January News and Highlights

Letter from Hudson Street January 2019 Dear Readers, Happy New Year! We hope that everyone had a pleasant holiday season. Did you get any reading done? We've got lots of goodies in this first newsletter of the year—a quiz, round-ups of favorite books from 2018, Thoreau on ice skating (and falling!). Also, we'd like to call attention to a couple of special mentions of our books in the press late last year. Parul Sehgal wrote about her experience reading Uwe Johnson's "oceanic" magnum opus, Anniversaries, for [The New York Times]( and, in The New Yorker, James Wood called out Walter Kempowski's All for Nothing as the ["one masterpiece" he read this year](. Both reviews are worth a read. Now, on to the fun stuff! Best wishes for 2019, The NYRB Staff Quiz: Pen Names Several authors in the NYRB Classics series wrote under pen names, some of which have fascinating meanings and sources behind them. See if you can guess who the pseudonym-toting authors are based on the bits of information below. Born Pinchus Kahanovich (1884–1950), this Ukraine-born author's pseudonym roughly translates as "the Hidden One" and may have been taken by Kahanovich because of his sensitive immigration status. On the other hand, the pseudonym is also redolent of kabbalistic and esoteric Jewish thought, significant in light of the author's important contributions to Yiddish literature. [?]( Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya (1872–1952) was a Russian writer of short stories and memoir. She provided two explanations for her nom de plume: 1) that it was a play on the pet name of a friend of hers, and 2) that it came from an old English rhyme that went "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief." [?]( Pierre Ryckmans (1934–2014) was a renowned Belgian-Australian literary critic, Sinologist, and art historian. On his publisher's advice, he decided to use a pen name to avoid being declared persona non grata in China. He drew the two parts of his pseudonym from the name of one of the twelve of apostles and the title of a Victor Segalen novel. [?]( Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh (1882–1961) was a Dutch writer whose importance was only largely recognized after his death. He wrote under a pen name that translated to "I don't know" in Latin. [?]( Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916) was best known for his satiric and sometimes macabre tales about Edwardian society and culture. His single-word pen name is believed to have been taken from a character from the works of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. [?]( Born Anna (Netty) Reiling (1900–1983) in Mainz, Germany, this author was a lifelong Communist and wrote some of the most important works about World War II. It's rumored that her pen name was based on the surname of a famous Dutch painter and printmaker. [?]( Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820–1887) is considered one of the Netherlands' greatest authors, known best for a satiric novel about colonialism in the Dutch East Indies. His pen name translated to "I have suffered much" in Latin. [?]( 500 NYRB Classics Covers, Analyzed Did you all catch this in-depth, [interactive feature]( the Los Angeles Times posted about the NYRB Classics series design? Aida Ylanan analyzed the data behind all of the covers in the series and came up with some interesting findings (did you know, for example, that a whopping 75% of the art on our covers are portraits of individuals or crowds?). We were floored when we saw how beautiful the feature itself is, too. It's worth clicking through. Your Favorite NYRB Books of 2018 In our December newsletter we asked you all to send in something about your favorite NYRB book that you read in 2018. Here are some of those replies. Thanks to all who responded, and congratulations to Joe, winner of the bag-of-books raffle! "Consisting of two volumes, six novels in all, [Fortunes of War]( is one of the most engrossing works I’ve read in my life. Manning, whom I don’t think gets the credit she deserves as a novelist, had this capacity to create so many vivid characters and then, from them, weave so many compelling story lines, it was often difficult for me to put down at night whichever of the books I was reading on a particular day. When I finished the last of them (and moved on to what is a kind of sequel, though she published it before FoW, [School for Love](), I felt a palpable sense of what I call 'book grief,' a sense of loss that the books were no longer going to be in my life in the same way they were while I was reading them." —Joe "My favourite this year was [Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa](. The reason was that it was just pure magic. Couldn't put it down. Am halfway through [Anniversaries]( but am leaving the second volume until after Xmas as it is fabulous, but not to be read during the long summer school holidays. Too many grandchildren around. It is truly an amazing book." —Anne "Throughout this year I've been reading Thoreau, [The Journal 1837–1861](, and I'm hoping to finish by year's end. I've been delighted by his close observation of the natural world and his thoughts about his place within it and the distance human culture can move from it. Much more than observation, it’s a daily celebration and a memorial of the green world on which everything depends. It is, as Thoreau often is, painfully relevant to our difficult present moment, as if he saw it coming. He did." —Tom "[Fancies and Goodnights](, by John Collier. First, I like the sheer plenitude of stories, but mainly I like the amusing surprises Collier is capable of, and especially, the outrageous things he delves into out of nowhere, with no buildup, just matter-of-fact outrageousness." —Bob Our Favorite Books of the Year We couldn't resist doing a little round up of favorite books here among the office staff, too. See our picks below. "I couldn’t put down Iris Origo's [A Chill in the Air](—the descriptions of Italy on the brink of war are vivid and eerily resonant with the present moment. Two of my other favorites that I read this year: Lisa Halliday's [Asymmetry]( and Alexander Pushkin's [Eugene Onegin](." —Hilary "[All the Sad Songs](, Summer Pierre's graphic novel about music and mixtapes, is more than just a memoir told in expert cross-hatching; it's a book that explores the idea of how a song can know us better than we know ourselves." —Evan "One of my favorite reads of the year was [Slow Days, Fast Company]( by Eve Babitz. I loved it in particular because it gets so unexpectedly knotty and dark, especially at the end in that room at the Chateau Marmont. I shudder just thinking about this moment, something I never thought I'd say about something in an Eve Babitz book. A few of the essays in Hilton Als's [White Girls]( absolutely slayed me, too. I can't believe it took me so long to read this." —Abigail "This was my year of reading books by authors and thinking 'Why didn’t anyone tell me how good this was?!'—then realizing, 'Wait, you all raved about these writers. Repeatedly. For years, I just didn’t trust you.' Under this category fall Mary Gaitskill, particularly [Bad Behavior](, and Helen Oyeyemi, particularly [Mr. Fox](. I also read a story that ruined me for almost anything else but Kafka for some time: '[Waxy](,' by Camilla Grudova. The story is available in [The Doll’s Alphabet](, which is worth picking up. I totally fell for two massive NYRB Classics, Chauteabriand’s [Memoirs from Beyond the Grave]( and Uwe Johnson’s [Anniversaries](. Both offered solace. We’ve made it through terrible periods of world history. Maybe we’ll be able to pull ourselves out of our current mess." —Sara "From our own books I'd have to say Anniversaries. It's big (best understatement of the year) and there's a lot to say, but I think what I like best about it are the characters. Who could not want to hang out with Gesine and Marie? That'd be inhuman. Not from NYRB, my favorite read this year is Alan Moore's [Swamp Thing](. The scene when Alec Holland/Swamp Thing hovers on the edge of existence and brings him/itself back to life is incredible." —Nick NYRB on Best of 2018 Lists We were honored to see some of our books included on various "best-of" lists at the end of last year. Here are a few of those mentions. "...part memoir, part brilliant commentary on poetry, art." —Joyce Carol Oates, TLS, ["2018 Books of the Year"]( "These tales turn familiar fairy-tale rhythms on their hands, balancing chaos and kindness, the natural and the supernatural, the unsettling and the inspiring." —Genevieve Valentine, NPR, ["2018's Great Reads"]( "Manga pioneer Tadao Tsuge’s awkward, unsentimental and sometimes Chekhovian short comics from the 1960s and 70s delineate the violent, desperate wanderers of postwar Tokyo’s red-light districts." —Chris Ware, Guardian, ["Best Books of 2018"]( "...puts you in the mean streets and meaner lives – and minds – of its 1920s underclass. There’s nothing sympathetic about what the characters do, and yet they’re so damned human, it’s impossible not to share in what they feel." —Stephen Brown, TLS, ["2018 Books of the Year"]( "It is funny, sexy and then suddenly brutal, like a shark attack at the beach." —Olivia Laing, Guardian, ["Best Books of 