Other books by NYRB authors

One thing I like about NYRBs is that I discover quite a few new authors. What are some other books by NYRB authors that are worth reading (ones from different publishers)?

I'll have to give a bump to Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo (NYRB publishes his As a Man Grows Older). It's funny, well-written and I always enjoy good psychological novels. The book is the memoir of whiny, neurotic Zeno - written at the behest of his therapist - and follows his relationships, business problems and addiction to smoking.

Hmm DieFledermaus, what does it mean that I saw your description and thought it sounded like a fun book.

I have seen Zeno's Conscience on friend's bookshelves and in bookshop displays so I feel like it is one of those books that is making it's way to my reading list and you may have just tipped it onto the list.

DieFledermaus, actually As a Man Grows Older is Senilita`, not La Coscienza di Zeno.
Italo Svevo was a great writer, so one cannot go wrong with any of his books.

I recently finished The Fountain Overflows and enjoyed it quite a bit. The introduction mentioned that West had planned a trilogy about the same family and that the other two works, though unfinished, had been published. While I was nearing the end of the book, I was thinking that I could probably do with several hundred more pages of narrative, so I was hoping to track the rest of the trilogy down. Has anyone read the other books - This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund?

I have read Cousin Rosamund, but not This Real Night, even if it has been sitting on one of my shelves for a while.
I love Rebecca West's style and her way of constructing a story and depicting the characters.
The Fountain Overflows is, in my opinion, better than Cousin Rosamund.

I've read The Fountain Overflows and This Real Night (which is the second in the planned trilogy). Cousin Rosamund was left unfinished at Rebecca West's death. I liked The Fountain Overflows best because it was just such a revelation to me, but I also liked This Real Night. It was sadder, though. It shouldn't be difficult to find a copy (quite a few, starting at a penny, on Amazon!).

(crossposted at 75 book challenge)

A brooding novel, the sort with no vulgar action, The Devil in the Hills holds one rapt with the atmosphere it creates. It is a simple story of three students who fall in with a decadent older couple and end up spending time with them at their remote country estate. A gun appears early in the novel, and though it does go off once, the convulsive explosion with which one expects the novel to end, and to which a lesser novelist would have had recourse, never occurs. Instead it is the relationship among the friends, the descriptions of Italian city, village, and country life, the beauty of the prose (translated by D.D. Paige) that keeps one turning pages, and convinces one that the author, Cesare Pavese was, indeed, an artist of the first rank.

Thank you for speaking so highly of one of my favourite authors, dcozy!
:-))

This was the first book I've read of Pavese's. What would you suggest I read next? The memoirs sound intriguing.

House on the hill and The Moon and the Bonfires. My favourite is La Bella Estate, but I don't know whether it has been translated into English.

I'm reading The Time of Indifference by Alberto Moravia - not an NYRB. I loved his two NYRBs, Contempt and Boredom. This one is published by Steerforth, and they have two others that are sitting on the pile, The Conformist and The Woman of Rome. What other Moravias would people recommend?

I read The Glass Bees by Ernst Jünger but I really preferred his Storm of Steel about his experiences in the trenches during WW I. I wouldn't mind reading more books by Jünger but I don't think anything else has been translated into English.

11> I have a novel by Moravia titled The Lie, but I haven't read it yet.

If you like John Collier's Fancies and Goodnights you should try his novel His Monkey Wife.

I just finished reading Nancy Mitford's translation of The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette. Set during the time of Henri II of France and full of court intrigue, the main story concerns what happens when the Princess of Cleves falls in love with a man who is not her husband. I can't comment on the accuracy of Mitford's translation, but once you get past the first ten or eleven pages of naming of names and explaining of relationships the book is a quick and enjoyable read.

>15 agmlll: I've been slowly making my way through The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh—in which Mitford discusses translating the book, so I've been curious about it. You might want to check that out.

>16 nyrbclassics: Thanks, I'll look it up.

Does she also mention the play The Little Hut by Andre Roussin that she adapted? I have a copy of that, too.

W. W. Jacobs is primarily known for his story "The Monkey's Paw" (included in The Haunted Looking Glass). He also wrote stories set around the London Docks. I picked up a copy of his Salthaven off a sale table and found it very enjoyable. It's a humorous love story with the normal confusions and misunderstandings until the right people end up together.

Just finished T. H. White's England Have My Bones. It's White's diary of a year (April 16, 1934 to March 3, 1935) spent hunting, fishing, learning to fly an airplane, playing darts, and keeping snakes. This is one of White's best books. I enjoyed it even though I'm not particularly fond of hunting.

I just finished T. H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It was a very good biography of a strange and interesting man. (I guess England doesn't have T. H. White's bones since he's buried in Athens.)

I read Limbo Tower by William Lindsay Gresham and enjoyed it. It's set in a tuberculosis ward and concerns the lives of the patients, doctors, and nurses but with more depth than the usual hospital drama. It could stand to be reprinted.

Another book I enjoyed also set in a tuberculosis ward--only this one is true--is Betty MacDonald's The Plague and I. I was recently in the Czech Republic where all Betty MacDonald's adult books are available in Czech. Apparently she is still popular there.

