Bøker utgitt av The New York Review of Books, Inc

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.

Paul Hazard's magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the process by which new developmentsin the sciences, arts, philosophy, and philology came to undermine the stable foundations of the classical world, with its commitment to tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage. Hazard shows how travelers' tales and archaeological investigation widened European awareness and acceptance of cultural difference; how the radical rationalism of Spinoza and Richard Simon's new historical exegesis of the Bible called into question the revealed truths of religion; how the Huguenot Pierre Bayle's critical dictionary of ideas paved the way for Voltaire and the Enlightenment, even as the empiricism of Locke encouraged a new attention to sensory experience that led to Rousseau and romanticism. Hazard's range of knowledge is vast, and whether the subject is operas, excavations, or scientific experiments his brilliant style and powers of description bring to life the thinkers who thought up the modern world.

The Jameses are perhaps the most extraordinary and  distinguished family in American intellectual life. Henry’s novels, celebrated as among the finest in the language, and William’s groundbreaking philosophical and psychological works have won these brothers a permanent place at the center of the nation’s cultural firmament. Less well known is their enigmatic younger sister, Alice. But as Jean Strouse’s generous, probing, and deeply sympathetic biography shows, Alice James was a fascinating and exceptional figure in her own right. Tormented throughout her short life by an array of nervous disorders, constrained by social convention and internal conflict from achieving the worldly success she desired, Alice was nonetheless a vivid, witty writer, an acute social observer, and as alert, inquiring, and engaging a person as her two famous brothers. “The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science,” writes Strouse, “Alice simply lived.”

A New York Review Books OriginalAn uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free.This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.

Now in PaperbackIn Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic reflects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America's great artists. Simic's spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned.

Anna Akhmatova on Osip Mandelstam • Virgil Thomson on Gertrude Stein • Jonathan Miller on Lenny Bruce • Robert Lowell on John Berryman • Stephen Spender on W. H. Auden • Mary McCarthy on Hannah Arendt • John Thompson on Robert Lowell • James Merrill on Elizabeth Bishop • Isaiah Berlin on Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova • Joseph Brodsky on Nadezhda Mandelstam • Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale on George Balanchine • John Richardson on Douglas Cooper • Hector Bianciotti on Jorge Luis Borges Gore Vidal on Dawn Powell • Bruce Chatwin on George Ortiz Philip Roth on Ivan Klíma • Elena Bonner on Andrei Sakharov Elizabeth Hardwick on Murray Kempton • Aileen Kelly on Isaiah Berlin • Murray Kempton on Frank Sinatra • Adam Michnik on Zbigniew Herbert • John Updike on Saul Steinberg Jonathan Mirsky on Noel Annan • Alison Lurie on Edward Gorey Ian Buruma on John Schlesinger • Darryl Pinckney on Elizabeth Hardwick • Colin Thubron on Patrick Leigh FermorTWENTY-SEVEN MEMOIRS OF TRANSFORMING PERSONAL AND INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIPS AMONG WRITERS AND ARTISTS FROM THE PAGES OF THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKSA sense of the intimacy and verve of the memoirs is captured in Darryl Pinckney's description of the premises of The New York Review of Books itself, from whose offices these writings were edited and in whose pages they first appeared: "Books were streaking across the ocean and galleys were zooming in from the West Coast or the East Side, nearly all by messenger, by overnight delivery, because everything was urgent, every contributor was at the center of a drama called his or her 'piece.' Incredible battles went on during press week as indescribable things rotted in the office refrigerator. Someone's laughter in the typesetting studio would provoke to fury someone doing layout next door and the storms, the slammed doors. It was a family."The New York Review of Books, with an international circulation of more than 130,000, began during New York's 1963 newspaper strike when the present editor, Robert B. Silvers, and founding co-editor Barbara Epstein, along with Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, decided to create a new kind of magazine-one in which the most interesting and qualified minds would discuss current books and issues in depth. Since then, every twoweeks, The New York Review has continued to be the journal where the most important issues in American life, culture, and politics are discussed by writers who are themselves a major force in world literature and thought. "The secret of its success, The New York Times wrote, "is this: Its editors' ability to get remarkable writers and thinkers, many of them specialists in their fields, to write lucidly for lay readers on an enormous range of complex, scholarly and newly emerging subjects, issues and ideas." Many of the contributors to The New York Review of Books have written about deep and abiding relationships- both personal and intellectual-with fellow poets, writers, and artists. The Company They Kept, Volume II is a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these friendships that were always stimulating, often inspiring, and sometimes vexing (as Robert Lowell writes about John Berryman: "Hyperenthusiasms made him a hot friend, and could also make him wearing to friends-one of his dearest, Delmore Schwartz, used to say no one had John's loyalty, but you liked him to live in another city").There are historic moments-Isaiah Berlin's conversations with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, Hector Bianciotti's account of the death of Borges-as well as lighthearted ones-Bruce Chatwin's hilarious drunken evening with George Ortiz, and Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale's subway ride with George Balanchine ("…like a mythical guide he made the dingy steps, the sinister train, the underground arrival at the State Theater a Tiepoloesque flight into heaven").Many of the portraits include vivid images that otherwise would have been lost forever: the poet Osip Mandelstam, whom Anna Akhmatova first glimpsed as "a thin young boy with a twig of lily-of-the-valley in his button-hole"; the young Gore Vidal in Dawn Powell's living room suddenly realizing "this is a ménage à trois in Greenwich Village. My martini runs over"; twelve-year-old aspiring cartoonist John Updike writing Saul Steinberg to ask for a cartoon (Steinberg sent one, and another, nearly fifty years later, when Updike turned sixty). Each portrait is written with feeling and fullness of heart.

