August News and Highlights

Letter from Hudson Street August 2019 Dear Readers, This is it: the calm before the storm. By the time our next monthly transmission comes around, we will be in full celebratory swing as we mark the 20th anniversary of the NYRB Classics series. Actually, some of the fêting has already begun (have you all been seeing our weekend flash sales?), but there will be more, so stay tuned. For now, we've got a fun quiz below and other little tidbits for you. Happy reading, The NYRB Staff Side Gigs: Another Quiz Many of our authors did a lot more than write books. See if you can guess who these writers are by the incredible and sometimes strange other professions they practiced. Just click through to reveal the identity of each author. For a brief time, this food writer, who was also an accomplished linguist, worked in the British naval cipher department. [?]( This author, who would eventually be known as a master of the short story, put himself through school by catching and selling goldfinches. [?]( This now-beloved children's book author ran a dance school in Calcutta. [?]( This author of one of the underground classics of American literature for a while made a meager living as a folk singer in Greenwich Village. [?]( Before taking up writing and publishing nine novels, this author was a painter, sculptor, and amateur pilot. [?]( This celebrated novelist worked as a furniture painter in London before signing up to be an ambulance driver during WWII—without yet knowing how to drive. [?]( This novelist, who died very young, supported herself by working at a teahouse in Taiwan. [?]( This poet became a celebrated mandolin player and even established a mandolin orchestra in his hometown. [?]( This master of mystery worked for a time as a surgeon on a whaling ship. [?]( Congratulations to Anita Desai! Anita Desai's novel for young readers, [The Village by the Sea](, was recently selected for the 2019 Skipping Stones Honor Awards. The awards promote respect for the ecological richness and cultural diversity in the world. To see other books that made the Skipping Stones honor list, visit the Skipping Stones website. August with Henry David Thoreau Our monthly foray into Thoreau's [The Journal: 1837–1861](. This time, an entry from August 28, 1856. Thoreau was thirty-nine years old, watching a turtle watching him. August 28. I open the tortoise nest of June 10th, and find a young turtle partly out of his shell. He is already wonderfully strong and precocious. Though those eyes never saw the light before, he watches me very warily, even at a distance. With what vigor he crawls out of the hole I have made, over opposing weeds! He struggles in my fingers with great strength; has none of the tenderness of infancy. His whole snout is convex, and curved like a beak. Having attained the surface, he pauses and warily watches me. "This week’s #BookFaceFriday is kind of a bummer, man…" Apparently, the Nebraska Library Commission staff does a weekly ["Book Face"]( feature, and Stoner was the star of one such post not too long ago. The image was just too hilarious not to share. Thanks for the love, Nebraska libraries! Need a book group? Just a brief PSA here to bring attention to the [NYRB Classics book group on Goodreads](. The group, which boasts over 800 members, will be reading [Charles Bovary, Country Doctor]( by Jean Améry throughout August. Take it from us: this group is dedicated, and they maintain message boards on a range of topics regarding NYRB. Starting a book group of your own? We have reading group guides for many of our books available for download on [this page of our website](. They're very handy. NYRB Classics Featured in Commonweal's "Summer Readings & Screenings" Or, if you're looking for a different kind of guided reading, catch up with Commonweal's ["Summer Readings & Screenings"]( series. Every two weeks or so, the editors pair a book recently published by NYRB Classics with a film from the [Criterion Collection]( and exchange their critical responses to them. So far this summer, there have been exchanges on Dorothy B. Hughes' In a Lonely Place and the Nicholas Ray film adaptation of the same name; and Masanobu Fukuoka's The One-Straw Revolution and Ermanno Olmi's film The Tree of Wooden Clogs. Next up: Vasily Grossman’s An Armenian Sketchbook and Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates. The many faces of Nada One of our office tech whizzes put together this GIF showing several of the international covers of Jean-Patrick Manchette's [Nada](, which we are publishing in a new translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith this month. As the cover art suggests: this book is intense. August Books [HEAVEN'S BREATH A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE WIND]( by Lyall Watson [NADA]( by Jean-Patrick Manchette [THE GLASSBLOWER'S CHILDREN]( by Maria Gripe illiustrated by Harald Gripe [THE LADY FROM PHILADELPHIA THE PETERKIN PAPERS]( by Lucretia P. Hale [Heaven's Breath]( the August selection for the [NYRB Classics Book Club](. If you join the club by August 14, Heaven's Breath will be your first selection. Upcoming Events Monday, August 12, 7pm at [Brooklyn Bridge Park, Granite Prospect](: Damion Searls, translator of Uwe Johnson's [Anniversaries](, will be joined by guests (including NYRB Classics editorial director Edwin Frank) in a reading at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Hosted by Community Bookstore as part of the annual Books Beneath the Bridge event series. Monday, August 26, 7pm at [Aeon Bookstore](, NYC: translator Mitch Abidor and writer and filmaker Steve MacFarlane discuss Victor Serge's [Notebooks: 1936–1937](. In the Press "The sober but committed voice of Walzer—saying political action is hard, might well fail, and might not deliver the personal satisfactions we all seek, but nonetheless is the only way forward—provides a solid grounding for those swept up in the urgency of our current, global social crisis.” —Joshua B. Freeman,[Dissent](, on Political Action by Michael Walzer "When it comes to Charlotte Brontë, Hardwick cuts to the heart of the matter, and she cuts deep. She shocks with the truth: it runs like blood through her every sentence.” —Deborah Levy,[The Paris Review](, on Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick "Max Havelaar speaks directly to us across the centuries. It sheds the fustiness of its nineteenth-century colonial setting easily because it is a truly modern novel: unmannered, digressive, irreverent, transnational, self-effacing, self-referential, constantly testing its own boundaries.” —Mukund Belliappa,[Full Stop](, on Multatuli's Max Havelaar "Gilot’s memoir shines, now, as a proto-feminist classic, the tale of a young woman who found herself in the thrall of a dazzling master and ended up breaking free. But it is also a love story, and a traditional one.” —Alexandra Schwartz, [The New Yorker](, on Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake "Grossman wanted to tell the truth, the whole truth … He wanted to push for greater change. He was a man on a mission; he always lived for the causes, and he was never thinking about himself.” —Alexandra Popoff, [Lit Hub](, on Vasily Grossman, the author of Stalingrad "Proof it can be done" In case you don't already follow us on Instagram (and you [really should](), we just wanted to share this photo evidence that reading the entirety of Uwe Johnson's [Anniversaries]( is possible and worth it. We love the look of those well-worn spines. Kudos, Andreas. Image at the top of the newsletter: West Village + NYRB Offices, photos by Alex Ransom, 2019 You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. You can [choose the types of mailings you wish to receive](: [Update preferences]( [Facebook]( [Instagram]( New York Review Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 Not a subscriber? Sign up for our newsletter [here](. [Unsubscribe](