Trevor’s Comments (group member since Aug 02, 2012)

Trevor’s comments from the NYRB Classics group.

I'm hoping to start it tonight! I have a lot of other books in the works right now, though, so I'm a bit nervous.

Book club read for January 2024.

I think it sounds awesome! I'm heavily involved in Kim McNeil's #NYRBWomen23 read along (2 books per month for 2023), and she recently put up the list for #NYRBWomen24. I do plan to read other NYRB books, so it's always good to see places to chat about it!

Okay, it's number 1 now, and should also be showing in the group's homepage. I can change the format a bit also, Michael, so that Arabesques is not showing as a link if you'd like.

Edit to add: I changed Arabesques to be the book rather than a link to the book's page, so that will also populate around GR accordingly. I did set a stop date for the poll, Michael, but go ahead and set that however you'd like at this point. It shouldn't change the position of the poll.

Here is the link to the poll.

I'm not sure why your poll is showing as random number 16. I can take a look at that and see if I can figure it out.

I was just going through my collection of NYRB Classics today and pulled down the two Powers books I have of the three they've published. I still haven't read them! I know I need to though, particularly now that I've had two reminders in one day!

No, you usually get a 12 month membership plus the free book. This one is 13 plus the free book for the same price.

NYRB Classics just sent out an email that if you join their book club now you get a 13-month subscription for the price of 12 and a free book. The free book looks to be The Red Thread, and if you order by April 15 your first book will be Malicroix (which I'm loving). Here is the link.

I started this one today, and I think it’s already so good! If any one else is reading it, please do chime in. I will try to come on here to leave some thoughts as I go through it.

At this point, I like it more than I liked The Door, and I really liked The Door!

It is!

I got a copy of it a day or two ago, and it looks wonderful. The first story really grabbed me. I'll edit the top post to show the contents.

Machines in the Head: Selected Stories



Publication Date: February 18, 2020
Pages: 170
Edited and with a foreword by Victoria Walker

Anna Kavan is one of the great originals of twentieth-century fiction, comparable to Leonora Carrington and Jean Rhys, a writer whose stories explored the inner world of her imagination and plumbed the depths of her long addiction to heroin. This new selection of Kavan’s stories gathers the best work from across the many decades of her career, including oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and institutionalization from Asylum Piece (1940), moving evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945), fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958), and stories of addiction from Julia and the Bazooka (1970). Kavan’s turn to science fiction in her final novel, Ice, is reflected in her late stories, while “Starting a Career,” about a mercenary dealer of state secrets, is published here for the first time.

Kavan experimented throughout her writing career with results that are moving, funny, bizarre, poignant, often unsettling, always unique. Machines in the Head offers American readers the first full overview of the work of a fearless and dazzling literary explorer.

Contents:

from Asylum Piece (1940)
Going Up in the World
The Enemy
Airing a Grievance
The Summons
At Night
Machines in the Head
Asylum Piece II
The End in Sight
There Is No End

from I Am Lazarus (1945)
Palace of Sleep
The Blackout
Face of My People
The Gannets
Our City

from A Bright Green Field (1958)
A Bright Green Field
Ice Storm
All Saints

from Julia and the Bazooka (1970)
The Old Address
A Visit
Fog
World of Heroes
Julia and the Bazooka

from My Soul in China (1975)
Five More Days to Countdown

Previously Unpublished
Starting a Career

Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures



Publication Date: February 4, 2020
Pages: 176
Introduction by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon
Translated from the German by Damion Searls

The German sociologist Max Weber is one of the most venturesome, stimulating, and influential theorists of the modern condition. Among his most significant works are the so-called vocation lectures, published shortly after the end of World War I and delivered at the invitation of a group of student activists. The question the students asked Weber to address was simple and haunting: In a modern world characterized by the division of labor, economic expansion, and unrelenting change, was it still possible to consider an academic or political career as a genuine calling? In response Weber offered his famous diagnosis of “the disenchantment of the world,” along with a challenging account of the place of morality in the classroom and in research. In his second lecture he introduced the notion of political charisma, assigning it a central role in the modern state, even as he recognized that politics is more than anything “a slow and difficult drilling of holes into hard boards.”

