Tag Archives: NYRB Classics
Exuberance is beauty
#128 of 2011 • Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy, translated from the Hungarian by John Bátki, with an introduction by John Lukacs. Published by NYRB Classics. “Let’s wait for winter. The first, the second, the third winter… Let’s wait for monotonous evenings of this place, the courses of the moon, the howling-wolf nights. We’ll just have […]
Victorine!
#139 of 2011 • Victorine, by Maude Hutchins. Our Victorine is a strange one. She’s a bright-eyed adolescent, rapt and giddy with the secrets her body has just begun to disclose. And everything is hyper-eroticized, every brush with the world summons an arousal—it’s nearly ridiculous. Everything is sex! And not even necessarily a prelude to intercourse, […]
Brief thoughts on Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon
My first Georges Simenon [or, as the coolest kids refer to him, just Simenon (like Madonna?)], and I liked it immensely: Monsieur Monde Vanishes, about Monsieur Monde who walks out of his life seemingly the very moment he wakes up from his droning existence, and what he did while he disappeared. What compels people to […]
Not exactly disappointments
In this post: Thoughts on My Reckless Surrender by Anna Campbell [jump to A], and on Fair Play by Tove Jansson [jump to B]—two books I very much expected I would like—hell, I wanted to like them—but, well, just couldn’t. [A] • I like Anna Campbell, I really do. She was one of my great […]
Make way for the falco peregrinus—
Some notes / questions-to-self made while reading The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story, a novella by Glenway Wescott. This edition, published by NYRB Classics, includes an introduction by Michael Cunningham. • Is it possible for a really short book to transcend the usual burdens of symbol? See, the eponymous pilgrim hawk is, as Michael Cunningham points […]
Summer NYRBs
April is the usual [hello, global warming] start of the summer here in the Philippines. I’d know, though, regardless of any calendar—the daily twenty-minute walk from the office to the train station has me wishing I could rub against an ice cube doing the mambo. One of the things that the season [one of blasted […]
On The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
#46 of 2011 • The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson — translated from the Swedish by Michael Meyer — with an introduction by Michael Chabon This, ladies and gentlemen, is an epic. An episodic epic, a gather-around-the-fire-with-your-mouth-open kind of epic. Written in the 1940s, yes, but so confidently structured, The Long Ships is patterned […]
“And I am asking you, do you still remember?” — Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig
#35 of 2011 • Journey Into the Past, by Stefan Zweig – translated from the German by Anthea Bell; – with an introduction by André Aciman. In remembering a poem by Verlaine – In the old park, in ice and snow caught fast / Two specters walk, still searching for the past – a chilling […]
