excitement and haunting poetry of the original Greek.

Captains of the City Streets is another trip into the world of the legendary Cat Club of Greenwich Village. Two adventurous young cats—Sinbad and the Duke—are best friends who share a "trampish love of the free and easy life." They travel together, away from the tall buildings of the north, in search of a home where they can practice the skip and shuffle of their boxing technique. With luck, they find themselves proud residents of their very own home—an abandoned shack in an overgrown garden. Food is scarce until one man, an old sea captain new to the neighborhood, notices them and becomes their "Master of the Supper Nook."When the duo follow their new Master home, they witness one of the first meetings of the famous Cat Club. Sinbad and the Duke decide they don''t need the "rules and obligations" of membership in any club; but as they join in its business and frolics, they realize that perhaps the Club needs them.Ready for any challenge, Sinbad and the Duke, the Captains of the City Streets, charm the Cat Club''s admirers with their free spirits and "nifty" street smarts, as they grow up and ultimately find friendship and a place where they belong.