On Saturday, October 17, 2009--Greenlight Bookstore flung open its doors to the lucky residents of Fort Greene in the borough of Brooklyn. To celebrate this new independent bookstore in our city as well as 10 Years of the NYRB Classics series, we are throwing our last event of the year. We hope you'll join us!

When and Where:
Friday, November 13th at 7:30pm
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton Street (at South Portland Street)
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 246-0200

What:
A reading and reception in celebration of 10 Years of NYRB Classics and the opening of Greenlight Bookstore.

With Brooklynites--and NYRB Classics introducers--L.J. Davis on A Meaningful Life, Jhumpa Lahiri on The Cost of Living, and Matt Weiland on Names on the Land. Introduction by NYRB Classics editor (and Brooklyn resident) Edwin Frank.

Later this month we will officially publish one of the most involved (and thrilling) undertakings of our first decade: an abridgment of Henry David Thoreau's nearly two-million-word, 14-volume Journal into a portable 700-page single volume. Whenever a book is presented in an altered format, there are multitudes of  questions that accompany every step in the editorial process. Translator, editor, and novelist Damion Searls has had abridgments and selections on his mind for much of the past few years (see his recent work, ; or the Whale) and was guided in his selection by a very particular ethos, which he describes both in his introduction to the book, and in the informal Q&A that follows.

You can pre-order The Journal by Henry David Thoreau at 25% the list price at www.nyrb.com.

Instead of my last semester in college, I took a year off and spent the first half, January to June, living in a cheap sublet house—$150 a month I think—in Waterville, Maine. I picked Waterville because someone I knew in college was from there, and he helped me find a place to stay. On my first visit to this friend's home, before I decided to move to Maine, I saw on a table in his house a little letterpress edition of Thoreau's essay "Wild Apples," and thought it was just brilliant.

I was a philosophy major and had studied with Stanley Cavell, whose works, incredibly, include the century's best essay on Shakespeare, the best essays on Wittgenstein, the best book on Hollywood screwball comedies, and the best book on Thoreau: The Senses of Walden. So along with all the other books I read up in Maine, I read Walden, I think for the first time but I'm not sure any more. It was late to encounter him, and I wasn't in school, but I had a guide to open up some of the depths of the book. It was fantastic.

When did you first encounter the Journal? How did the idea to edit an abridged edition, rather than a selection come about? And can you talk a little about how this edition differs from previous presentations of the Journal (apart from the complete, 14-vol. edition)?

I ran across the paperback 14-volume edition at Black Oak Books in Berkeley, California and bought it for $75. It was just an impulse. For years I would dip into it in small doses, read an anniversary entry from the same date as that day or flip around. He's an incredibly relaxing writer. I love his lists, his names of plants. He is such a good writer that his lists are great.

And this aspect of the Journal wasn't available to people. There have been selections from the Journal, but they all feel like grab-bags of the good bits, not the way reading the Journal really feels. Especially with Thoreau, snippets can feel sententious or bossy or crabby, and the Journal isn't. You have to leave in the "boring bits"-because first of all, they're not boring, and second of all, they're what make the excerptable snippets as great as they are. There was no edition both big enough and holistically enough edited to capture the feel of the thing.

Thoreau said it himself: "I do not know but that thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the selected ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life, and are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched. . . . Perhaps I shall never find so good a setting for my thoughts as I shall have taken them out of. The crystal never sparkles more brightly than in the cavern" (1/27/1852 and 1/28/1852, with the great Thoreau pun on "far-fetched": things you get from somewhere else are inherently less plausible than things from close to home).

I also thought we needed a contemporary edition that portrayed Thoreau as a complex emotional man, a committed writer, and a subtle philosophical thinker, without condescending to his scientific, ecological interests-the Thoreau we've learned to read from Virginia Woolf, Stanley Cavell, Rachel Carson, John Ashbery.

What will readers—even those familiar with Thoreau's work—find most surprising in the edition?

How pleasurable it is to read Thoreau even when he's not making a particular point. In his books and essays he's usually trying to argue something, and he writes with the tone of someone absolutely sure of himself. This confidence is a big part of the thrill of reading him, but also why some people don't like him. I think the self-doubt occasionally on display in the Journal, like the book's looseness and openness, gives Thoreau, perhaps paradoxically, even greater integrity.

Speaking of self-questioning, the Journal has great questions in general. Why are mountains pointy? Why are the shadows on snow blue? Why do rivers wind back and forth? The ones he doesn't answer are sometimes the most poetic.

And there's just the scale of the thing. When you hear that Thoreau spent his life taking walks around Concord, it's hard not to think that that's ultimately kind of a waste, or at least pretty boring. Emerson already said that in his eulogy for Thoreau; even Thoreau had his moments of wondering. Well you read the Journal and it's all so full, he wrote a longish essay about the events of the day, day after day, month after 80- or 100- or 120-page month, and not to be dutiful but because it was interesting. In my intro I quote a comment by Hans Richter about Kurt Schwitters that applies to the Thoreau on display in the Journal: his life was more full of incident each day than the entire Trojan War.

What is your favorite entry from the NYRB edition?

