Walkabout
James Vance Marshall
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590174906
$16.36 ex $18.00 inc
A plane crashes in the vast Northern Territory of Australia, and the only survivors are two children from Charleston, South Carolina, on their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide. Mary and her younger brother Peter set out on foot, lost in the vast, hot Australian outback. They are saved by a chance meeting with an Aboriginal boy on walkabout, who teaches them to find food and water in the wilderness, but whom Mary can't bring herself to trust. Though on the surface Walkabout is an adventure story, darker themes lie just beneath. Peter's innocent friendship with the Aboriginal throws into relief Mary's no longer childish anxiety, and together raise questions about how Aboriginal and Western culture can meet. And in the vivid descriptions of the natural world, we realize that this story-a deep fairy tale in the spirit of Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal-must also be a story about the closeness of death and the power of nature.
True Deceiver
Tove Jansson
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590173299
$19.09 ex $21.00 inc
A New York Review Books Original
Deception--the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others--is the subject of this, Tove Jansson's most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson takes a darker look at the subjects that animate the best of her work, from her sensitive tale of island life, "The Summer Book," to her famous Moomin stories: solitude and community, art and life, love and hate.
Snow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody's talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for the white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children's book illustrator, appears to be Katri's opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has something Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna's life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusions.
Red Shift
Alan Garner
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590174432
$18.18 ex $20.00 inc
In second-century Britain, Macey and a gang of fellow deserters from the Roman army hunt and are hunted by deadly local tribes. Fifteen centuries later, during the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley hides from the ruthless troops who have encircled his village. And in contemporary Britain, Tom, a precocious, love-struck, mentally unstable teenager, struggles to cope with the imminent departure for London of his girlfriend, Jan.
Three separate stories, three utterly different lives, distant in time and yet strangely linked to a single place, the mysterious, looming outcrop known as Mow Cop, and a single object, the blunt head of a stone axe: all these come together in Alan Garner's extraordinary Red Shift, a pyrotechnical and deeply moving elaboration on themes of chance and fate, time and eternity, visionary awakening and destructive madness.
The Journal: 1837-1861
Henry David Thoreau
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590173213
$29.09 ex $32.00 inc
Henry David Thoreau's journal was his life's work: the daily practice that accompanied his daily walks; the source from which he drew his books and essays; and perhaps the most searching investigation ever made into the everyday environment, seasonal changes, and the ecology or interrelations among different facets of nature and the moods and mind of the observer. It is a treasure trove of some of the finest prose in English and is deeply beloved by its readers-but at roughly two million surviving words, or 7,000 pages, it is not often read. This reader's edition, commissioned specially for New York Review Books, is the largest one-volume edition of the Journals ever published. It draws on the entirety of the Journals : rather than collecting highlights out of context, it captures the scope, dailiness, rhythms, and variety of the work as a whole. Thoreau's infinitely curious mind ranges over nearly every phenomenon of nature and life in nineteenth-century New England-the Journals are a rich source of social, environmental, natural, and cultural history-but he looks inward as well as outward, for "It is in vain to write on the seasons unless you have the seasons in you."
Berlin Stories
Robert Walser
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590174548
$18.18 ex $20.00 inc
A New York Review Books Original. In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters' galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram. Originally appearing in literary magazines as well as the feuilleton sections of newspapers including the Berliner Tageblatt, the Vossische Zeitung, and the Frankfurter Zeitung, the early stories are characterized by a joyous urgency and the generosity of an unconventional guide. Later pieces take the form of more personal reflections on the writing process, memories, and character studies. All are full of counter-intuitive images and vignettes of startling clarity, showcasing a unique talent for whom no detail was trivial, at grips with a city diving headlong into modernity.
The Pumpkin Eater
Penelope Mortimer
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590173824
$19.09 ex $21.00 inc
On the brink of a nervous breakdown and facing the potential failure of her fourth marriage, a housewife discovers the frightening truth that she has sacrificed everything in the name of love and marriage.