A New York Review Books Original Élisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, a name, Irène Némirovsky, a once popular novelist, a Russian émigré from an immensely rich family, a Jew who didn't consider herself one and who even contributed to collaborationist periodicals, and a woman who died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew. To her daughter she was a tragic enigma and a stranger. It was to come to terms with that stranger that Gille wrote, in The Mirador, her mother's memoirs. The first part of the book, dated 1929, the year David Golder made Némirovsky famous, takes us back to her difficult childhood in Kiev and St. Petersburg. Her father is doting, her mother a beautiful monster, while Irene herself is bookish and self-absorbed. There are pogroms and riots, parties and excursions, then revolution, from which the family flees to France, a country of "moderation, freedom, and generosity," where at last she is happy. Some thirteen years later Irène picks up her pen again. Everything has changed. Abandoned by friends and colleagues, she lives in the countryside and waits for the knock on the door. Written a decade before the publication of Suite Française made Irène Némirovsky famous once more (something Gille did not live to see), The Mirador is a haunted and a haunting book, an unflinching reckoning with the tragic past, and a triumph not only of the imagination but of love.

A New York Review Books OriginalDuring the eighteenth century, from the death of Louis XIV until the Revolution, French culture set the standard for all of Europe. In Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, England, Russia, and Germany, among kings and queens, diplomats, military leaders, writers, aristocrats, and artists, French was the universal language of politics and intellectual life. In When the World Spoke French, Marc Fumaroli presents a gallery of portraits of Europeans and Americans who conversed and corresponded in French, along with excerpts from their letters or other writings. These men and women, despite their differences, were all irresistibly attracted to the ideal of human happiness inspired by the Enlightenment, whose capital was Paris and whose king was Voltaire. Whether they were in Paris or far away, speaking French connected them in spirit with all those who desired to emulate Parisian tastes, style of life, and social pleasures. Their stories are testaments to the appeal of that famous "sweetness of life" nourished by France and its language.