I don't know that it's my favorite, but I put the entry of December 25, 1851, in my query letter to NYRB, to argue that a new edition of Thoreau's Journal was needed:

. . . It would be a truer discipline for the writer to take the least film of thought that floats in the twilight sky of his mind for his theme, about which he has scarcely one idea (that would be teaching his ideas how to shoot), faintest intimations, shadowiest subjects, make a lecture on this, by assiduity and attention get perchance two views of the same, increase a little the stock of knowledge, clear a new field instead of manuring the old. . . . We seek too soon to ally the perceptions of the mind to the experience of the hand, to prove our gossamer truths practical, to show their connection with our every-day life (better show their distance from our every-day life), to relate them to the cider-mill and the banking institution. . . . Do not seek expressions, seek thoughts to be expressed. . . .

I also discuss a couple other favorite moments in my introduction, including maybe my favorite line: "The bluebird carries the sky on his back."

Is there anything you had to cut for space but that you wish you had been able to retain?

Most of the book! There's basically 6,000+ more great pages where the NYRB edition came from. My first pass through the 14 volumes of the full Journal, making check marks or question marks in the margins and not worrying about the page count, ended up with about 1,200 pages of Yes and another 1,200 of Maybe.

I had wanted to keep more full entries, but ended up needing to shorten most of them. But I'm glad that the full entries that remain are indicated (with dates in all caps), so readers can browse for them. I also kept a year's worth of months more full than the rest, with a list of them in the introduction, so readers can see more fully what April or August or October meant to Thoreau. That means there's a 180-page book tucked inside the 670-page edition.

You've also edited an abridgment, or inverted abridgment, of Moby-Dick called ; or The Whale—an edition that includes only the words edited out of the Orion Books abridgment Moby-Dick in Half the Time. Could you imagine a similar project for the Journal? What would the resulting book be like?

Well the resulting book would be 6,300 pages long, since the NYRB edition is only about a tenth of the whole. So I don't think an inverted abridgment would work. Unless we took the first version I sent to the publisher, about 1,150 pages long, and subtracted the final, 700-page version.... I don't think that would be as interesting as ; or The Whale. But there are all sorts of other ways to use the Journal as a source for other writing. John Cage wrote several major texts and pieces using the Journal; I think a book made up of all the questions in the NYRB Journal would be great, like Neruda's Book of Questions.

One of the points you make in your Introduction to this edition is that The Journal should be looked at as more than a log: that it is a book, as significant a work as any Thoreau intended for publication.

Yes, Thoreau's journal started out as a notebook among others but after his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was such a commercial failure, he reoriented his ideas about authorship, writerly vocation, and the meaning of publication. He later published Walden but the Journal was his great book, his "Book of Concord," the one he quite consciously worked on as a systematic "calendar" of the ecology of his world. As I say in the intro, it was "an investigation of dailyness, seasons, and the relationship between self and nature-a hybrid and incompletable book but a book in its own right nonetheless, with an ecology all its own."

I think Thoreau's great insight, and his poetic method too, was to perceive the interaction of different systems: how the seasons affect water levels, how animals propagate seeds, how one growth of forest trees succeeds the previous one, how the lake affects the shore or the river the riverbanks, and most centrally how the life he led shaped Henry David Thoreau and vice versa. Very early on (page 7 in this edition), he says:

The hardest material obeys the same law with the most fluid. Trees are but rivers of sap and woody fibre flowing from the atmosphere and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as their roots flow upward to the surface. And in the heavens there are rivers of stars and milky ways. There are rivers of rock on the surface and rivers of ore in the bowels of the earth. And thoughts flow and circulate, and seasons lapse as tributaries of the current year.

Later he puts it more forcefully:

I was impressed as it were by the intelligence of the brook, which for ages in the wildest regions, before science is born, knows so well the level of the ground and through whatever woods or other obstacles finds its way. Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship round the globe? (5/17/1854)

These parallels animate everything, so that for Thoreau the whole world is intelligent and alive, and that is what makes his writing so alive and so moving:

I planted six seeds sent from the Patent Office and labelled, I think, "Poitrine jaune grosse" (large yellow pumpkin (or squash?)). Two came up, and one bore a squash which weighs 1231/2 lbs. the other bore four, [weighing 1861/4]. Who would have believed that there was 310 pounds of poitrine jaune grosse in that corner of our garden? Yet that little seed found it. (9/28/1857)

The same is true for his Journal. The whole thing lives and breathes as an ecosystem of its own.

If you're not familiar with the Guardian's Digested Read series, we suggest you have a look at John Crace's recent roundup of the Booker nominees.

Here Mr. Crace presents a satirical, meta-critical summary of Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel of a hapless missionary who after 3 years of residence on a remote Pacific island, has managed to convert only one heathen—or has he?

Listen to The Digested Classic, Mr. Fortune's Maggot

This edition of Mr. Fortune's Maggot includes "The Salutation"—in which we discover what becomes of Mr. Fortune.

By the way, the word "maggot" here does not refer to an creepy crawly creature, but is a synonym for "whim." Sylvia Townsend Warner's formulation, however, recalls a musical naming convention. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Music explains the word was "used by 16th- and 17th-cent. composers in titles of instrumental pieces, often country dances, e.g. ‘My Lady Winwoods Maggot.’"

