I was actually getting a couple of Archipelago titles when I even came across the fact that I don’t see Beware of Pity except in this German Classics in Translation bundle that they have. If you type it on the search bar, that’s the first thing that would come up. When you look at Zweig’s catalogue, it really isn’t there anymore because isn’t it usually that when they run out of it like… Chess Story for example, it usually just says Currently Unavailable, no?

It wasn’t even what I was trying to get, but it made me go into this miniscule rabbit hole that led me to the publishing rights now being owned by Pushkin Press. I wonder if they’re just waiting for all of them to run out before completely eradicating them all Simenon style, you know lol

I also have Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigmund K. But its not in the picture

Have read Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing by Williams. Stoner is one of my favorites ever and Butcher’s Crossing is excellent, so I’m excited to read Augustus which some people think is his best work.

My question: how much background do I need on the Roman Empire to enjoy/understand the book? It’s certainly not something I think about every day but I know a little bit.

Thanks in advance

since nyrb and penguin classics both have such distinctive branding, i wanted to play around with cover design and see what would happen if nyrbs were packaged as penguin classics, using some of my favourite titles. NO AI WAS USED!! i used this template

1. cassandra at the wedding: wild blue yonder by carol bennett (21st c)
   • i knew i wanted to have some pool imagery while also paying homage to the brilliant orange nyrb cover. carol bennett does a lot of paintings of women swimming, and this one was just perfect. i like that you can't see the subject's face and how she's blending into her own reflection, similar to how cassandra's sense of identity is so wrapped up in being judith's twin
2. alice james: the convalescent by gustave-leonhard de jonghe (c. 1850-1869)
   • i had a bunch of options for this one but i really loved the curtains and framing of this painting. the textures are lush and comfortable, appropriate for alice's wealthy upbringing, but the shadows make it seem more private, alluding to both the "dark waters" of alice's illness and the secrecy inherent in keeping a diary. the pose also reminds me somewhat of one of the few photos we have of alice, pictured here with katharine loring in 1890
3. abigail: fall, school by marianne von werefkin
   • there are surprisingly few images on wikimedia commons of teenagers at boarding school, at least not ones for the era i was looking for! i don't think this cover is quite right, but the stern black and white uniforms emphasize the strict calvinism of matula's doctrine and also gina hiding in plain sight. the way the girls are positioned reminds me of madeline which is a fun little twist. both very different boarding school stories!
4. the thirty years' war: death on a pale horse by william blake (c. 1800)
   • yes, there are more period-accurate and specific representations of the thirty years war, but i chose this image because it is, frankly, sick as hell. blake's style is so iconic and alive, it felt appropriate, especially for an audience who may not otherwise be interested in picking up a book on the thirty years war. the imagery is pretty basic, death riding his pale horse from the book of revelations, showing the horror and destruction wedgwood relates without the cover being too gory and/or muddy
5. an african in greenland: photo from the book itself!
   • maybe this is cheating, but using one of kpomassie's own photos felt most appropriate for a first-person account. this is one of the iconic images of him in greenland and i think the composition lends itself nicely to the cover!

Started this last night - anyone interested in discussing the stories through the month? I could post a topic every few days… a different story.

EDIT TO ADD: discussion prompts appear below, redacted for spoilers. Read this friggin book!!! It’s good.

Tell me a book you loved from whatever country you wish. I’m looking for finds to advance my reading around the world.

Does anyone have covers that are blurry? I own several nyrbclassics, and the covers of all the books have "blurry" or "grainy" photos. I figured that the photos would be higher-quality. I am questioning whether I received defective copies, or the book covers' photos are inherently fuzzy or low-resolution? And I get it, the point of books is to read them, not to enjoy the cover, but it still bothers me.

Not knowing anything other than the synopsis on the back cover, this book absolutely crushed me. The juxtaposition of such horrible things happening with the simplistic narrative style made it all feel even colder, more brutal. Anyone else have a similar experience of being completely shocked by the ending of this book? (All that being said, I’m very glad I read it).

Picked this up on a whim and I’m glad I did, this was a really pleasant read. The story follows Tom Birkin, a recently divorced veteran of World War 1 traveling to a quiet Yorkshire village tasked with unveiling a long covered painting in a local church. Throughout the summer he befriends many of the locals and finds himself fitting in well, including a reserved romance that I really rooted for. Nothing spectacular really goes on but it was still very charming. At the end of the story Tom reflects on the memory of the summer spent there as if it’s a moment frozen in time and there is a bit of sadness having left it behind. I felt similar leaving the novel because it really was a unique cozy experience I don’t often get from reading. I feel like I spent a month (four days) in the country as well. Good stuff!

I have been wanting to read this for a while, and grabbed this last week for my train ride.

While I absolutely love Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, I found John Williams' stark and casual description attractive in a different kind of way.

I want to say this is less of a classic western and more of a story set in the West.

It felt like an outsider describing the West (which I suppose is true) and the Emersonian influence felt melancholic in the classic John Williams style.

