Best nyrb prints?

hey Veeky Forums, i think the nyrb editions of books are really nice/pretty on a shelf so want to buy myself a few to start a collection. what are the best books that are in print by them? i feel like stoner is an obvious first port-of-call but they print so many obscure titles i'd love to hear a bit about them if possible

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:3

The Doll by Boleslaw Prus

How much do you get paid to constantly shill this brand on Veeky Forums?

i wish i did. they're pretty books though with some obscure titles & authors, i think that's pretty appealing.

also thanks for the suggestions - i've seen a lot about skylark recently, that's definitely on the list

there's a list on goodreads with all the best/most popular nyrb books

Augustus

It's this shit that I hate about nyrb fags. They're in it for meme aesthetics and spoonfed obscurity instead of literature and reading.

Chess Story.

g1, but stoner, butcher's crossing, augustus, modiano(s), stephen zweig(s), there are seriously so many good ones- you could just look through their catalog, pick at random, and not be disappointed

oh wow, m8s good recs

...

"The Collector of Cracks" is one of the most enthralling and imaginative short stories I've ever read. Some of the early stories are kind of a drag to read; I didn't think that "Autobiography of a Corpse" was that good at all. But there are 3 or 4 stories in here that are absolutely great.

i understand this derision but from my perspective the NYRB publishes titles that range from masterpieces to "decent but flawed"

no matter the motivation, if someone picks up a NYRB book and reads it, it's at least one more person reading decent literature.

and i mean, it's not like everyone who picks up war and peace is doing it for "authentic" reasons. many are also posturing pseuds, but whatever, at least they're giving tolstoy a shot.

You will probably hate this, unless you happen to be a hardcore opera music fan or a hardcore homosexual. This book is as glamorous and glittery as a 80's drag queen on her birthday. There is considerable wit and baroque turns of phrase and it devolves towards the end in a flamboyant festival of faggotry. Whatever you think the top is, it's over it. Don't worry, there is no description of gay sex or any such awful act; there's just love for music, art and the sublime, and a cast of characters as improbable and flitting as fairies in a dream.

Who knows, if you're crazy enough to love this book you might even learn to spell its title one day.

for most for the translations they're literally the only source for that book in english, books don't get translated at least not in the US, it's really embarrassing

they also pull books out of being out of print (particualry women writers, not that Veeky Forums cares), like I'm tired of seeing just Stoner talked about as everyone else, but chill

Every time I go to buy a book and find out that it's now being published by NYRB I feel cheated. If possible I always buy an old copy, I hate the cult of consumerism that's grown up around "fine editions." It's like those "people" who obsessively buy Criterion Collection DVDs.

NYRB aren't fine editions. They're just branded reprints.

Fine editions are things like Easton Press.

I like nyrb because they publish literature that would otherwise go unnoticed and unread and bring it to the forefront.
Aesthetically they're nice paperbacks, but the ease of access to relatively obscure works from lesser known writers and countries are the real point of interest.

>Just branded reprints
Is it supposed to be a bad thing that John Williams' ouvre was reprinted and he's finally gaining the acclaim he deserved? Or that relatively unread writers from the middle East, Latin America, and Africa are being printed by a company with a wide readership while maintaining a mid-high literary standard? Or that nyrb picks up books that have gone out of print? I don't understand your complaint here.

also
>Easton press
Gaudy reddit-tier books

Just get Everyman's editions and trash the dust cover. They're more rugged anyway.

Dont get me wrong, I think they publish some fantastic stuff, but it's the authors I care about, not the brand. The brand is what attracts faggots. Europa Editions does a similar thing of making lesser known authors more available in well done editions but they don't get the kind of attention from posturing pseuds that nyrb does.
Point is if they have a book I want I'll buy their edition but I won't pick up something just cause of the publisher.

Season of Migration to the North
Lucky Jim
All John Williams' stuff
Colette's Pure and Impure
Chess Story

>Criterion Collection

I think you're under-rating how useful curation can be. I stopped subscribing to Netflix recently and switched to Hulu because of Criterion. I could spend hours scrolling through Netflix
looking for something that's not shit or I could throw on a random Criterion movie and at least know that it will be decent.

It's a similar case with NYRB. You can (and should) read widely and research the authors you read, but if you want to pick up a random book and be confident that, even if flawed, it will have redeeming qualities, then NYRB provides a valuable service. And, like Criterion, they keep in print works which be difficult or even impossible to find otherwise.

That NYRB collection torrent from sharethreads back in the day was probably the best Veeky Forums related thing I ever downloaded to be quite honest.

On topic- pic related

Short and sweet, you can read it before going to bed.

OP referred to "NYRB prints" as if he was talking about artwork. You know as well as I do that when Barnes and Noble came out with their "Leather Bound Classics" anons here were buying every one just to have a full set, because "they just look so nice on the shelf!" Easton Press and Folio are just more overpriced versions of the same bonded leather garbage. Everyman is the best of a bad lot.