A brief review of Memories of the Future by Dwight at Royal Rhino Flying Records:

[Krzhizhanovky's] works beautifully parade their influences, Russian and otherwise, and share affinities with those of other authors inside and out of his medium. The stories collected in Memories of the Future happily jaunt into Borgesian irrealities, with John Collier’s whimsical poeticism and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s humor. [read the entire post]

You can read a more detailed essay about Krzhizhanovsky by Christopher Byrd at The Barnes and Noble Review and next Sunday's New York Times Book Review will feature a full-page assessment of the book.

Oct. 22 [1837].
“What are you doing now?” he* asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry to-day.

So begins Henry David Thoreau's Journal, one of the major projects of the naturalist's career, and one that would eventually comprise nearly one million words.

The abridged Journal of Henry David Thoreau will be available through www.nyrb.com in early November.

More excerpts from the Journal:
June 10th, 1857
June 15th, 1852
August 11th, 1858

*In his introduction to The Journal, editor Damion Searls remarks, "The 'he' in this first entry is undoubtedly Emerson."

Some of the best responses to our books come from non-traditional review sources—which is why we're starting a feature that is long overdue: TIA or Total Information Awareness. That's right, we're watching you, and if you write something of note about an NYRB title, we just might post an excerpt here.

First up: A celebration of Tim Robinson, author of The Stones of Aran and his personal, historical, mythical maps of Aran. The complete text of the review can be found at Views from the Barracks.

The fractured limestone landscapes of Western Ireland, and in particular, Connemara, the Aran Islands and the Burren are the subject of Robinson's cartographic and literary output.  A Yorkshire-born, Cambridge-educated mathematician, Robinson brings to his task linguistic diligence, an inquisitive spirit, and the capacity to translate and communicate the abstract into his maps and writings and make it  wonderful. Last year, my partner Ro and I explored the islands of Inis Meán and Inis Oirr, clambering over dry-stone walls, walking down ancient boreens accompanied by Tim Robinson's increasingly dog-eared map.  Monochrome, with the greyness of the landscape itself, and covered with hints and gifts, here a dolmen, there a blow-hole. And, on one memorable afternoon in the spring sun sat on the stones of an ancient fortress with the sea a distant but insistent drone and found the music of a flute that brought the first cuckoo to an eerie duet.

This is fractal cartography that describes the intersection of geology, human activity, the ascent of the human spirit in myth-making and story-telling and the ever-present sea.  The maps guide the traveller to look harder, listen longer and take time to absorb his/her surroundings. [cont.]

Please join NYRB Classics and
The New York Review of Books at two Boston-area events:

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 7PM
October Winedown with Edwin Frank
Harvard Book Store
Cambridge

Over the last decade NYRB Classics has selected over two hundred titles ranging through fiction, memoir, criticism, and reportage to shed light on authors and titles that may otherwise have fallen through the cracks. Edwin Frank, editor of the series, will discuss some of the 250 titles that NYRB Classics has revived, as the press celebrates its tenth anniversary. Wine will be served.

Click here for additional information.

Saturday, October 24, 2009 from 10AM-6PM
Boston Book Festival
Copley Square
Boston

Stop by our booth at the first annual Boston Book Festival. Pick up a complimentary copy of the latest issue of The New York Review of Books and have a look at the titles in the NYRB Classics series. Plus, be sure to attend an event or two!

Click here for additional information.

Pamela Dean is a writer of books for children and adults. She is best known for her  contribution to Terri Windling's Fairy Tale Series, a modern retelling of the Tam Lin story (which Publishers Weekly called a "quintessential college novel, anchoring its fantastic elements in a solid, engaging reality.") and for her Secret Country Trilogy, inspired, in part, by the Carbonel books. We thank her for sharing the story of how a Midwestern girl became enamored of a royal cat.

I found The Kingdom of Carbonel in the St. Louis County Public Library when I was about ten years old. I didn't know that there was an earlier book. I didn't know what had happened to Rosemary and John in Carbonel: The King of the Cats. I knew nothing about life in England in the 1950s, either. I was growing up in a brand new suburb in Missouri, one not unlike the hastily built towns spreading like ribbons across Carbonel's world.

It might be more correct to refer to Carbonel's worlds, for there were two: The everyday world of England, where schools broke up rather than letting out, where war widows had a hard time making ends meet and twig brooms and patched cauldrons were sold in street markets; where the change from braids and sandals to ponytails and flats signaled a girl's growing up and suddenly refusing "to play anything sensible"—a fate that at the time I was very keen to avoid, however it might present itself. To Barbara Sleigh's British readers at least, that was the mundane world. The second world would have been as astonishing to them as it was to me, for this was the world of Cat Country, which appears when darkness falls and all the straight lines of wall and house redraw themselves into wilderness, there streams run with milk that has had herring boiled in it and every chimney pot is a tree or bush. C.S. Lewis talks about a sensation that he calls "Joy," which can be derived from many sources, but which I experienced reading fantasy. Lewis connects it with the divine, but I don't go so far; I merely record it. The moment when Cat Country first made itself known in The Kingdom of Carbonel gave me that flash of wonder, of entering into a larger world. Books that do this are to be cherished. 