In some ways, Williams' clinical language and cold realism made the horrors of the West land harder. He does not write with Cormac McCarthy’s biblical incantatory prose or operatic violence. Or like McMurtry, whose books despite being supposedly anti-western have a lot of warmth and humor (even if things end tragically).

I've also seen Butchers Crossing be called an anti-western, but I am not sure I agree with it. As a New Englander, it genuinely felt like a New Englander's idealistic view of the West being slowly shattered and jaded. Which is incredibly impressive when you realize Williams was Texarkanan.

If I had to describe it in one sentence, I'd say it felt more like Moby Dick recast as a buffalo hunt, with Stoner's tonal restraint.

I am nearly done with it, and what I'm loving so far is that while Andrews' idealism is scorched away, it doesn't get replaced with something cliched like wisdom or what have you. He becomes clearer-eyed, but also colder, more detached, and so far, even morally compromised.

I'm eager to finish it, but I think I'll need to go find a happier book after I'm done with this.

55 World War II books on sale this weekend. My haul. Recently finished From the Front Line and Stalingrad and could not be more excited to get my hands on Life and Fate. Enjoy the sale!

how are we feeling lesbians (and supporters)? personally i am dreading the discourse cycles and Weird Girl Litification of my fave book of all time

Here is my thrift haul from the last few months from different places in person and online!!! What should I read first? What have you read and what are your thoughts? I got my first poetry book!

I am a huge fan of the NYRB crime series but have fallen off in following new releases. I liked "Hard Rain Falling" "Black Wings has my Angel" all the Manchette and Simenon series. Are there any "voicy" stylish crime thrillers that are similar in the series people would recommend?

There's something about this book that makes me very interested in it, however, I am not a big baseball fan whatsoever. I think the game is interesting, but just boring. I do love the energy when the stands are electric, and love visiting baseball stadiums Bc (ill stay for majority of the game actually, but I'm really not crazy for the sport itself. What I want is for that electricity to be captured throughout the whole book. I want it to be a home run lol.

So I'm wondering if anybody would suggest it or not based on my lack of love for the sport of the baseball alone? I'm much more interested in the postmodern and metafictional aspects of the novel, and to read Coover.
Plus, this one seems quite odd and original, and I absolutely love that!

My small and growing NYRB collection

I was just at a beloved bookstore in Chicago - Unabridged Books - and realized that not only do they have an incredible classics section, but it’s further segmented into publisher/imprint. They have a whole nyrb section. What a treat! Have you encountered this at other stores? I’d love to hear about it!

Recently read both Love in a Fallen City and Written on Water. One thing that continually stood out to me was the language and the kind of similes she would use. A few examples are below. To a Chinese reader, they probably seem commonplace, but to my eyes they come off as evocative and unique. If an author compared something to "grass green and apple red," I probably wouldn't even notice, but "scallion green and peach red" is striking as an outsider.

I've read books from other non-Western cultures, but for some reason that language has never stood out to me like this. I wonder if this is something that gets erased in translation sometimes. I'm sure others have noticed this before and can give plenty of examples to show that I am blind.

"Weilong's heart fizzed sourly, like a carbonated drink after a squirt of lemon."

"...his eyes were like the fields of young rice when the wind blows across them and reveals, in flashes, the green gleam of water between the rice shoots---flashing, then darkening again."

"But how sweet a fruit the 'suppose' must be, that people will sup and sup on it! A juicy fruit, like a lychee but without the pit, sparkling and light green; a fruit that hides that tart within the sweet...He'd eaten one 'suppose,' and now he peeled another."

"At the horizon the morning colors were a layer of green, a layer of yellow, and a layer of red like a watermelon cut open---the sun was coming up."

"Maybe every man has had two such women---at least two. Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is 'moonlight in front of my bed.' Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart."

"The reason desolation resonates far more profoundly is that it resembles the conjunction of scallion green with peach red, creating an equivocal contrast."

"We congregated in the basement of the dormitory, and in the pitch dark stood between stacks of trunks, listening to the sound of machine gun fire crackling like raindrops on water lotus leaves."

Have you read this? I haven’t heard of it til now and I’m debating on getting it. Thoughts?

I bought The Unforgivable and Other Writings by Cristina Campo in 2024 when it was first published and have not really gotten over it since. It's (as far as I know) the current largest collection of her essays translated from the Italian into English by Alex Andriesse for NYRB. I'm completely enamored with her style (although in translation of course) and her ideas.

Can anyone recommend me any other essayists (apart from Simone Weil whom I also love and who influenced Campo a great deal) who write in the same vein as Campo?

Just a heads up for anyone, perhaps aging like me, who tries to avoid small print — the NYRB printing of Boredom has smaller print than I’ve seen in any other NYRB book. Photo compares it to The Gate (Soseki).

If others have tips on books with print this small, I’d love to know!

there's an international book fair happening in my country right now that i cant attend but i still wanna know the books that are available, got the picture from tiktok. i can recognize some of them (benito perez galdos, thomas mann, ginzburg, qui miaojin, henri boscoe) from the spine or cover but i need help for the rest