An NYRB Classics Original Simone Weil--philosopher, activist, mystic--is one of the most uncompromising of modern spiritual masters. In "On the Abolition of All Political Parties" she challenges the foundation of the modern liberal political order, making an argument that has particular resonance today, when the apathy and anger of the people and the self-serving partisanship of the political class present a threat to democracies all over the world. Dissecting the dynamic of power and propaganda caused by party spirit, the increasing disregard for truth in favor of opinion, and the...
An NYRB Classics Original Simone Weil--philosopher, activist, mystic--is one of the most uncompromising of modern spiritual masters. In "On the A...
First published in 1968, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country established William Gass as one of America's finest and boldest writers of fiction, and nearly fifty years later, the book still stands as a landmark of contemporary fiction. The two novellas and three short stories it contains are all set in the Midwest, and together they offer a mythical reimagining of America's heartland, with its punishing extremes of heat and cold, its endless spaces and claustrophobic households, its hidden and baffled desires, its lurking threat of violence. Exploring and expanding the limits...
First published in 1968, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country established William Gass as one of America's finest and boldest writers of...
An NYRB Classics Original Tove Jansson was a master of brevity, unfolding worlds at a touch. Her art flourished in small settings, as can be seen in her bestselling novel The Summer Book and in her internationally celebrated cartoon strips and books about the Moomins. It is only natural, then, that throughout her life she turned again and again to the short story. The Woman Who Borrowed Memories is the first extensive selection of Jansson s stories to appear in English. Many of the stories collected here are pure Jansson, touching on island solitude and the dangerous...
An NYRB Classics Original Tove Jansson was a master of brevity, unfolding worlds at a touch. Her art flourished in small settings, as can be seen...
In 1933, Victor Serge was arrested by Stalin s police, interrogated, and held in solitary confinement for more than eighty days. Released, he spent two years in exile in remote Orenburg. These experiences were the inspiration for "Midnight in the Century," Serge s searching novel about revolutionaries living in the shadow of Stalin s betrayal of the revolution. Among the exiles gathered in the town of Chenor, or Black-Waters, are the granite-faced Old Bolshevik Ryzhik, stoic yet gentle Varvara, and Rodion, a young, self-educated worker who is trying to make sense of the world and...
In 1933, Victor Serge was arrested by Stalin s police, interrogated, and held in solitary confinement for more than eighty days. Released, he spent...
An NYRB Classics Original Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious. Italo Calvino has written that no other writer "better captures the magic...
An NYRB Classics Original Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of...
Anthropology is a science whose most significant discoveries have come when it has taken its bearings from literature, and what makes Paul Radin's PrimitiveMan as Philosopher a seminal piece of anthropological inquiry is that it is also a book of enduring wonder. Writing in the 1920s, when anthropology was still young, Radin set out to show that -primitive- cultures are as intellectually sophisticated and venturesome as any of their -civilized- counterparts. The basic questions about the structure of the natural world, the nature of right and wrong, and the meaning of life and...
Anthropology is a science whose most significant discoveries have come when it has taken its bearings from literature, and what makes Paul Radin's ...
One of The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015" An NYRB Classics Original The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary s Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda s housekeeper and she has taken control over Magda s household,...
One of The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015" An NYRB Classics Original The Door is an unsettling explo...
In the winter of 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick ( Paddy ) Leigh Fermor set out on a walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople. Decades later, Leigh Fermor told the story of that life-changing journey in "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water," works now celebrated as among the most vivid, absorbing, and beautifully written travel books of all time. "The Broken Road" is the account of the final leg of his journey, catching up with Paddy in the fall of 1934, following him through Bulgaria and Romania and ending in Greece. Days and nights on the...
In the winter of 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick ( Paddy ) Leigh Fermor set out on a walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantino...
A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism's most compelling figures In 1937 Leonora Carrington--later to become one of the twentieth century's great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild--was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse in Provence. In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a...
A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism's most compelling figures
The first appearance of Alice Goodman's two internationally-renowned and controversial libretti, alongside one of her masterful translations. An NYRB Classics Original Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer played a crucial role in bringing opera back to life as a contemporary art form, and they have been popular--and, in the case of Klinghoffer, highly controversial--ever since they were first staged by the director Peter Sellars in the eighties and nineties. Both operas were conceived from the start as collaborations between composer and writer, and...
The first appearance of Alice Goodman's two internationally-renowned and controversial libretti, alongside one of her masterful translations. <...
