Bøger udgivet af NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

"For years, Aidan Koch's comics have been pushing the boundaries of the medium, helping reimagine what a comic can look like, and the kinds of stories it can tell. Koch has been living and working in the desert of California, turning her focus toward the ways humans and the natural world converge. ... Using watercolors, pencils, crayons, charcoals, and collage, Koch builds worlds of dense detail and vast open spaces, urgent scrawled text and long silences, telling a series of stories about people and the places they inhabit"--

"ABOUT BLUE LARD The Russian master's most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination. Vladimir Sorokin's Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author's books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, Blue Lard is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines. The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese-peppered with ample neologisms-and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this "script-process" is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write. This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon-that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers? Blue Lard is a stylistically acrobatic book, translated by Max Lawton into an English idiom just as bizarre as the Russian original. Evoking both Pulp Fiction and the masterpieces of Marquis de Sade, Sorokin's novel is a brutal, heady trip that annihilates all of its twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century competition in the Russian canon-and that annihilates Russia itself in a resounding act of heavy-metal dissidence"--

"Provocative, hilarious, and tender stories about sex, violence, politics from one of the greatest Russian writers of the post-Soviet era. Red Pyramid is a sort of "greatest hits" collection of short stories from across Vladimir Sorokin's career, beginning with juvenilia like "The Pink Tuber," composed with no expectation of either publication or readership; moving on to scatological conceptual texts like "An Obelisk"; then plunging into the more even-tempered, but still quite uncanny, delights of his post-Soviet work. Stories like "A Month in Dachau" earn Sorokin his moniker as the "Russian De Sade," while others, like "Timka," are shockingly tender-despite their graphic depictions of mass shootings and anal sex. This collection also contains the infamous "Nastya," a story about a family cannibalizing its daughter on the eve of the twentieth century, for which Sorokin was nearly put on trial; "Horse Soup," which was the first translation from the Russian to win an O'Henry Prize; as well as stories published in Anglophone magazines such as The New Yorker, n+1, Harper's, and The Baffler to great acclaim. Translated by Max Lawton with equal attention to chewiness and pop flair, Red Pyramid is introduced brilliantly, brutally, and as always, unexpectedly by Will Self. Red Pyramid is perhaps the best place to begin a dive into Sorokin's arch detonation of Russian violence"--

"Manchette wrote two novels using the character of private eye Eugene Tarpon, Morgue pleine (Crowded day at the Morgue) and Que d'os! (Skeletons in the Closet!). Tarpon is a French private detective, a former cop responsible for the death of a protester, eaten up by grief, with a wry and weary outlook on the world, who gets mixed up in very tangled cases áa la Raymond Chandler, another of Manchette's favorite writers"--

"The twenty-four tales included in Oceans of Cruelty constitute one of the oldest collections of stories in the world, a book that offers both a set of uncanny, unsettling, and unforgettable narratives and a profound meditation on what weird thing it is that drives us to tell and to listen to stories. "Tales of the Vetala" is one of the names under which these stories have made their way from ancient India to the world at large, a Vetala being a corpse-spirit, and the frame story to the collection as a whole tells of a young king who bears the burden of a double spell. He has fallen under the power of a sorcerer, whose demand is that he fetch to him a Vetala to be his servant, and he has fallen under the power of the Vetala itself. Like a bat, the Vetala roosts upside down in the branches of a tree, and night after night the king is driven to take it down and bear it on his back to the burial ground where, once laid to rest, it will fall into the sorcerer's hands. Night after night, king and spirit make their way from tree to burial ground, and as they do the spirit whispers a riddling story in the king's ear. If the king knows the answer to the riddle, he must tell it; as soon as he tells it, the spirit flies back to the tree. Thus story follows story, the king's labors continue, and neither he nor the spirit finds rest. Only when the king has no idea what the answer to the riddle may be, when he is unable at last to respond to the story at all, will his obligation to the sorcerer be fulfilled and will he be set free, though when that comes to pass-well, that's when the whole story takes a new turn. Within this framework, Oceans of Cruelty unfolds a suite of tales of suicidal passion, clever deceit, patriarchal oppression, obligatory self-sacrifice, changing bodies, and narrow escapes from death. Here are all the passions, and here is the play of appearance and desire from which stories are drawn and that make us come back hungry for story, wondering how will the story end and when at last will we be done with all those stories? Douglas Penick's recreation of this ancient work brings out all its humor and horror and vitality, as well its unmistakeable relevance in a world of stories gone viral"--

