Bøker utgitt av The New York Review of Books, Inc

Fans of Flaubert's Madame Bovary will want to read this reimagination of one of literature's most famous failures, Charles Bovary. Part fiction, part philosophy, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor is also a book about love.Charles Bovary, Country Doctor is one of the most unusual projects in twentieth-century literature: a novel-essay devoted to salvaging poor bungler Charles Bovary, the pathetic, laughable, cuckolded husband of Madame Bovary and the heartless creation of Gustave Flaubert. As a once-promising novelist who was tortured by the Nazis and survived a year in Auschwitz, author Jean Améry had a particular sympathy for the lived experience of vulnerability, affliction, and suffering, and in this book-available in English for the first time-he asserts the moral claims of Dr. Bovary. What results is a moving paean to the humanity of Charles Bovary and to the supreme value of love.

A smart and witty picture book about a king whose pride is challenged, by the renowned Spanish illustrator and children's author Guridi.It is not nothing to be the king of nothing and the formidable king of nothing presides with proper pride over his kingdom of which nothing is known except that he is the king. He parades through his kingdom, and he oversees his kingdom, and he sets out to defend his kingdom-especially when, one day, out of the blue, the last thing he would ever have expected or wanted shows up within its borders: something.What to do?The King of Nothing is a sly and witty and entertaining parable about personhood and power, about always getting your way and not always getting your way, and getting on anyway. It is a playful book of first philosophy and fundamental psychology for kids, brilliantly executed and illustrated by Guridi, a renowned Spanish artist and author for children.

A collection of chilling and prescient stories about ecological apocalypse and the merging of human and machine.Welcome to Moderan, world of the future. Here perpetual war is waged by furious masters fighting from Strongholds well stocked with "arsenals of fear," earth is covered with vast sheets of plastic, and humans vie to replace more and more of their own "soft parts" with steel machinery. What need is there for nature when trees and flowers can be pushed up through holes in the plastic? Who requires human companionship when new-metal mistresses can be ordered from the shop? But even a Stronghold master can doubt the catechism of Moderan. Wanderers, poets, and his own children pay visits, proving that another world is possible."The effect is as if Whitman and Nietzsche had collaborated," Brian Aldiss wrote of David R. Bunch's stories. Originally published in science-fiction magazines in the 1960s and '70s and passionately sought by collectors, the stories have not been available in a single volume for nearly fifty years, and this new edition of Moderan will include ten previously-uncollected stories. Like Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, and borrowing from the Bible and the language of advertising, Bunch coined a mind-bending new vocabulary. His intent was not to divert readers from the horrors of modernity but to make them face it squarely.

A poetic portrait of Paris that combines prose poetry, diary, and memoir by award-winning writer and poet Henri Cole.Henri Cole's Orphic Paris combines autobiography, diary, essay, and poetry with photographs to create a new form of elegiac memoir. With Paris as a backdrop, Cole, an award-winning American poet, explores with fresh and penetrating insight the nature of friendship and family, poetry and solitude, the self and freedom. Cole writes of Paris, "For a time, I lived here, where the call of life is so strong. My soul was colored by it. Instead of worshiping a creator or man, I cared fully for myself, and felt no guilt and confessed nothing, and in this place I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew." Written under the tutelary spirit of Orpheus-mystic, oracular, entrancing-Orphic Paris is an intimate Paris journal and a literary commonplace book that is a touching, original, brilliant account of the city and of the artists, writers, and luminaries, including Cole himself, who have been moved by it to create.

A one-of-a-kind collection of work by little-known Late Tang poetic master Li Shangyin.Li Shangyin is one of the foremost poets of the late Tang, but until now he has rarely been translated into English, perhaps because the esotericism and sensuality of his work set him apart from the austere masters of the Chinese literary canon. Li favored allusiveness over directness, and his poems unfurl through mysterious images before coalescing into an emotional whole. Combining hedonistic aestheticism with stark fatalism, Li's poetry is an intoxicating mixture of pleasure and grief, desire and loss, everywhere imbued with a singular nostalgia for the present moment.This pioneering, bilingual edition presents Chloe Garcia Roberts's translations of a wide selection of Li's verse in the company of other versions by the prominent sinologist A. C. Graham and the scholar-poet Lucas Klein.

An eclectic collection of poetry by one of 17th century England's boldest, smartest, and independent women.Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was a groundbreaking writer-a utopian visionary, a scientist, a science-fiction pioneer. She moved in philosophical circles that included Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, and she produced startlingly modern poems unlike anything published in the seventeenth century or since, at once scientific and visionary, full of feminist passion and deep sympathy with the nonhuman world. In recent years, Cavendish has found many new admirers, and this selection of her verse by Michael Robbins is an ideal introduction to her singular poetic world.