After all this, you'll be thinking that the Carbonel books are quaint, old-fashioned things, good for training aspiring writers but perhaps not much good for actually reading. But that's all wrong. They are excellent stories, imbued with wonder and practicality in equal measure, dry humor, and a clear-eyed and sometimes sardonic love of cats. They have a healthy interest in food and a ruthless interest in the logical working-out of the implications of magic. Luckily, since Rosemary is still in the pigtails-and sandals stage, the gender-role differences are not as pronounced as they might be. Both children get into trouble and make mistakes, but they also both get to be competent and clever, they get to try to reverse the trouble they've caused others, however inadvertently. They even feel sorry for the people who mean them ill. And in The Kingdom of Carbonel, Rosemary gets to do the ultimate good deed, by giving up something she loves very much for something else she loves very much.

These books have moved me to laughter and tears, as a child, and again as I write this, even though I am just recalling rather than rereading them. I'm very, very glad that they will be in print in the United States.

In which we gladly retreive the gauntlet thrown by the Asylum

In a recent post on Asylum, John Self reviews Vivant Denon's novella, Point de Lendemain, which we recently published in Lydia Davis's translation as No Tomorrow. He, however, had only the Penguin Syren edition, which was translated by David Coward, to quote from. We were struck by the difference between the two translations, particularly in the very first line of the story. Now, David Coward has a Scott Moncrieff prize to his name, so we think he won't mind a friendly comparison between the two translations.

First up, the first sentence, which is is among the best of any work we've published (right up there with Hartley's "The past is a foreign country, etc. etc"):

I was desperately in love with the Comtesse de —— ; I was twenty years old and I was naive. She deceived me, I got angry, she left me. I was naive, I missed her. I was twenty years old, she forgave me, and, because I was twenty years old, because I was naive—still deceived, but no longer abandoned—I thought myself to be the best-loved lover, and therefore the happiest of men.

The Syren:

I doted on the Countess ______; I was twenty, and I was naive; she deceived me, I was incensed; she deserted me. I was naive, I missed her; I was twenty, she forgave me; and because I was twenty, was naive, and, though still deceived, no longer deserted, I believed that lover was never more loved than I and I was therefore the happiest man alive.

J’aimais éperdument la comtesse de ——; j’avais vingt ans, et j’étais ingénu; elle me trompa, je me fâchai, elle me quitta. J’étais ingénu, je la regrettai; j’avais vingt ans, elle me pardonna; et comme j’avais vingt ans, que j’étais ingénu, toujours trompé, mais plus quitté, je me croyais l’amant le mieux aimé, partant le plus heureux des hommes.

Exhibit 2 contains, at least in Coward's translation, an eye-catching phrase, one that's become a catchword for a certain type of literature. Can you spot it? It doesn't figure in the Lydia Davis translation:

When lovers are too ardent, they are less refined. Racing toward climax, they overlook the preliminary pleasures: they tear at a knot, shred a piece of gauze. Lust leaves its traces everywhere, and soon the idol resembles a victim. 

The Syren:

Unbridled passion murders niceness of feeling. We run toward pleasure and ride roughshod over the delights which precede it. A ribbon is snapped, a bodice is ripped: desire leaves its mark in its wake and soon the idol of our heart looks uncommonly like its victim.

The original:

Trop ardent, on est moins délicat. On court à la jouissance en confondant tous les délices qui la précèdent: on arrache un nœud, on déchire une gaze: partout la volupté marque sa trace, et bientôt l’idole ressemble à la victime.

We leave it to the reader to decide which edition he'd rather spend time with. Of course, the Syren edition is no longer in print, and the brand spanking new NYRB edition comes with an engaging introduction by Princeton professor Peter Brooks (an introduction that almost makes us wish we were back in school, just to take a class with the man, who must be an astonishing lecturer) as well as the complete French text.

We can't tease John Self too much, because we'd never even heard of the Syren classic series before he pointed it out (much less gone about collecting them obsessively, as he has). As he rightly says, Syren was doing the art of the novella in the mid-90s, well before Pushkin and Melville House began their own like-minded projects.

Today marks the publication of Poem Strip by Dino Buzzati, the first graphic novel in the NYRB Classics Series! Please join us--along with the book's translator Marina Harss--tonight in celebration.

We'll be at McNally Jackson booksellers on Monday, October 5th to hear Jhumpa Lahiri read from The Cost of Living, our new collection of Mavis Gallant's short stories. Edwin Frank, editor of NYRB Classics series, will introduce the evening.

Event Information

We're 10! Come celebrate with us at a variety of readings, discussions, and just plain parties taking place in both the US and the UK. This list also includes a few special readings with poet, translator, and children's book writer Alastair Reid in honor of the reprint of his collaboration with Ben Shahn, Ounce Dice Trice.