An NYRB Classics OriginalThe first of the great Russian novels and one of the indisputable masterpieces of world literature, Dead Souls is the tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con man who causes consternation in a small Russian town when he shows up out of nowhere proposing to buy title to serfs who, though dead as doornails, are still property on paper. What can he have up his sleeve, the local landowners wonder, even as some rush to unload what isn't of any use to them anyway, while others seek to negotiate the best deal possible, and others yet hold on to their dead for dear life, since if somebody wants what you have then no matter what don't give it away. Chichikov's scheme soon encounters obstacles, but he is never without resource, and as he stumbles forward as best he can, Gogol paints a wonderfully comic picture of Russian life that also serves as a biting satire of a society as corrupt as it is cynical and silly. At once a wild phantasmagoria and a work of exacting realism, Dead Souls is a supremely living work of art that spills over with humor and passion and absurdity. Donald Rayfield's vigorous new translation corrects the mistakes and omissions of earlier versions while capturing the vivid speech rhythms of the original. It also offers a fuller text of the unfinished second part of the book by combining material from Gogol's two surviving drafts into a single compelling narrative. This is a tour de force of art and scholarship-and the most authoritative, accurate, and readable edition of Dead Souls available in English.

One of the great mavericks of French literature, Georges Bernanos combined raw realism with a spiritual focus of visionary intensity. Mouchette stands with his celebrated Diary of a Country Priest as the perfection of his singular art."Nothing but a little savage" is how the village school-teacher describes fourteen-year-old Mouchette, and that view is echoed by every right-thinking local citizen. Mouchette herself doesn't bother to contradict it; ragged, foulmouthed, dirt-poor, a born liar and loser, she knows herself to be, in the words of the story, "alone, completely alone, against everyone." Hers is a tale of "tragic solitude" in which despair and salvation appear to be inextricably intertwined. Bernanos uncompromising genius was a powerful inspiration to Flannery O'Connor, and Mouchette was the source of a celebrated movie by Robert Bresson.

Over four decades and a multitude of books, "Colonel" Glen Baxter has built a world and a language all his own-slightly familiar, decidedly abnormal, irresistibly funny. Have you felt the terror of a failed Szechuan dinner? Have you seen what happens at precisely 6:15? Do you know where the beards are stored? Either way, this is the book for you.Baxter's drawings are a delicious stew of pulp adventure novels, highbrow hjinks, and outright absurdity: lonesome cowboys confront the latest in modern art, brave men tremble before moussaka, schoolgirls hoard hashish, and the world's fruits are in constant peril. Wimples abound.This new selection of Baxter's work brings together highlights from the full sweep of his long career, and is sure to enchant both confirmed Baxterians and those iin dire need of an introduction.This NYRC edition is a hardcover with printed endpapers, debossed cover design, and extra-thick paper.

The Glory of the Empire is the rich and absorbing history of an extraordinary empire, at one point a rival to Rome. Rulers such as Basil the Great of Onessa, who founded the Empire but whose treacherous ways made him a byword for infamy, and the romantic Alexis the bastard, who dallied in the fleshpots of Egypt, studied Taoism and Buddhism, returned to save the Empire from civil war, and then retired "to learn to die," come alive in The Glory of the Empire, along with generals, politicians, prophets, scoundrels, and others. Jean d'Ormesson also goes into the daily life of the Empire, its popular customs, and its contribution to the arts and the sciences, which, as he demonstrates, exercised an influence on the world as a whole, from the East to the West, and whose repercussions are still felt today. But it is all fiction, a thought experiment worthy of Jorge Luis Borges, and in the end The Glory of the Empire emerges as a great shimmering mirage, filling us with wonder even as it makes us wonder at the fugitive nature of power and the meaning of history itself.

A New York Review Books OriginalIn 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters' galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram. Originally appearing in literary magazines as well as the feuilleton sections of newspapers, the early stories are characterized by a joyous urgency and the generosity of an unconventional guide. Later pieces take the form of more personal reflections on the writing process, memories, and character studies. All are full of counter-intuitive images and vignettes of startling clarity, showcasing a unique talent for whom no detail was trivial, at grips with a city diving headlong into modernity.