A new translation of the only novel by lauded Romanian literary critic Matei CălinescuAn NYRB Classics Original Ugly, unkempt, a haunter of low dives who begs for a living and lives on the street, Zacharias Lichter exists for all that in a state of unlikely rapture. After being engulfed by a divine flame as a teenager, Zacharias has devoted his days to doing nothing at all—apart, that is, from composing the odd poem he immediately throws away and consorting with a handful of stray friends: Poldy, for example, the catatonic alcoholic whom Zacharias considers a brilliant philosopher, or another more vigorous barfly whose prolific output of pornographic verses has won him the nickname of the Poet. Zacharias is a kind of holy fool, but one whose foolery calls in question both social convention and conventional wisdom. He is as much skeptic as ecstatic, affirming above all the truth of perplexity. This of course is what makes him a permanent outrage to the powers that be, be they reactionary or revolutionary, and to all other self-appointed champions of morality who are blind to their own absurdity. The only thing that scares Zacharias is that all-purpose servant of conformity, the psychiatrist.This Romanian classic, originally published under the brutally dictatorial Ceauşescu regime, whose censors initially let it pass because they couldn’t make head or tail of it, is as delicious and telling an assault on the modern world order as ever.

Written over the course of four decades, François-René de Chateaubriand's epic autobiography has drawn the admiration of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Barthes, and Sebald. Here, in the first books of his massive Memoirs, spanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looks back on the already bygone world of his youth. He recounts the history of his aristocratic family and the first rumblings of the French Revolution. He recalls playing games on the beaches of Saint-Malo, wandering in the woods near his father's castle in Combourg, hunting with King Louis XVI at Versailles, witnessing the first heads carried on pikes through the streets of Paris, meeting with George Washington in Philadelphia, and falling hopelessly in love with a young woman named Charlotte in the small Suffolk town of Bungay. The volume ends with Chateaubriand's return to France after seven years of exile in England. In this new edition (the first unabridged English translation of any portion of the Memoirs to be published in more than a century), Chateaubriand emerges as a writer of great wit and clarity, a self deprecating egotist whose meditations on the meaning of history, memory, and morality are leavened with a mixture of high whimsy and memorable gloom.

A surreal vision of a post-alien-invasion Earth where human beings still have to deal with quotidien frustrations, ennui, and understanding their place in the world.Since the mid-1980s, the British cartoonist Chris Reynolds has been assembling a world all his own. On the surface, it seems much like ours: a place of cool afternoon shadows and gently rolling hills, half-empty trains and sleepy downtown streets. But the closer you look, the weirder it gets. After losing a mysterious intergalactic war, Earth is no longer in humanity’s control. Blandly friendly aliens lurk on the margins and seem especially interested in the mining industry. The very rules of time and space seem to have shifted: Mysterious figures suddenly appear in childhood photos, family members disappear forever without warning, power outages abound, and certain people gain the power of flight. A helmeted man named Jimmy is somehow causing local businesses to shutter and is being closely watched by the “trendy new police force,” Rational Control. The world is being remade, but in what image?This new collection, selected and designed by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth, includes short stories, a novella, and the full-length graphic novel Mauretania. It is the ideal guide to all the mystery and wonder of one of the most underappreciated cult classics in the history of comics.This NYRC edition is a hardcover with foil stamping, debossing, full-color endpapers, and extra-thick paper, and features new scans of the original artwork.

A sweet tale about kindness, jealousy, and fairness perfect for reading when a child is sick or well.Edward is sick and Elizabeth is well, and nothing could be more unfair! Edward gets to stay in bed and everyone treats him like a prince. Elizabeth has to get out of bed, get dressed, go to school, come home and do chores, finish her homework and practice the piano. "I wish I was sick too!" Elizabeth complains, and soon, to her dawning dismay, her wish is granted. Jealousy and kindness, fairness and responsibility, the passionate complaints and pleasures of childhood are well represented here by a close-knit and surprisingly intellectual cat family, drawn with good humor and sympathy by the illustrator-author couple, Aliki and Franz Brandenberg. The perfect book to read when you''re sick, or when you''re well and wish you were sick too.

An original collection of lauded philosopher Galen Strawson''s writings on the self and consciousness, naturalism and pan-psychism.Galen Strawson might be described as the Montaigne of modern philosophers, endlessly curious, enormously erudite, unafraid of strange, difficult, and provocative propositions, and able to describe them clearly—in other words, he is a true essayist. Strawson also shares with Montaigne a particular fascination with the elastic and elusive nature of the self and of consciousness. Of the essays collected here, “A Fallacy of Our Age” (an inspiration for Vendela Vida’s novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) takes issue with the commencement-address cliché that life is a story. Strawson questions whether it is desirable or even meaningful to think about life that way. “The Sense of the Self” offers an alternative account, in part personal, of how a distinct sense of self is not at all incompatible with a sense of the self as discontinuous, leading Strawson to a position that he sees as in some ways Buddhist. “Real Naturalism” argues that a fully naturalist account of consciousness supports a belief in the immanence of consciousness in nature as a whole (also known as panpsychism), while in the final essay Strawson offers a vivid account of coming of age in the 1960s. Drawing on literature and life as much as on philosophy, this is a book that prompts both argument and wonder.