Damion Searls’s new translation brings out the power and nuance of these celebrated lectures. Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s introduction describes their historical and biographical background, reception, and influence. Weber’s effort to rethink the idea of a public calling at the start of the tumultuous twentieth century is revealed to be as timely and stirring as ever.

The Criminal Child



Publication Date: January 21, 2020
Pages: 128
Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell and Jeffrey Zuckerman

The Criminal Child offers the first English translation of a key early work by Jean Genet. In 1949, in the midst of a national debate about improving the French reform-school system, a French radio station commissioned Genet to write about his experience as a juvenile delinquent. He sent back a piece about his youth that was a paean to prison instead of the expected horrifying exposé. Revisiting the cruel hazing rituals that had accompanied his incarceration, relishing the special argot spoken behind bars, Genet wondered if regulating that strange other world wouldn’t simply prevent future children from discovering their essentially criminal nature in the way that he had. The radio station chose not to broadcast Genet’s views.

“The Criminal Child” appears here with a selection of Genet’s finest essays, including his celebrated piece on the art of Alberto Giacometti.

Sketches of the Criminal World, Further Kolyma Stories



Publication Date: January 14, 2020
Pages: 576
Translated from the Russian by Donald Rayfield
Introduction by Alissa Valles

In 1936, Varlam Shalamov, a journalist and writer, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and sent to the Soviet Gulag. He survived fifteen years in the prison camps and returned from the Far North to write one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the years he spent in the Gulag. Sketches of the Criminal World is the second of two volumes (the first, Kolyma Stories, was published by NYRB Classics in 2018) that together constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text.

In this second volume, Shalamov sets out to answer the fundamental moral questions that plagued him in the camps where he encountered firsthand the criminal world as a real place, far more evil than Dostoyevsky’s underground: “How does someone stop being human?” and “How are criminals made?” By 1972, when he was writing his last stories, the camps were being demolished, the guard towers and barracks razed. “Did we exist?” Shalamov asks, then answers without hesitation, “I reply, ‘We did.’”

The Simple Past



Publication Date: January 7, 2020
Pages: 240
Introduction by Adam Shatz
Translated from the French by Hugh A. Harter

The Simple Past came out in 1954, and both in France and its author’s native Morocco the book caused an explosion of fury. The protagonist, who shares the author’s name, Driss, comes from a Moroccan family of means, his father a self-made tea merchant, the most devout of Muslims, quick to be provoked and ready to lash out verbally or physically, continually bent on subduing his timid wife and many children to his iron and ever-righteous will. He is known, simply, as the Lord, and Driss, who is in high school, is in full revolt against both him and the French colonial authorities, for whom, as much as for his father, he is no one. Driss Chraïbi’s classic coming-of-age story is about colonialism, Islam, the subjection of women, and finding, as his novel does, a voice that is as cutting and coruscating as it is original and free.

Agathe: Or, The Forgotten Sister



Publication Date: December 17, 2019
Pages: 400
Translated from the German by Joel Agee

Agathe is the sister of Ulrich, the restless and elusive “man without qualities” at the center of Robert Musil’s great, unfinished novel of the same name. For years Agathe and Ulrich have ignored each other, but when brother and sister find themselves reunited over the bier of their dead father, they are electrified. Each is the other’s spitting image, and Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more defiant and inquiring than Ulrich. Beginning with a series of increasingly intense “holy conversations,” the two gradually enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, identity, and understanding in pursuit of a new, true form of being that they are seeking to discover.

Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is perhaps the most profoundly exploratory and unsettling masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction. Agathe; or, The Forgotten Sister reveals with new clarity a particular dimension of this multidimensional book—the dimension that meant the most to Musil himself and that inspired some of his most searching writing. The outstanding translator Joel Agee captures the acuity, audacity, and unsettling poetry of a book that is meant to be nothing short of life-changing.

For posterity, here was the original cover:

Did anyone else pick this up? It's a lot of fun. Many of the pieces are from published books, but it's wonderful to see the work NYRB Classics has done. Also, at the end is a nice full list of everything they've published up to The Red Thread.

I didn't realize until today that I had not updated the cover to the final. For posterity, here was the initial cover art (that, as of now, is still up on Amazon).

Wonderful comments here, folks! I love the pictures, Karen!