2018"]( "...in our age of idealistic mass obsessions and lynch-mob ideologies Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories are as instructive as ever – in the insightful new translation by Donald Rayfield." —Zinovy Zinick, TLS, ["2018 Books of the Year"]( "Written in 1962 and reprinted again this year, every word, every sentence, every full-stop of Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker had me in its clutches...She plumbs the deep emotional truth of human beings. Such sweet agony." —Viv Albertine, Guardian, ["Best Books of 2018"]( January with Henry David Thoreau Our monthly foray into Thoreau's [The Journal: 1837–1861](. This time, entries from January 14 and 15, 1855. Thoreau was thirty-seven years old and often found himself skating from place to place in the winter. Jan. 14. Skated to Baker Farm with a rapidity which astonished myself, before the wind, feeling the rise and fall,—the water having settled in the suddenly cold night,—which I had not time to see. A man feels like a new creature, a deer, perhaps, moving at this rate. He takes new possession of nature in the name of his own majesty. There was I, and there, and there, as Mercury went down the Idæan Mountains. Jan. 15.—Skated to Bedford. It had just been snowing, and this lay in shallow drifts or waves on the Great Meadows, alternate snow and ice. Skated into a crack, and slid on my side twenty-five feet. If one of your New Year's resolutions is to read more... ...perhaps consider joining a book group? There's a great one [over at Goodreads]( entirely devoted to the NYRB Classics series that has been running for years. We can vouch for the members and moderators: they are all true-blue NYRB Classics nerds. Publishing in January [THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS]( by Salka Viertel The Kindness of Strangers is the January selection for the [NYRB Classics Book Club](. If you join the club by January 16, The Kindness of Strangers will be your first selection. Upcoming Events Thursday, January 10, 7:30pm at [Books Are Magic](, Brooklyn: NYRB Classics Managing Editor Sara Kramer, The New Yorker's Jia Tolentino, and Vanity Fair contributing editor Lili Anolik for a discussion of Anolik's new book, Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A., on the life and work of Eve Babitz. Tuesday, January 15, 7pm at [City Lights Booksellers](, San Francisco, CA: Norma Cole and Forrest Gander discuss and read from the work of one of Latin America's most celebrated and controversial poets, Raúl Zurita, to celebrate the reissue of Zurita's [INRI,]( translated by William Rowe and with a foreword by Norma Cole. In the Press "[Anniversaries] requires a hard chair, a fresh pen and your full attention — for attention is its great subject...Searls’s superb translation inscribes Johnson’s restlessness and probing into word choice and the structures of the sentences themselves, which quiver with the anxiety to get things right, to see the world as it is.” —Parul Sehgal, [The New York Times](, on Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl "I encountered one masterpiece this year—Walter Kempowski’s epic novel All for Nothing…What an amazing book this is: it was excitedly put into my hands by a writer friend, and I’ve been handing it on, in turn, to anyone who’ll listen to me….at once searing and utterly unsentimental, [All for Nothing is] a historical epic that doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that it is being written in the twenty-first century, decades after the events." —James Wood, [The New Yorker](, on Walter Kempowski's All for Nothing "She is a poet of the senses as much as she is a poet of ideas; her ‘divergent sides and selves’ cohere not because they cancel each other out but because they invigorate and energise each other." —Patrick McGuinness, [The London Review of Books](, on Joan Murray's Drafts, Fragments, and Poems "It’s a perfect novel, a masterpiece of domestic gothic." —Sarah Waters, [The Guardian](, on The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns "This year, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the essay, and rereading Montaigne and James {NAME}, so Brian Dillon’s superb study, [Essayism,]( fell into receptive hands. It’s short, digressive, teasing, dilettantish, circular, and it reads like some delicate, wandering combination of Roland Barthes’s [Camera Lucida]( and E. M. Cioran’s longer aphorisms.” —James Wood, [The New Yorker](, on Brian Dillon's Essayism Image at top of newsletter: NYRB Classics, photo taken in Manhattan's West Village, December, 2018 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](