The Magic Pudding
Norman Lindsay
New York Review Of Books Classics, HC, 9781590171011
$24.55 ex $27.00 inc
The Magic Pudding is a pie, except when it's something else, like a steak, or a jam donut, or an apple dumpling, or whatever its owner wants it to be. And it never runs out. No matter how many slices you cut, there's always something left over. It's magic. But the Magic Pudding is also alive. It walks and it talks and it's got a personality like no other. A meaner, sulkier, snider, snarlinger Pudding you've never met. So Bunyip Bluegum (the koala bear) finds out when he joins Barnacle Bill (the sailor) and Sam Sawnoff (the penguin bold) as members of the Noble Society of Pudding Owners, whose "members are required to wander along the roads, indulgin' in conversation, song and story, and eatin' at regular intervals from the Pudding." Wild and woolly, funny and outrageously fun, The Magic Pudding stands somewhere between Alice in Wonderlandand, The Stinky Cheese Manas one of the craziest books ever written for young readers.
The Sorely Trying Day
Russell & Lillian Hoban
New York Review Of Books Classics, HC, 9781590173435
$20.00 ex $22.00 inc
Father has had a sorely trying day, but what he finds when he comes home isn't going to make it any better. The cat is on top of the grandfather clock, and the dog is barking and trying to get at her, and all the children are striking each other and speaking in unpleasantly harsh voices. Thus begins Russell and Lillian Hoban's wonderfully comic and deliciously quaint story of what lengths kids and adults will go to in order to pass the buck, before everyone owns up to having a part in the general mess and in the end things are fine. Unless, that is, it all begins again...The Sorely Trying Day is a classic picture book in which the beloved authors of Bread and Jam for Frances once again prove their power to both delight and instruct.
Carbonel: The King of Cats
Barbara Sleigh
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590171264
$21.82 ex $24.00 inc
Back in print in the U.S. for the first time in over 30 years. Rosemary's plan to clean houses during her summer break and surprise her mother with the money hits a snag when an old lady at the market talks her into buying a second-rate broom and a cat she can't even afford to keep. But appearances can be deceiving. Some old ladies are witches, some brooms can fly, and some ordinary-looking cats are Princes of the Royal Blood. Rosemary's cat ( You may call me Carbonel. That is my name. ) soon enlists her help in an adventure to free him from a hideous spell and return him to his rightful throne. But along the way Rosemary and her friend John must do some clever sleuthing, work a little magic of their own, and--not least-- put up with the demands of a very haughty cat.
Don't Look Now
Daphne Du Maurier
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590172889
$20.00 ex $22.00 inc
A dead child appears in the alleyways of Venice; routine eye surgery reveals the beast within to a meek housewife; nature in revolt against man's abuse turns a harmless species into a force that threatens humankind; a dalliance with a beautiful stranger offers something more dangerous than a broken heart. In Daphne du Maurier's stories, the stuff of everyday life-grief, the limits of self-knowledge, battles between the sexes, and environmental degradation-burst through the ordinary into the realm of the uncanny.This new selection of du Maurier stories, chosen from the span of her extraordinarily fruitful career, represents the author at her most chilling and most psychologically astute, looking back to the Gothic masterpieces of the Brontes and forward to the work of Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. Here novelist Patrick McGrath revisits some of the best-known examples of du Maurier's output, like “The Birds” and "Don't Look Now," and unearths hidden gems-many of which have been unavailable for years. This book is an excellent introduction to one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century and a deeper exploration of one of its most prodigious imaginations.