Thursday September 17, 7 pm
Idlewild Books hosts a NYRB Classics 10th anniversary party and launches the Idlewild NYRB Classics book club

Sunday, September 20, 3 pm
Word Bookstore in Brooklyn, Alastair Reid reads from Ounce Dice Trice

Monday, September 21, 7 pm
Idlewild Books hosts a reading by Tete-Michel Kpomassie, author of An African in Greenland

Thursday, September 24, 6 pm
Books of Wonder Alastair Reid reads from Ounce Dice Trice

Monday, October 5,  7 pm,
McNally Jackson, Jhumpa Lahiri reads from The Cost of Living: The Early and Uncollected Fiction of Mavis Gallant

Tuesday, October 6, 7 pm
Idlewild Books, launch party for the first graphic novel published by NYRB, Poem Strip by Dino Buzzati, featuring translator Marina Harss

Tuesday, October 13, 7 pm
London Review Bookshop,  John Banville and John Gray discuss the work of Georges Simenon

Wednesday, October 14, 6: 30 pm
Heffers (Cambridge, England) NYRB 10th anniversary event with Andrew O'Hagan, Pankaj Mishra, Mary Beard

Tuesday, October 20, 7 pm
Harvard Bookstore, NYRB Classics 10th anniversary event and Winedown with series editor, Edwin Frank

Thursday, October 29
NY Institute of the Humanities, New School Tishman Auditorium with Fred Wiseman, Walter Murch, Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Chris Hedges discusssing the war writings of Curzio Malaparte and Vasily Grossman

Thursday, November 5
NYPL Cullman Center NYRB Classics event with Cullman Center fellows Wendy Lesser, Francine Prose, Edmund White, Esther Allen

November tbd
NYRB Classics celebrates ten years of publishing classics and the opening of Greenlight Books in Brooklyn

Please note that details are subject to change. Keep checking this site for updates on the listings above.

The start of the school year got us thinking about Jenny Linsky's first days at school, and how scary they were for her. As you know, the most common word used to describe Jenny Linsky is "shy"—so it wasn't easy for her to adjust to life at the boarding school she went to when the Captain was "obliged" to go away to sea. At first Jenny was intimidated by all the things the other cats already knew. For instance, this little tune:

"If you will learn manners,"
The dear Teacher said,
"Then you shall have Catnip
Before going to bed."

"Oh give us our Catnip,"
The kittens insisted.
"Without any Catnip
Our Manners get twisted."

"Untwist your best Manners,"
The kind Teacher said,
"For you shall have Catnip
Before going to bed."

and they all lined right up for their catnip before Jenny had any idea what was going on.

To make matters worse, that brash creature, Pickles the Firecat (who might be familiar from his own book) picked on Jenny mercilessly, as you can see from the pages below. 

We don't want to give anything away, but in the end, Jenny does manage to gather courage, and make new friends at The School for Cats—including the formidable Pickles.

The School for Cats was originally published in 1947 and the design of the title page below has a surprising Bauhaus flavor. Look at that use of Futura, which complements Averill's simple drawings and at the same time suggests a schoolroom ABC chart. Someone very hip must've been designing children's books for Harper (Jenny's original publisher) back then!

We've been talking about the animated film adaptation of My Dog Tulip for a while now, but it's finally close to having a US distributor—that is, if it gets picked up after the Toronto Film Festival (where it will be showing on September 13, 14, and 18).

The cast of the could not be more illustrious. Christopher Plummer, Lynne Redgrave, and Isabella Rossellini are among those who lend voices to this most adult (and often scatological) story of a middle-aged gay man's discovery of the love he spent his life searching for—in the form of an ill-behaved German Shepherd (or Alsation, as they're also known).

The filmmakers, the husband-and-wife team of Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, have a no less impressive pedigree, including a Peabody award for their Still Life with Animated Dogs. Paul began his career as an independent producer of television and theatrical shorts in his native Czechoslovakia. After emigrating to the US in the late '60s, he established a studio and created films for Sesame Street (such as the famous "Little Teeny Superhero") and Nickelodeon, in addition to longer works, including an animated autobiography, that have appeared in such venues as PBS's Independent Lens series. Sandra has been Paul's close collaborator on many of these projects. She is responsible for the resplendent coloration of the film.

Go to www.tulipthedog.com to see clips of the film and to find out more.

Summer Will Show is the third novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner to appear as an NYRB Classic, having been preceded by Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune's Maggot. Warner is one of the most inventive, intelligent, and plain astonishing British writers of the twentieth century, fully the equal of such contemporaries of hers as Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, not to mention the slightly older Virginia Woolf. She is an unmistakably modern writer who, however, worked outside the conventions of literary modernism. That should make her particularly attractive to readers and writers of today, and adventurous younger novelists like Ali Smith and Sarah Waters have in fact praised her very highly in recent years.

Summer Will Show is a historical novel set in 1848, that famous disastrous year of revolutionary uprisings throughout Europe. It is the story of Sophia Willoughby, a headstrong and stubborn young aristocrat of—at least to begin with—ironclad Tory conviction. Having made an early marriage to a classic cad, Sophia has hastily borne two children before packing her cheating husband off to Paris and into the arms of his mistress. Now in rural English retreat, she has decided to devote herself to bringing up her children precisely as she was brought up—the only proper way, after all. But then the children die.

What to do? Grief-stricken, Sophia eventually makes her way to Paris, driven by the thought that her husband, whatever his failings, can at least supply her with more children. Paris, however, is in the throes of revolution. Sophia unexpectedly encounters Minna, the despised mistress, and the two women fall in love.