"What you have loved remains yours." Thus speaks the irresistible rogue Sindbad, ironic hero of these fantastic tales, who has seduced and abandoned countless women over the course of centuries but never lost one, for he returns to visit them all-ladies, actresses, housemaids-in his memories and dreams. From the bustling streets of Budapest to small provincial towns where nothing ever seems to change, this ghostly Lothario encounters his old flames wherever he goes: along the banks of the Danube; under windows where they once courted; in churches and in graveyards, where Eros and Thanatos tryst. Lies, bad behavior, and fickleness of all kinds are forgiven, and love is reaffirmed as the only thing worth persevering for, weeping for, and living for. The Adventures of Sindbad is the Hungarian master Gyula Krúdy's most famous book, an uncanny evocation of the autumn of the Hapsburg Empire that is enormously popular not only in Hungary but throughout Eastern Europe.

Harriet is leaving her boyfriend Claude, "the French rat." That at least is how Harriet sees things, even if it's Claude who has just asked Harriet to leave his Greenwich Village apartment. Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. To the contrary, she will stay and exact revenge-or would have if Claude had not had her unceremoniously evicted. Still, though moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Not in any way. Girlfriends circle around to patronize and advise, but Harriet only takes offense, and it's easy to understand why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is an unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women's lives and hearts-until, in a surprise twist, she finds a savior in a dark room at the Chelsea Hotel.

More than a thousand years ago, an extraordinary trove of early Buddhist sutras and other scriptures was secreted away in caves near the Silk Road city of Tun-huang. But who hid this magnificent treasure and why? In Tun-huang, the great modern Japanese novelist Yasushi Inoue tells the story of Chao Hsing-te, a young Chinese man whose accidental failure to take the all-important exam that will qualify him as a high government official leads to a chance encounter that draws him farther and farther into the wild and contested lands west of the Chinese Empire. Here he finds love, distinguishes himself in battle, and ultimately devotes himself to the strange task of depositing the scrolls in the caves where, many centuries later, they will be rediscovered. A book of magically vivid scenes, fierce passions, and astonishing adventures, Tun-huang is also a profound and stirring meditation on the mystery of history and the hidden presence of the past.

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.

Heartwarming and profound, this account of one writer''s relationship with his beloved German sheperd is a masterpiece of animal literature. The distinguished British man of letters J. R. Ackerley hardly thought of himself as a dog lover when, well into middleage, he came into possession of a German shepherd. Tohis surprise, she turned out to be the love of his life, the“ideal friend” he had been searching for in vain for years. My Dog Tulip is a bittersweet retrospective account of their sixteen-year companionship, as well as a profound andsubtle meditation on the strangeness that lies at the heartof all relationships. In vivid and sometimes startling detail, Ackerley tells of Tulip’s often erratic behavior and very canine tastes, and of his own fumbling but determinedefforts to ensure for her an existence of perfect happiness.My Dog Tulip has been adapted to screen as a major animated feature film with a cast that includes the voices of Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave, and Isabella Rossellini. It has been heralded as "A stroke of genius" by New York Magazine and "The love story of the year" by Vanity Fair.My Dog Tulip was adapted into a major motion picture in 2010. 

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.

Bołeslaw Prus is often compared to Chekhov, and Prus’s masterpiece might be described as an intimate epic, a beautifully detailed, utterly absorbing exploration of life in late-nineteenth-century Warsaw, which is also a prophetic reckoning with some of the social forces—imperialism, nationalism, anti-Semitism among them—that would soon convulse Europe as never before. But The Doll is above all a brilliant novel of character, dramatizing conflicting ideas through the various convictions, ambitions, confusions, and frustrations of an extensive and varied cast. At the center of the book are three men from three different generations. Prus’s fatally flawed hero is Wokulski, a successful businessman who yearns for recognition from Poland’s decadent aristocracy and falls desperately in love with the highborn, glacially beautiful Izabela. Wokulski’s story is intertwined with those of the incorrigibly romantic old clerk Rzecki, nostalgic for the revolutions of 1848, and of the bright young scientist Ochocki, who dreams of a future full of flying machines and other marvels, making for a book of great scope and richness that is, as Stanisław Barańczak writes in his introduction, at once “an old-fashioned yet still fascinating love story . . . , a still topical diagnosis of society’s ills, and a forceful yet subtle portrayal of a tragically doomed man."

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.