Do you really have hard time finding books to read? I have thousands of books in my list of desiderata. I don't need to pick up random books. You're just letting some Jew's cousin at Yale decide what media you consume. They're also rarely hard to find in print, thanks to the wonders of the internet. Even without an internet connection you could go to a main library and find them all gathering dust. What's hard is picking up some of these guys' "back catalog." NYRB publishes the most popular and accessible books by each author, and then if they sell out their print run they might consider dredging up Butcher's Crossing or Augustus.

I don't care for movies, but I imagine it's slightly different due to the problem of physical discs and tapes moldering away and getting lost forever. Still, you could slap a Criterion Label on a Barenstien Bears dvd and people would buy it.

life and fate

I'm the pro-criterion user you're criticizing.

No, I do not have trouble finding books to read. But I study political philosophy, particularly Plato, and when I want an intelligent piece of fiction, NYRB has not yet steered me wrong. I don't study literature and so I appreciate the expertise of those who do. And, yes, it is because Stoner sold so well that NYRB brought out Butcher's Crossing and Augustus. But how is that a bad thing?

As for your comment about the Berenstein Bears, part of the point of Criterion is that the intelligent layman can trust Criterion not to certify garbage. I am a specialist in ancient political thought, but I am a layman in literature and film, so on those subjects I defer to NYRB and Criterion.

If NYRB or Criterion released editions of The Fault in Our Stars or Transformers, though, then they would lose my trust and their status as accepted curators.

>in it for the aesthetics
funnily enough as i actually read i do own a shelf. i'm always going to have random, one-off books but where i can, seeing as i'm buying it for £9, i like to buy matching books of the same edition. otherwise i'd torrent it free of use on my kindle. and i made this thread to weed out the good works of literature that people suggest. but i guess having nice possessions makes me a fag

oops i used nyrb prints to refer to the collection of books, not artwork. as in collections like penguin modern classics, vintage - they all have similar spines. look organised on the shelf. and if i'm buying a physical copy of a book i will always buy into the aesthetic too - that's just getting the most satisfaction for my money

Yes, this is tremendous. The one with the woman with all her exes inside her eye is really good, as is the one with the runaway hand

eta: Krzhizhanovsky is like Borges meets Kharms

any way you can share pls

Yeah, but it was last updated in 2012 or something

I like drag culture and theater and spectacle so would I still enjoy this without knowing a single thing about opera? I want to read something jovial and proudly homosexual and maybe bitchy involving stage performance.

This is the shit I hate about nyrb haters. Why do you care what I choose to read or what publisher it comes from? Why do you roll your eyes if I read a book with a pretty picture on the cover and a colored spine? Why do you care if I buy a book that has been saved from obscurity?

How do any of these things keep me from reading and experiencing literature?

They dont like the idea of buying lit just because you think it is pretty. Each side imagines a simplified version of the reality and so don't know the whole picture of their target.

Europa makes the worst looking editions, they don't deserve any attention for their covers or presentation.

Z A M A
A
M
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If they have a book you want there's nothing wrong with buying from them, they make a lot of stuff easily available. Buying it for the brand however is of interest outside of literature; the brand attracts faggots who have a shallow interest in "aesthetics" and showing off their collection of branded "obscure" books. It stops being about the authors, literature, or reading at that point and slides into appearance and consumer wankery.

I tried reading "Ice" by Sorokin and it was abysmal. Even if it was the translation that was the problem NYRB still done fucked up with that one.

You don't think utilitarianism has an aesthetic all of its own? I have some books my brother brought back from a holiday in Slovenia and the cheap, communist era, unpretentious appearance of the books is sort of soothing compared to all the bright colours and gloss and glacial white paper you see now. Pretty much every country has better taste in book design than the anglosphere. When I go to the Latin American section of the library, I notice something different: the books aren't tacky! Same with France, Germany, Russia/Yugoslavia. There's no silver foil, no garish pictorial covers, no author's name in giant text. It's nice.

>It stops being about the authors, literature, or reading at that point and slides into appearance and consumer wankery.
I agree with everything you said, but consumer wankery is rampant, and very few escape it. The arts are no exception to this. My post was kinda just me saying if you're a purist, be a purist, go ahead, read, write, starve, bleed, sip wine, puff fags, do whatever qualifies as the authentic literary or artistic lifestyle, but don't worry if I indulge in consumer wankery from time to time.

So you find nothing wrong with buying books simply because
>the nyrb editions of books are really nice/pretty on a shelf
They're not being bought to be read, the OP doesn't even know what books he wants. He just wants the spines on the shelf. That doesn't bother you? That doesn't set off pseud alarms?

Ice is great you pleb. Just because you can't into literature and aesthetics doesn't mean everyone else is a braindead moron.

Caring about the apperance of a book is the plebbiest thing you can do and you're exhibiting it in spades.

Oh, I read them. I around six or seven myself.

No, it doesn't bother me if someone wants to buy many books from the same publisher so they match and look nice.

It takes just as much conscious effort and "phoneyness" to deliberately work around nyrb editions so that your bookshelf is composed of books from many different publishers and they all appear disheveled and nonuniform, like a true patrician shelf should be, like the shelves you see lining the walls of some posh apartment or country home owned by your favorite author.

What if I was reading a book by another publisher and then decided I'd read a bunch of nyrb and just add them to my collection cause they look so nice while I explore that catalogue?

am i a phoney then?

literally no one gives a shit

I buy mostly from second hand shops and library sales (unless I absolutely have to buy online) and it's really easy to ignore appearance or who it's published by and just get what's available.

Hard Rain Falling
The Peregrine
Warlock
Life and Fate

I would say do whatever you want and I find it ridiculous that we are talking at length about arbitrary rules that should govern the purchase of books, but I know that's not an answer you're looking for.

I'd say no. I see no problem with that.

Of course it is easy.
I'm talking about people who make it a matter of principle not to own nyrb copies because they have a reputation of being made for consumer fuckholes.

nobody ever said that, just that it's shallow to buy based on publisher reputation alone.

that's the only answer to admit. this bickering is dumb af

I did their bookclub for a year and it was pretty good

T.circa 2008 hipster

I know no one said it, but it has been heavily implied in this and ever other one of these threads, so I figured I'd put it into words.

>alone
That's what stared this whole thing lad.

>If NYRB or Criterion released editions of The Fault in Our Stars or Transformers, though, then they would lose my trust and their status as accepted curators.

The criterion collection wasn't quite the same back then. They were coming from their laserdisc days, and they didn't try to do the same thing as they do now. They reinvented themselves later on, NYRB started with roughly the same mission as they have now.

I think I made the book sound gayer than it is. I don't even think there is any mention of homosexuality at all and the main character is quite hetero. There is something flamboyant and glittery about the book though and it s seeped in a sort of arrogance that's still endearing.

I didn't know much about opera music either and still have no idea what they were talking about when they mention certain vocal inflections and other such musical geekiness. But that didn't stop me from enjoying it.

Have you read this? Would you recommend it? It caught my eye months ago and I've been considering giving it a go.

The two that I have read are Summerbook, which is one of my favorite books and Asleep in the Sun, which I also enjoyed pretty immensely although it made me very sad. If the rest of the collection is this well curated, I am very interested in reading more.

Ah, that still sounds great. Thanks for the OBSCURE suggestion m8.

I just hate how gaudy and tasteless everything marketed for anglos is.

There's no equivalent to NRF or Reclam in the English market. The closest thing is Penguin Classics but we all know how badly they can screw up a cover. They will pick the most garish image possible so long as it lures people into buying it.

I wish each publisher's books looked exactly the same: a jacketless hardcover with a colophon stamped on the boards and the title and author stamped on the spine. When I'm dictator that's gonna be the rule.

I've read it and I really liked it, it is probably the great opera novel of all time. But I am also a hardcore opera lover. I think a LOT would be lost on someone who wasn't familiar with the operatic repertoire as a lot of the plot beats echo operatic tropes such as "the curse", "the love potion", "the mad scene" etc. Like, there's not much sense in reading about the nuances of a legendary performance of La Traviata if you've never even listened to La Traviata yourself.

As far as a gay novel, it's not a great example either, most of it is subtext as it's set in the late 40s, and all the major relationships in the story are straight, though with a heavy dose of camp.

It's berenstain. I wouldn't have believed it either but my kids have some of the books.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
Raymond Queneau- Witch Grass
VASILY GROSSMAN

>They reinvented themselves later on

that's apparently bc of a deal they have with ifc or some other company

Oh, I see. Well, I enjoyed it anyway and I think that says as much about the quality of the novel as about my ignorance. I'm asking myself: would I have appreciated and loved the Iliad had I no idea about the history, warfare and society of the ancient Greeks? Yes, yes I would have, and I did. That's great writing, it transcedes its subject matter and setting. Just as with the gay undertones; maybe some of them flew right past me but I still liked that posh playfulness that permeates the whole thing.

Thanks for pointing out how the ludicrousness of the plot is somewhat explained by the presence of opera tropes. Of course! I don't remember this being mentioned in any of the few reviews I've read.

Can you spell the whole name without looking out up? The truth, now!

I know, I just, some habits die hard.

The book came in the mail last week. Halfway through so far. Enjoying it but can't say I understand everything

I would like a link pls

link pls

My favorite

...

and this

Fools on you, I pirate them all

The Slynx
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

That hurt my soul holy shit.

This looks promising. Sad you've overstated the gayness. Love my lit faggy and disreputable. But the camp and the flambouyance have me hooked.

I was a little disappointed with The Invention of Morel cover - though I'm infinitely grateful to NYRB for publishing a readily available copy of it. And I'm especially happy they published a bilingual collection of Reverdy poems which I would recommend to anyone on earth.

As for their best covers, I'm fond of Augustino myself.

stoner
augustus
butcher's crossing
warlock
invention of morel
misadventures of maqroll
the long ships
hard rain falling
life and fate
everything flows
the foundation pit
day of the owl
chess story
the post office girl
beware of pity
journey by moonlight
the thirty years war (nonfiction)

that's the list of what i've got/read