I'm not going to give away more of the plot of this exciting and surprising book, in which nothing is ever quite as it seems. It is an increasingly bloody carnival, a tale of modern metamorphosis to set beside Ovid's ancient ones, and a book about the ways love remakes and unmakes people, one in which the politics of the heart exist in competition and confusion with politics as usual. It is a disconcerting, even radical book, and its central subject, as in much of Warner's work, is the inherent strangeness of the self, resistant to control, insusceptible to coercion, demanding one way or another to be discovered and demanding more after that. How to come to terms with this insistent stranger within?

Throughout much of the last century, the historical novel was in very low critical repute; it was daring for Warner to take up this déclassé genre. Recently, however, the genre has had a surprising revival: think of Ragtime, J.G. Farrell's Siege of Krishnapur, or Beloved; of Hilary Mantel's great novel of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. What the best of these new historical novels have in common is that they function not as period pieces but as a form of inquiry into history, an inquiry that implicates the present just as much as the past. Summer Will Show looks forward to these books—or they allow us to look back at it and read it with renewed appreciation for Warner's achievement. In a year of revolution, Warner's characters are all under the pressure of historical forces they can barely imagine. They feel themselves becoming ever stranger to themselves, ever more weirdly historical, with every step and quarrel and kiss. In 1936, when Summer Will Show was first published, history was of course very much in the air—but then it always is. Warner's novel awakens us to the ways in which our lives are, as another great writer puts it, "historical, flowing and flown."

Those words are Elizabeth Bishop's, and it strikes me now that Warner's work may remain underestimated for much same the reason that Bishop's was throughout much of her life. Warner doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve. She doesn't make a point of writing about big important subjects in a big important way. (To write a historical novel like Summer Will Show in the 30s was, among other things, very much not to write something like The Waves or For Whom the Bell Tolls.) Though utterly individual, she never cultivated a trademark style or subject—each of her novels is different from the last—and though she writes beautifully she is careful never to draw attention to her art.

Her books, however, leave indelible marks. Lolly Willowes, published in 1926, was Warner's first book and an improbable bestseller. It is the story of a spinster who cuts herself loose from the constraints of respectable family life by becoming a witch and entering into a pact with the Devil. It appears to be a straightforward, though in its day still provocative, feminist parable (call it A Broom of One's Own), and yet the book takes a mysterious and troubling turn at the end, as the heroine renounces her witchcraft and takes to the road, sleeping out in the open and moving ever farther away from society—as if true freedom could only be had at the cost of a separation from humanity and even life.

Mr. Fortune's Maggot may be the most perfect (even if perfection doesn't admit of degrees) book in the NYRB Classics series—an immaculate work, the story of a missionary on a tiny island in the South Seas who falls in love with a young man (again a daring subject for its day) and loses his faith. Timothy Fortune isn't your stereotypic fictional missionary, all dead dogma and dammed-up desire, but a genuinely good man for whom the discovery of love and the discovery of his utter aloneness come with a shock any of us can share. And yet nothing in Warner's telling of his tale is melodramatic or sentimental. The "maggot" that sticks out of the book's title means foible—Warner alluding almost ironically both to Fortune's falling in love and falling from grace—but it also echoes the names of lute and keyboard fantasies by early English composers like Byrd and Dowland and Gibbons. These dance-inspired pieces, with titles such as "Lord Salisbury's Pavan" and "Hugh Aston's Ground," are both stately and melancholy, brooding and quirky, light and dark—precisely the qualities of the book itself.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a woman of extraordinary achievement—not only a marvelous novelist and writer of stories but a very fine poet and a notable musicologist to boot. Summer Will Show is perhaps her most out-and-out exciting book, but Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune's Maggot are equally good places to start exploring the work of a wonderful writer who seems all the more central because she stands so beautifully apart.

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

******************

Sylvia Townsend Warner is featured in the Gay Icons exhibit at the National Portrait Galley in London, have a look here and here.

 

The Marshal Insect Album via Bibliodyssey

"For a long time I lived without hating anything much. Today, I positively hate flies. Even thinking about them brings tears to my eyes. A life entirely devoted to wiping them out seems to me a great destiny. I mean the flies of Asia; those who have never been out of Europe are no judges of the matter. In Europe flies keep to windows, to sticky liquids, to the shade of corridors. Sometimes they even wander on to a flower. They are no more than shadows of themselves, exorcised – that is to say, innocent. In Asia they are spoilt by the abundance of the dead and the abandon of the living, and they have a sinister insouciance. Tough and relentless, smuts from some horrible material, they are up with the sun and the world is theirs. Once it is daylight, sleep is impossible. At the slightest hint of repose, they take you for a dead horse and attack their favourite morsels: the corners of the lips, around the eyes, the eardrums. You find yourself asleep? They venture forth, get in a panic, and in their inimitable manner buzz up channels of the most sensitive mucus membranes in the nose, at which point you leap to your feet, retching. But if there is a cut, an ulcer or a spot that hasn’t yet healed over, you could perhaps doze off for a bit because they will make a beeline for that, and their tipsy immobility then – replacing their odious agitation – has to be seen to be believed. You can then observe one at leisure: it has no obvious appeal, is not exactly streamlined, and its broken, erratic, absurd flight, designed to get on one’s nerves, is beneath contempt. The mosquito, which one would happily do without, is an artist by comparison."