ENJOY THE ECSTASY OF AGONY. Amy and Jordan are just like us: hoping for the best, even when things go from bad to worse. They are menaced by bears, beheaded by ghosts,  and hunted by the cops, but still they struggle on, bickering and reconciling, scraping together the rent and trying to find a decent movie. It’s the perfect solace for anxious modern minds, courtesy of one of the great innovators of American comics. Now if only Amy’s skin would grow back ... This NYRC edition features a recreation of the original, pocket-size, slipcovered paperback, designed by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly.

Donkey-donkey has a problem. Despite his many friends and his good master, he is sad because his ears are so long and ridiculous. If only Donkey-donkey could have short sensible ears like his friend Pat the horse, he would be content. So he seeks the advice of his fellow farm animals who suggest he wear his ears differently, more like theirs: floppy like the dog’s, to the side like the sheep’s, to the front like the pig’s. But each unnatural arrangement leads to increasing insult and injury. Finally a little girl passing by remarks on the beauty of the pretty little donkey’s ears!  At last Donkey-donkey is happy. A classic tale of vanity and folly, and learning to accept oneself—protrudent ears, redundant name, and all.

Best known for her classic book Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, Eleanor Perényi led a worldly life before settling down in Connecticut. More Was Lost is a memoir of her youth abroad, written in the early days of World War II, after her return to the United States. In 1937, at the age of nineteen, Perényi falls in love with a poor Hungarian baron and in short order acquires both a title and a struggling country estate at the edge of the Carpathians. She throws herself into this life with zeal, learning Hungarian and observing the invisible order of the Czech rule, the resentment of the native Ruthenians, and the haughtiness of the dispossessed Hungarians. In the midst of massive political upheaval, Perényi and her husband remain steadfast in their dedication to their new life, an alliance that will soon be tested by the war. With old-fashioned frankness and wit, Perényi recounts this poignant tale of how much was gained and how much more was lost.

Benjamin Fondane—who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges’s friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz—was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, “a torture and a spur.” Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, affirming individual against those great abstractions that limit human freedom—the State, History, the Law, the Idea. Existential Monday, the first selection of his philosophical work to appear in English, includes four of Fondane''s most thought-provoking and important texts, "Existential Monday and the Sunday of History," "Preface for the Present Moment," "Man Before History" (co-translated by Andrew Rubens), and "Boredom." Here Fondane, until now little-known except to specialists, emerges as one of the enduring French philosophers of the twentieth century.

David Plante's dazzling portraits of three influential women in the literary world, now back in print for the first time in decades.Difficult Women presents portraits of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women, while also raising intriguing and, in their own way, difficult questions about the character and motivations of the keenly and often cruelly observant portraitist himself. The book begins with David Plante's portrait of Jean Rhys in her old age, when the publication of The Wide Sargasso Sea, after years of silence that had made Rhys's great novels of the 1920s and '30s as good as unknown, had at last gained genuine recognition for her. Rhys, however, can hardly be said to be enjoying her new fame. A terminal alcoholic, she curses and staggers and rants like King Lear on the heath in the hotel room that she has made her home, while Plante looks impassively on. Sonia Orwell is his second subject, a suave exploiter and hapless victim of her beauty and social prowess, while the unflappable, brilliant, and impossibly opinionated Germaine Greer sails through the final pages, ever ready to set the world, and any erring companion, right.

Originally published to promote his French translation of Moby-Dick, Jean Giono's Melville: A Novel is an astonishing literary compound of fiction, biography, personal essay, and criticism.In the fall of 1849, Herman Melville traveled to London to deliver his novel White-Jacket to his publisher. On his return to America, Melville would write Moby-Dick. Melville: A Novel imagines what happened in between: the adventurous writer fleeing London for the country, wrestling with an angel, falling in love with an Irish nationalist, and, finally, meeting the angel's challenge-to express man's fate by writing the novel that would become his masterpiece. Eighty years after it appeared in English, Moby-Dick was translated into French for the first time by the Provençal novelist Jean Giono and his friend Lucien Jacques. The publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface, granting him unusual latitude. The result was this literary essay, Melville: A Novel-part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. Paul Eprile's expressive translation of this intimate homage brings the exchange full circle.Paul Eprile was a co-winner of the French-American Foundation's 2018 Translation Prize for his translation of Melville.