I recently read The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krudy and would recommend it for those who liked Sunflower - it has the same wistful, weird, magic-realist feel. The story follows the title character as he reminisces about past loves, often from the afterlife. Krudy's descriptions of places, characters and inanimate objects are very memorable.

Also - if NYRB published anything else by Krudy, I'd definitely purchase it.

I'd second that DieFledermaus, I'll have to look for The Adventures of Sinbad.

I have The Adventures of Sindbad too -- bought it because I liked Sunflower so much -- and now I'll have to move it up on the TBR.

Just want to let you know that we're planning to publish The Adventures of Sindbad, so if you haven't bought a copy, wait a bit longer. (It won't be out for at least a year, though.)

>25 nyrbclassics: . . . okay :-( . . . What about more e-books.

working working working! It's more work to get an ebook into the world than it may appear. Actually, I should list the ones coming out this month!

Just out of curiosity, what makes getting an ebook into the world more difficult than one would think? I can see how it might be difficult if one were trying to work from pdf files. They do not convert to mobi, prc, etc., well at all. Often the result is gibberish. However, working directly with mobi or prc (both of which can be read on Kindle or the iPad using the Kindle application) is fairly easy to do. Is it a question of proofreading twice? Are there no cross platforms allowing one to move between Adobe, for example, and a dram version of mobi, which is essentially what the Kindle uses? Or are authors and agents getting restive about electronic rights?

25 Oh I might be willing to wait for a year. I am so backlogged at the moment already.

I recently read Sun City by Tove Jansson and it was just as good as The Summer Book. Read it if you can get your hands on a copy. It's about a retirement community in Florida, the characters are mostly elderly or their caretakers, and has that signature Tove Jansson humor/sadness/philosophy that I love. I wrote a review of it on here, check it out.

Also, I'm currently reading Albert Cossery's (author of nyrb's The Jokers) other book A Splendid Conspiracy (New Directions) and it's really a pleasant read. I'm enjoying it immensely, highly recommended.

Jimmy -- there's no link to your review. I read Sun City earlier this year and loved it.

ah -- I see your review is on the book's main page. I wonder if Jansson was ever in Florida. Anybody know?

Great reviews - from both. It's a shame the book is out of print.

I was wondering that too, janeajones. The Florida setting was such an interesting choice for a Finnish writer. It's hard to write about an American subculture as a foreigner, but I thought she did really well in that arena, did you?

JimmyChanga -- I live about 45 miles from St. Petersburg, and although the setting is earlier than my acquaintance with the city and the downtown area has gotten much younger, I recognize some of the landmarks she incorporates, and the ambience is very true to St. Pete. There seems to be very little written about Jansson in English, and I don't read Swedish or Finnish, so I've been rather at a loss for details about any possible trips to Florida.

Cool, thanks for the insight! I think American culture (whether it be Florida or Las Vegas or anywhere in between) must look really strange to a foreigner.

Florida and Las Vegas look really strange to me, and I was born in the US :-)

Haha. Good point

re Tove Jansson query --here's a post from Annix is response to my query about Jansson on a Reading Globally thread:

Regarding Tove Jansson and her knowledge of Florida:
After some web searching I've learnt that she found travelling very important but until the sixties she had only been in Europe and Northern Africa. Then in 1971-72 she and her life companion Tuulikki Pietilä (who by the way was born in the U.S.A., but far from Florida – in Seattle, WA) made a trip around the world via Japan, Hawaii, and Mexico and finally through the U.S.A. up to New York. I have not found any detailed description of this trip or if it included some time in St. Petersburg or even Florida. All I found was that they stayed for an extended period of time in New Orleans where she finished writing The Summer Book.

Sun City was published two years after this journey, in 1974.

You can read a bit about her travels here: http://www.moomin.com/tove/eng/matkalla.html

Great information! Thanks

Jane,

As always, you are a fount of information. Thank you.

41> Hah! That's me -- spouting bits and pieces of extraneous trivia. Hope you're recovering quickly from the HWY pileup!

Recovered. My how news does spread.

I recently finished another book by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Seven stories, and enjoyed it as much as Memories of the Future. The stories have the same sci-fi/metafictional subject matter with occasional comments on life in the Soviet Union and interesting scientific/technological descriptions of emotions.

I wanted to let you all know about a recent republication of another of Barbara Comyns's books, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. The book's been published by a brand-new, very small press with excellent taste.

I wrote a little bit about it & linked to the introduction by Brian Evenson, on our blog: http://bit.ly/ekomdl.

The title alone is fantastic!

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was published by Virago a long time ago.

Finished Casanova: A Study in Self-Portraiture by Stefan Zweig from Pushkin Press. I don't know enough about Casanova's life to judge the factuality of this book, but it seems like a very true and insightful analysis of Casanova's life and work.

Saved a copy of Destinations by Jan Morris at the local library book sale. I've read a number of essays in it, but now I can read the rest. Truly sad to see them discarding this volume.