From The Way of the World
by Nicolas Bouvier

Today would have been H.P. Lovecraft's 119th birthday. In the introduction to our own Lovecraft-inspired anthology, The Colour Out of Space, editor D. Thin talks about his particular brand of horror:

"The true weird tale," Lovecraft writes, "has something more than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain-a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and daemons of unplumbed space." The fa- miliar scenes of daily life fall away to reveal an unthinkable, encompassing alien dimension that threatens to engulf and destroy everything. It may break out of space or out of time, a pastness or futurity suddenly erupting within or descending upon the present. It may break out of the supposed sanctum of the self-the familiar figure in the mirror abruptly proving itself a stranger, a ghost, a mere host to an entity of some unimagined sort. Or it may emerge in the body like a disease, corrupting its tissues and disorganizing its structures, so that it turns pestilent and repugnant, oozing or crumbling away before our eyes. "The true weird tale," Lovecraft writes, "has something more than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain-a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and daemons of unplumbed space." The fa- miliar scenes of daily life fall away to reveal an unthinkable, encompassing alien dimension that threatens to engulf and destroy everything. It may break out of space or out of time, a pastness or futurity suddenly erupting within or descending upon the present. It may break out of the supposed sanctum of the self-the familiar figure in the mirror abruptly proving itself a stranger, a ghost, a mere host to an entity of some unimagined sort. Or it may emerge in the body like a disease, corrupting its tissues and disorganizing its structures, so that it turns pestilent and repugnant, oozing or crumbling away before our eyes.

And thanks to GalleyCat's Ron Hogan for pointing out this fitting tribute, The Mountain Goats, "Lovecraft in Brooklyn"

The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society

Laura Miller on Lovecraft in Salon

©The Cartoonbank.com

Aug. 11 [1858]. The great bullfrogs, of various colors from dark brown to greenish yellow, lie out on the surface of these slimy pools or in the shallow water by the shore, motionless and philosophic. Toss a chip to one, and he will instantly leap and seize and drop it as quick. Motionless and indifferent as they appear, they are ready to leap upon their prey at any instant.

Our blowout summer sale is still on. Book groupings discounted 40%, individual books discounted 25%. 

You know what books are part of that sale? The two John Williams books we publish: Everybody's favorite story about a depressed academic, Stoner, along with Sam Mendes's favorite Western, Butcher's Crossing. At The Quarterly Conversation, Scott Bryan Wilson explains why the books are "impossible to put down." And, as part of the National Book Foundation's countdown of the 77 fiction winners of the National Book Award, Harold Augenbraum discusses Williams's Augustus.

Morte D'Urban won the National Book Award in 1963, and both Joshua Ferris and Fiona Maazel discuss it at that very same NBA Fiction blog.

All right, we have no real idea if Butcher's Crossing is Sam Mendes's favorite Western or not, but we do know that he'll be producing a film adaptation of it as part of a new deal he's made with Focus Features.

Other recent books you can pick up on the cheap for a bit longer: Sylvia Townsend Warner's romantic, beautiful, enthralling lesbian love story set during the French revolution of 1848, Summer Will Show, and our two Elaine Dundy novels, including her roman-à-clef follow-up to The Dud Avocado, The Old Man and Me.

A High Wind in Jamaica is not part of the sale, but Andrew Sean Greer thinks you must read it anyway, listen to the story on NPR here.

According to Jesse Kornbluth (aka The Head Butler) you must also read James Thurber's 13 Clocks.

James Wood really did play the bongos in honor of Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives. Peter Terzian must be a very persuasive man.

Before Esperanza Spalding was singing to Barack Obama at the White House, she was singing the praises of The Summer Book.

The Recent production of a theatrical adaptation of Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate as part of the Lincoln Center got the Post's Elisabeth Vincentelli thinking about the source material. If anyone knows if the play is traveling, please get in touch with us.

The philosophy of Pinocchio.

Christopher Byrd explains How Platonov Can Change Your Life (very little collectivization required) at the always-delightful BN Review.

We've been sitting on this preview of Alistair Reid and Ben Shan's Ounce Dice Trice for a while now. And even though the book isn't on sale yet—we've only just received a few advance copies this week—we couldn't resist sharing some choice pages. The only problem was, figuring which pages to choose, since almost every one contains something delightful. Alastair Reid, who for many years worked at the New Yorker, drew on "odd notebooks" for wonderful, private, obscure, mouth-bending words. He addressed his young readers in a very short introduction to the book:

"And if you grow to love words for their own sake, you will begin to collect words yourself, and you will be grateful, as I am, to all the people who collect odd words and edit odd dictionaries, out of sheer astonishment and affection."

An aside: A few months ago, Vicky Raab just happened to run into Mr. Reid on the subway, and she wrote about the chance encounter at the New Yorker's Book Bench blog.