Game of Hide and Seek
Elizabeth Taylor
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590174968
$20.00 ex $22.00 inc
The mid-twentieth century British novelist Elizabeth Taylor numbered among her admirers Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton- Burnett, and Kingsley Amis. She also regularly published stories in The New Yorker for close to two decades. For all that, her work, as steely as it is delicate, remains the secret of a small number of intensely devoted readers. The publication of her finest novel, A Game of Hide and Seek, long unavailable in the United States, should help to change that. This is an unabashed love story, capturing all the uncertainty and inevitability and deceptiveness of true love, tracking the shifting currents of emotional life, and never yielding to melodrama. Set in Britain between the wars, a time of transition between old convention and new ways, the book has for a heroine Harriet, the only child of a suffragette, whom we meet as a shy and domestic and not especially smart or pretty girl. At eighteen she falls in love with Vesey, but after Vesey must go away, she marries another man, Charles, and bears a child. Then Vesey returns. Love is at the center of the book, but so too is Taylor's extraordinary knack for depicting characters. The minor figures in the book-from Harriet's mother's friend Caroline, with her progressive politics, to Charles, his coworkers, and his mother, to Betsy with her schoolgirl crush on her Greek teacher-are as memorable as the passion and heartache of Harriet and Vesey.
Anatomy of Melancholy
Robert Burton
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9780940322660
$35.45 ex $39.00 inc
This work is cited in Books for College Libraries, 3d ed. It is one of the major documents of modern European civilization, a survey not only of melancholy in all its myriad forms, but also of humanity's endless efforts to assuage it. First published in 1621, the book was an immediate popular success.
Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590174869
$18.18 ex $20.00 inc
In Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic reflects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America's great artists. Simic's spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned.
Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories
Mavis Gallant
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590173275
$21.82 ex $24.00 inc
Mavis Gallant is renowned as one of the great short-story writers of our day. This new gathering of long-unavailable or previously uncollected work presents stories from 1951 to 1971 and shows Gallant's progression from precocious virtuosity, to accomplished artistry, to the expansive innovatory spirit that marks her finest work.
"Madeleine's Birthday," the first of Gallant's many stories to be published in The New Yorker, pairs off a disaffected teenager, abandoned by her social-climbing mother, with a complacent middle-aged suburban housewife, in a subtly poignant comedy of miscommunication that reveals both characters to be equally adrift. "The Cost of Living," the extraordinary title story, is about a company of strangers, shipwrecked over a chilly winter in a Parisian hotel and bound to one another by animosity as much as by unexpected love.
Set in Paris, New York, the Riviera, and Montreal and full of scrupulously observed characters ranging from freebooters and malingerers to runaway children and fashion models, Gallant's stories are at once satirical and lyrical, passionate and skeptical, perfectly calibrated and in constant motion, brilliantly capturing the fatal untidiness of life.
Riders in the Chariot
Patrick White
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590170021
$25.45 ex $28.00 inc
Patrick White's brilliant 1961 novel, set in an Australian suburb, intertwines four deeply different lives. An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed--and stricken--with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them to transcend the machinations of their fellow men. Tender and lacerating, pure and profane, subtle and sweeping, Riders in the Chariot is one of the Nobel Prize winner's boldest books.
Peasants and Other Stories
Anton Chekhov
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9780940322141
$25.45 ex $28.00 inc
The ever maturing art and ever more ambitious imaginative reach of Anton Chekhov, one of the world's greatest masters of the short story, led him in his last years to an increasingly profound exploration of the troubled depths of Russian society and life. This powerful and revealing selection from Chekhov's final works, made by the legendary American critic Edmund Wilson, offers stories of novelistic richness and complexity, published in the only formatp edition to present them in chronological order.
Hons & Rebels
Jessica Mitford
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590171103
$20.00 ex $22.00 inc
Jessica Mitford, the great muckraking journalist, was part of a legendary English aristocratic family. Her sisters included Nancy, doyenne of the 1920s London smart set and a noted novelist and biographer; Diana, wife to the English fascist chief Sir Oswald Mosley; Unity, who fell head over in heels in love with Hitler; and Deborah, later the Duchess of Devonshire. Jessica swung left and moved to America, where she took part in the civil rights movement and wrote her classic expose of the undertaking business, "The American Way of Death."