"In the early 1960s, the Japanese manga artist Shigeru Sugiura took the well-loved literary character Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke and made him his own. In this legendary gag manga ... Shigeru sends the famous Ninja on a wild, eye-popping adventure: Sarutobi encounters cowboys and aliens, spaceships and sailing ships, mid-'60s celebrity cameos, mushroom clouds, detectives with squirt guns, and more in a delightful and ever-surprising world. Available for the first time in English and with a new essay by Ryan Holmberg, Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke [provides] trippy visuals and silly storytelling"--

"The story of two people (Helen, a young mother, and her baby) composing their day together, when their day gets interrupted by a book. From here, Helen, her baby, and books spend the day together, entwined, along with the social realities Helen encounters in an everyday world of class and privilege, housing and care work, creativity and frienship."--

"'O, it has happened little by little, as many things simply happen little by little, Mother said, and told us everything about Herr Veilchenfeld, as far as it was known to her.' Germany, late 1930s. Walking into town on a hot summer evening, the elderly professor of philosophy Herr Veilchenfeld encounters a group of local drunks. He is humiliated and assaulted; his hair is shorn. The police "don't interfere in such minor matters." What happens to Veilchenfeld is recounted by the young son of the doctor who attends the professor. The boy observes, listens in to his parents' conversations, and asks for ice cream. He cannot know the true import of the events he witnesses. Our Philosopher, first published in Germany in 1986 and now translated into English for the first time, is a salutary masterpiece about the destructive effects of persecution not only for the victims, but for the community as a whole"--

Mr. Sillypants worries so much about his swimming lesson that he has a dream in which he turns into a fish.

"Anna has married an Italian seaman, Ilario. Beginning-and ending-at a point shortly before her death, the story told in The Limit draws upon her past and his future to focus attention, with increasing intensity, along the lines of narrowing perspective. In each chapter, dying becomes an appraisal of memory, a confession, perhaps, of secrets shred and not shared. In the ten years of the couple's marriage, the limits of devotion had somehow to be reached. And yet, when Anna can no longer speak, appears to understand nothing, Ilario feels at his closest to her: Anna, so old, ill, and wasted, is a child again. The Limit, inevitably, is not about dying, but living. To read it is to have one's perception and humanity heightened"--

The first English-language collection of its kind, this anthology offers an overview of the past and present history of a long-underappreciated—and now quickly burgeoning—poetic tradition.For decades, the prose poem has variously delighted, confounded, and incensed readers and critics. Until recent years, it had been confined to the margins of literary history as a rather disturbing and elusive oddity. All this is changing.The prose poem, which has long been neglected and underrepresented in mainstream and experimental publications alike, is growing in popularity in the world of contemporary poetry. It is more widely available than ever before, thanks to the joint efforts of an ever-increasing number of imaginative writers, publishers, and editors. And still, this volume is the first anthology of the French prose poem to see the light in the English-speaking world.This anthology gathers a wide range of poets practicing what Michael Riffaterre memorably called “the literary genre with an oxymoron for a name,” from the prose poem’s official “inventors” (Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire) to a younger generation of poets from all over the French-speaking world. The poems in this bilingual collection have been rendered into English by some of the finest translators of French literature, including John Ashbery, Mark Polizzotti, Richard Sieburth, Rosmarie Waldrop, and many others.

"Flaubert was not only a great novelist, one of the inventors of of the modern novel, but a great letter writer, writing letters that are among other things a remarkable exploration of the art of the novel. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1880 is Francis Steegmuller's extensive selection from the writer's correspondence, to which he adds deft biographical bridgework and agile annotation. "If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert's correspondence," Steegmuller's introduction begins, "it is that the function of art is not to provide 'answers,'" and The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions, personal, political, artistic, with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life. Here we have Flaubert's youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, his wrestle to write Madame Bovary. (Looking back on his early work, he writes, "How I congratulate myself on the prescience I had not to publish!") Here we have Flaubert's correspondence with family and friends describing his life-changing trip to Egypt, exchanges with Baudelaire, the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and Guy de Maupassant, his young protege, as well as the letters that went back and forth between him and the great confidante of his later life, George Sand. Steegmuller's book, recognized as a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life story of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of a master. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover"

Adapted to film by both Louis Malle and Joachim Trier, this heart-rending and tenderly wrought novel narrates the decline of an artist and heroin addict in 1920s Paris.Pierre Drieu la Rochelle might be said to be both the Hemingway and the Fitzgerald of twentieth-century French literature, a battle-scarred veteran of the First World War whose work chronicles the trials and tribulations of a lost generation, a man about town, a heartbreaker with a broken heart, a literary stylist whose work is as tough as it is lyrical and polished. Politically compromised as Drieu came to be by his affiliation with the fascist right and collaboration under Nazi occupation—Drieu committed suicide at the end of the war—his novels remain vivid reflections of a broken spiritual and political world of the interwar years and as works of art, and to this day they are widely read and greatly admired in France.The Fire Within, which has been successfully adapted to the screen by Louis Malle and more recently Joachim Trier, is the lacerating tale of Alain Leroy, a war veteran and beautiful young man of whom the world is expected but who has taken refuge from the world in drugs. After being institutionalized, Alain emerges to try to put his life together again, but in spite of the attentions of friends and lovers, he struggles to find his way.

Bold and original poetry from a leading figure of an underrepresented anglophone tradition.Lakdhas Wikkramasinha is one of the major Sri Lankan poets of the twentieth century. Fearlessly political, “powerful and angry” (as Michael Ondaatje calls him in his memoir Running in the Family), Wikkramasinha has influenced generations of writers in Sri Lanka. Yet his work, originally self-published in limited editions, has long been inaccessible. This new volume, edited by Aparna Halpé and Ondaatje, is the first to offer a comprehensive selection of Wikkramasinha’s English poetry drawn from the original sources, most of which have never been reprinted. It is also the first to contain a representative selection of the poetry that Wikkramasinha composed in Sinhala, now translated into English by Udaya Prashantha Meddegama. An accomplished bilingual writer, deeply engaged with Sanskrit and Sinhalese traditions, Wikkramasinha also reveals himself to be a modernist shaped by his reading of Federico García Lorca and Osip Mandelstam, bringing a lyric style of great rhythmic force and imagistic compression to bear on his postcolonial present, as well as on the colonial and precolonial past.

Now available for the first time in the United States, a celebrated translation of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Swann’s Way, the first of the seven volumes that con­stitute Marcel Proust’s lifework, In Search of Lost Time, introduces the larger themes of the whole work while standing on its own as a brilliant evocation of childhood, hopeless love, and the French Belle Époque. We first encounter Proust’s narrator in middle age, consumed with regret for his misspent life. Suddenly, he is back in the past, seized by memories of childhood: his clinging attachment to his mother, his dread of his father, summers in the country and the two walks his family was in the habit of taking—one by an aristocratic estate, the other by the house of a certain Charles Swann, to whom a mystery was attached. A child’s world, and the world of adults the child struggles to imagine, spread out before us, while Proust’s pages teem with incident and puzzle­ment, pathos and humor. The novel then takes a further step backwards to tell the story of Swann’s infatuation with the courtesan Odette. Swann, man­-about­-town and familiar of royalty, is reduced to walking after midnight, forlorn as a child awaiting a good­night kiss. James Grieve began his career translating Proust in the early 1970s, driven by his dismay at how many readers recoiled from what they imagined to be the difficulty of Proust’s work, and his translation of Swann’s Way brings out the book’s fluency and speed as no other version does. It offers an unequaled introduction to an incompa­rably absorbing work of art.