The Lyric Theater, Tupelo, Mississippi

If you only know Elaine Dundy through her novels (the ones we publish were written early in her career) then you probably don't know that Dundy was the author of Elvis and Gladys, a well-regarded biography of the singer and his mother ("my friends thought I'd gone not only out of my mind but my realm" she wrote in her biography, Life Itself) and Ferriday, Louisiana. She spent many months in Tupelo, Mississippi in the early 80s researching Elvis's birthplace and made some lifelong friends there, including Roy Turner, a reasearch assistant who became one of her best friends. Since Elaine's death, Roy's been working on setting up a foundation to benefit the arts in Tupelo. The first grant has been awarded to the Lyric Theater, where Elvis watched movies as a child—and which now houses a local theater group.

Royalties from the sale of Elaine Dundy's books will go to the fund. For the full text of the article below, click here.

"Finding the entrance to the labyrinth is not the simplest of steps, for I find myself separated from it by another labyrinth. I no longer live in Aran; I cannot jump on my bicycle and go and have another look at that harsh grey hillside. My sight-lines and thought-lines to it are interrupted by the thick boggy hills and dazzling waters of Connemara. I am too far for touch, too near for Proustian telescopy. There is also a dense forest of signposts in the way, the huge amount of material I have assembled to help me. Here to my hand are a shelf of books, thirteen piled volumes of diary, boxes bursting with record cards, a filing-cabinet of notes, letters, off prints from specialist journals, maps and newspaper cuttings. Also, three ring-binders of writing accumulated over a dozen years towards this work, some of it outdated, misinformed, unintelligibly sketchy, some so highly polished it will have to be cracked open again in order to fuse with what is still to be written. What tense must I use to comprehend memories, memories of memories of what is forgotten, words that once held memories but are now just words? What period am I to set myself in, acknowledging the changes in the island noted in my brief revisitings over the years, the births and deaths I hear of in telephone calls? In what voice am I to embody the person who wrote that first volume with little thought of publisher or readership during a cryptic, enisled time, I who live nearer the main and have had public definitions attached to me, including some I would like to shake off—environmentalist, cartographer—and whose readers will open this volume looking for more of the same and will be disappointed if they get it? How am I to lose myself once again among the stones of Aran"

 The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories
Mavis Gallant
Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri
to be published fall 2009

Thanks to Granta magazine, which published a converation between these two writers in the summer 2009 issue, for posting these clips.

Q&A with Jhumpa Lahiri and Mavis Gallant

Jhumpa Lahiri and Mavis Gallant Q&A from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

 
Masanobu Fukuoka holding copies of the first English-language edition of The One-Straw Revolution
(all photographs from the collection of Larry Korn)

Larry Korn, editor of the English translation of Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution, will talk about his apprenticeship with the Japanese master of natural farming between now and June 30th, 2009. And he will be leading a permaculture design course in Eugene Oregon the last two weeks of July.

Korn apprenticed on Fukuoka’s farm for two years in the mid 1970s and collaborated in translating into English the Japanese farmer’s reflections on farming in harmony with nature. First published in 1978, The One-Straw Revolution had a profound impact on people around the world seeking a truly ecological approach to growing food.

Out of print for many years, the book is now regarded as one of the seminal texts of the international Permaculture movement. Because of growing interest in sustainable agriculture, the New York Review of Books recently re-published The One-Straw Revolution, with a preface by Wendell Berry and a new introduction by Frances Moore Lappé.

Fukuoka's book is a call to arms, a manifesto, and a radical rethinking of global agriculture. The book is also a personal memoir by a man whose spiritual beliefs underpinned and informed every aspect of his innovative farming system.

Equal parts farmer and philosopher, Fukuoka is recognized as a pioneer of the natural farming and Permaculture movements. Following World War II in Japan, Fukuoka returned to his family farm and, over three decades, perfected farming practices that all but eliminated the use of pesticides, fertilizer, tillage, and the wasteful effort associated with them. Fukuoka farmed actively into his eighties and died in 2008 at the age of ninety-five.

Masanobu Fukuoka and Larry Korn

Korn has a degree in Soil Science and Plant Nutrition at UC-Berkeley and is a certified Permaculture instructor. In addition to editing The One-Straw Revolution, Korn edited the The Future Is Abundant, a Guide to Sustainable Agriculture, and he is well versed in ecological approaches to farming in the Northwest.

TOUR DATES

June 23rd
Seattle Community Event
Sponsored by Tilth Seattle
7:30 p.m., doors open at 7 p.m.
Theater Off Jackson, 409 7th Ave S., Seattle WA  98104
($5 suggested donation)

June 25th   
King’s Book Store
218 St. Helens Ave.
Tacoma, WA 98402
(253) 272-8801
 7:00 Slides and Talk

June 26th
Olympia Community Event
Contact:  Marisha Auerbach

June 27th   
Portland Farmer’s Market
Powell’s Books booth
850 SW Main St.
Portland, OR   South Park Blocks at PSU
10am – 12am

June 29th   
Portland Community Event
Contact:  Marisha Auerbach

June 30th   
Permaculture Design Course
Portland, OR
Contact:  Marisha Auerbach

July 18 – Aug 2
Permaculture Design Course
Dharmalaya
356 Horn Lane
Eugene, Oregon 97404
(541) 342-7621