"Hons and Rebels" is the hugely entertaining tale of Mitford's upbringing, which was, as she dryly remarks, "not exactly conventional. . . Debo spent silent hours in the chicken house learning to do an exact imitation of the look of pained concentration that comes over a hen's face when it is laying an egg. . . . Unity and I made up a complete language called Boudledidge, unintelligible to any but ourselves, in which we translated various dirty songs (for safe singing in front of the grown-ups)." But Mitford found her family's world as smothering as it was singular and, determined to escape it, she eloped with Esmond Romilly, Churchill's nephew, to go fight in the Spanish Civil War. The ensuing scandal, in which a British destroyer was dispatched to recover the two truants, inspires some of Mitford's funniest, and most pointed, pages.
A family portrait, a tale of youthful folly and high-spirited adventure, a study in social history, a love story, "Hons and Rebels" is a delightful contribution to the autobiographer's art.
Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece
Patrick Leigh Fermor
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590171875
$20.00 ex $22.00 inc
Roumeli is not to be found on present-day maps. It is the name once given to northern Greece--stretching from the Bosporus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth, a name that evokes a world where the present is inseparably bound up with the past.
Roumeli describes Patrick Leigh Fermor's wanderings in and around this mysterious and yet very real region. He takes us with him among Sarakatsan shepherds, to the monasteries of Meteora and the villages of Krakora, and on a mission to track down a pair of Byron's slippers at Missolonghi. As he does, he brings to light the inherent conflicts of the Greek inheritance--the tenuous links to the classical and Byzantine heritage, the legacy of Ottoman domination--along with an underlying, even older world, traces of which Leigh Fermor finds in the hills and mountains and along stretches of barely explored coast.
"Roumeli" is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor's famous "Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese."
The Road: Stories, Journalism and Essays
Vasily Grossman
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590173619
$20.00 ex $22.00 inc
"The Road "brings together short stories, journalism, essays, and letters by Vasily Grossman, the author of "Life and Fate, " providing new insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer. The stories range from Grossman's first success, "In the Town of Berdichev," a piercing reckoning with the cost of war, to such haunting later works as "Mama," based on the life of a girl who was adopted at the height of the Great Terror by the head of the NKVD and packed off to an orphanage after her father's downfall. The girl grows up struggling with the discovery that the parents she cherishes in memory are part of a collective nightmare that everyone else wishes to forget. "The Road" also includes the complete text of Grossman's harrowing report from Treblinka, one of the first anatomies of the workings of a death camp; "The Sistine Madonna," a reflection on art and atrocity; as well as two heartbreaking letters that Grossman wrote to his mother after her death at the hands of the Nazis and carried with him for the rest of his life.
Meticulously edited and presented by Robert Chandler, "The Road" allows us to see one of the great figures of twentieth-century literature discovering his calling both as a writer and as a man.
Everything Flows
Vasily Grossman
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590173282
$20.00 ex $22.00 inc
Everything Flows" is Vasily Grossman's final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan's story is only one among many. Thus we also hear about Ivan's cousin, Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, and Pinegin, the informer who got Ivan sent to the camps. Then a brilliant short play interrupts the narrative: a series of informers steps forward, each making excuses for the inexcusable things that he did--inexcusable and yet, the informers plead, in Stalinist Russia understandable, almost unavoidable. And at the core of the book, we find the story of Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan's lover, who tells about her eager involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932-33, which led to the deaths of three to five million Ukrainian peasants. Here "Everything Flows" attains an unbearable lucidity comparable to the last cantos of Dante's "Inferno."
Life and Fate: Introduction By Robert Chandler
Vasily Grossman
New York Review Of Books Classics, PB, 9781590172018
$31.82 ex $35.00 inc
A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century.
Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope.
Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers' nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves.
This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature.