ITT: The best NYRB Classics

I'll start

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been shilling this shit in the hopes that one other person reads it. it's brilliant

have had this on my to-read pile for more than a year. going to read it this weekend

Short but great. Almost an early form of Old Boy.

Extremely comfy story of refugees who move to a farm in northern vermont and try to live with the earth as farmers.

All around great war story with very little sermonizing on colonialism.

NYRB publishes so many appealing-looking books that end up being either ultra-conventional realist fiction or some kind of ethnic modernism. If anyone has any suggestions that are not that, please tell

>some kind of ethnic modernism
What's wrong with that

>high modernism after 1970
help

Peter Handke

Thanks, this looks pretty good

Aren't many of these translations of works from before then? Not that your approaching literature like fashion makes any sense.

They also publish A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, but I couldn't find it on their website.

Yeah, I should correct and say that 1970 is probably too late and something more like 1950 would be better... the point being that postwar modernism is different than high modernism (and for good reasons) but there are countries that produce what you could call high modernist literature later than that date because they experienced modernity later. IMO, most of that stuff is bullshit. It's generally very naïve and simplistic, lacks the energy of w. European/North American modernism.

There's nothing wrong with """treating literature like fashion,""" at least not in the way that I've just done. If The Sorrows of Young Werther was published today it would not be just as good as it is having been published in the 18th century. When you're talking about the evaluation of literature with respect to aesthetic concepts like high modernism etc., the context matters a lot. Sure, you could compare it to fashion, but you could also compare it to any other area that deals with evolving paradigms, i.e. trying to write high modernist lit after 1970 is like trying to study subatomic particles using classical mechanics.

I've only got three NYBR books: Skylark, Warlock and Speedboat. Which one do I get next? Been meaning to branch out more from them since they all look spectacular, Speedboat had its ups and downs but was still pretty decent.

Journey By Moonlight

is this what a goat look like

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Dutchfag here. Nescio is brilliant indeed, I hope the translation reflects his style in the original.

Gassy af

It's very interesting to compare the two landmark works of Soviet WWII in the same vein and War and Peace, this and Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don. I'll be the first to admit that Sholokhov is a better writer and storyteller, but later on especially his work tends to be less, well, genuine than Grossman's. It's pretty blinded by ideology while Life and Fate is the exact opposite where ideology is instead ground down and exposed. Not that they really should even be compared at the end of the day

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Monitoring this thread. Haven't read too much NYRB.

Great post.

I enjoyed Speedboat a lot.

Moving there next month and recently pirated this book. Going to read it on the plane over.

Hold on, you point out that context matters a lot in order to then disregard actual context, as in time and place, and instead uproot literature to arbitrarily adjoin it to your pseudo World History of it... by date. No, while that behavior is psychologically speaking perfectly understandable, the reasoning doesn't make any sense.

Good choice

Despised this work. Put me of Gass entirely.

I really enjoyed this. Found it to be very under rated. I was just expecting a book about carnies but it goes way deeper.

What? The Pedersen Kid is great

Don't let the atrocious cover fool you, one of my favourites of all time. Zweig's sincerity and swift imagery were remarkable

I think that cover's pretty good

I was at a local bookstore where the shelves have a little lip on each end that hides the first and last book on the row and I went to the last row and pulled some books out literally to see if this specific book was hiding behind the lip and there was a fucking unread copy if it for $4.
I felt psychic; definitely one of the high points of browsing used book shops.
Haven't read it yet but it's on my reading list

the covers fucking great

>atrocious cover
this is your spectrum playing subjective tricks on you again. at worse it's inoffensive.. personally i think it's pretty great.

I wish i knew a person with a bibliotik account. Someone said they have uploads of every nyrb classic from the last two years that arent on libgen type sites and i would pay money for a zip of those.

pic related

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I'm not sure I follow, but if I'm understanding you correctly then that's a really good point. I wrote an alternative explaination for why I might not like ethnic high modernism post-1950 that has nothing to do with those contexts but my browser crashed and I didn't want to start over

the least sexiest pair of grandma panties to put on a girl

would never purchase that book

my favorite cover too

it's from the past. people didn't like the things you like, they liked other things

Only found this a couple weeks ago, other than that NYRB is alien to me. Does the selection vary or is it typically realist stuff as mentioned? I put pic related down as soon as I started it but I'd be interested in trying another.

I always shill this but never met anyone else who's read it. Did you just stumble on it? What did you like about it? Asking because it's my favorite book.

Their schtick is sort of "good books that got overlooked/forgotten/fell out of print," along with comparatively minor works by more famous authors (I think they have some Henry James, Balzac).

Corvo is brilliant; I first read The Quest for Corvo, then Julian Symons' biography of his brother, just as eccentric as Corvo himself, and followed that up with Hadrian VII some years ago. His other writings are hilarious - some are up online.

It's a pure /r9k/ + Catholicism cocktail of bitterness and mindless gamma-tier erudition, all expressed in the purplest of purple prose.

Seconding this.

But also Book of Ebenezer Le Page, Jakob von Gunten, and Diary of a Man in Despair

It's too fucking big and cumbersome. Should have split it into 2 or 3 parts.

Fear - Gabriel Chevalier
Stoner (duh)
A Way of Life, Like Any Other - Darcy O'Brien
Memories of the Future - Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

The only NYRB book that ever disappointed me was The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. I understand it's three psychological case studies but holy hell was it dry, even by those standards.