Jonathan Taylor writes:
Just kidding! Everyone loves New York Review Books Classics, and for good reason. Few things are as unreservedly worth celebrating as the 10th anniversary of this publishing project, which is single-handedly reshaping the understanding of the world’s recent literary past. By the way, their cover design scheme has become so well-known, does anyone remember that, a whole decade ago, it was rather different? Here’s my edition of J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself, alongside the current one:
Anyway, Martin’s got the New Yorker Festival covered, but NYR Books are having their own anniversary festivities through November—in New York, London and both Cambridges—listed here, including:
- Monday, September 21, 7 pm
Idlewild Books hosts a reading by Tete-Michel Kpomassie, author of An African in Greenland - Tuesday, October 6, 7 pm
Idlewild Books, launch party for the first graphic novel published by NYRB, Poem Strip by Dino Buzzati, featuring translator Marina Harss - Tuesday, October 13, 7 pm
London Review Bookshop, John Banville and John Gray discuss the work of Georges Simenon - Thursday, October 29
NY Institute of the Humanities, New School Tishman Auditorium with Fred Wiseman, Walter Murch, Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Chris Hedges discusssing the war writings of Curzio Malaparte and Vasily Grossman
Incidentally, Timothy Snyder is the author of a recent eye-opening article in The New York Review of Books about where, and how, the greater part of the Holocaust took place, that should be a must-read for all humans.
And the mention of Malaparte reminds me the great work of another series, a little lower-profile, but whose distinctive jackets are equally signals of worthy reading you might not otherwise know about: Northwestern University’s European Classics. They brought Malaparte’s Kaputt to my bookshelf before New York Review Books yet existed, as well as another eventual NYRB title, Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity.