A New York Review Books Original Hav is like no place on earth. Rumored to be the site of Troy, captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin, visited by Tolstoy, Hitler, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, this Mediterranean city-state is hom…
An extraordinary memoir by Iris Origo, who chronicled political life in A Chill in the Air and War in Val d'Orcia, and now turns inward to describe her own family, the work of writing, and the transcience of memory. Images and Shadows, Iris Origo's…
This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the hear…
A provocative, feminist novel about a woman who persists in spite of the violence, injustice, and oppression that fills her world. Bina is a woman who's had enough and isn't afraid to say so. "I'm here to warn you, not reassure you," she announces a…
The Robber Hotzenplotz is a merry tale of two scoundrels, two friends, a toad-fairy, and an unforgettable escapade. The Robber Hotzenplotz works hard at his job, waking early to hide in the woods and waylay new victims. One morning Kasperl's grand…
Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran is one of the most striking and original literary undertakings of our time. Robinson's ambition is to find out both what it is to know a landscape, know it as extensively and intimately as possible, and what it takes to…
In this now classic book, internationally famed journalist Ian Buruma examines how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with their conduct during World War II--a war that they aggressively began and humiliatingly lost, and in the course…
A modernist masterpiece (The New York Times) that will appeal to fans of Downton Abbey and The Great Gatsby Party Going, published in 1939, is Henry Green's darkly comic valediction to what W. H. Auden famously described as the "low dishonest decade…
1930-something: a professional hunter is passing through an unnamed Central European country that is in the thrall of a vicious dictator. The hunter wonders whether he can penetrate undetected into the dictator's private compound. He does. He has th…
In part two of La Divina Commedia, one of the masterpieces of world literature, Dante and his guide, the poet Virgil, must enter and traverse Purgatory and the seven deadly sins in their quest to reach Heaven. In this version of Dante's epic, Alasda…
In The Levant Trilogy Olivia Manning returns to the story of the young English couple Guy and Harriet Pringle, last seen, at the end of The Balkan Trilogy, departing from Athens ahead of the invading Nazi army. Now, in the spring of 1941, they arriv…
District Attorney Varga is shot dead. Then Judge Sanza is killed. Then Judge Azar. Are these random murders, or part of a conspiracy? Inspector Rogas thinks he might know, but as soon as he makes progress he is transferred and encouraged to pin the…
A short, spellbinding novel about a WWI veteran finding a way to re-enter--and fully embrace--normal life while spending the summer in an idyllic English village. In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War a…
Storytelling as a fundamental human impulse, one that announces itself at the moment, hidden in infancy, that dreams begin--this is what the poet and critic Randall Jarrell set out to illuminate in this extraordinary book. Here Jarrell presents ball…
A man is shot dead as he runs to catch the bus in the piazza of a small Sicilian town. Captain Bellodi, the detective on the case, is new to his job and determined to prove himself. Bellodi suspects the Mafia, and his suspicions grow when he finds h…
You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly controversial novelist who transformed, for better and for worse, the way we write about sex and emot…
Welcome to Moderan, world of the future. Here perpetual war is waged by furious masters fighting from Strongholds well stocked with "arsenals of fear," earth is covered with vast sheets of plastic, and humans vie to replace more and more of their ow…
Collects twenty-seven of Eleanor Farjeon's stories, which include kings, princesses, servants, a mysterious flower, orphans, enchanted woods, an organ-grinder, giants, a little dressmaker, fairies, and a kindly farmer.
The Pumpkin Eater is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist's couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathetic voice i…
Perhaps no one loves France as much as the English--at least some of the English--and Richard Cobb, the incomparable Oxford historian of the French Revolution, was a passionate admirer of the country, a connoisseur of the low dive and the flophouse,…
A pregnant Felicia returns to her home in the Indonesian islands to the side of her powerful grandmother and encounters mysterious occurrences tied to events and people from the past. Original.
The author re-imagines her own childhood in this witty, often troubling autobiographical novel that follows the lives of members of the Aubrey family from the perspective of Rose, one of four siblings. Original.
The Aran Islands, in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland, are a unique geological and cultural landscape, and for centuries their stark beauty and their inhabitants' traditional way of life have attracted pilgrims from abroad. The Aran Islands,…
Seated in a Paris caf , a man glimpses another man, a shadowy figure hurrying for the train: Who is he? he wonders, How does he live? And instantly the shadow comes to life, precipitating a series of comic run-ins among a range of disreputable and h…
By the author of the classic The Snow Goose, a heartbreaking story about a young girl and her most unusual cat, who has magical powers that save her owner's life. Seven-year-old Mary adores her ginger cat, Thomasina, and is crushed when Thomasina f…
Set in the war-torn world of Mughal India and first published in the gathering darkness of the 1930s, the three novels collected in The Root and the Flower are stories of intrigue, murder, and romance; of Tantric abandonment and Buddhist renunciatio…
The Midnight Folk introduces readers to Kay Harker, the orphaned boy who is also the hero of John Masefield's classic Christmas fantasy, The Box of Delights. Kay lives in a vast old country house, and is looked after by an unpleasant duo: the oily a…
Continuing the epic foot journey across Europe begun in A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor writes about walking from Hungary to the Balkans. The journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on in 1933--to cross Europe on foot with an emergency allo…
Stories about the occult, folk religions, superstition, and spiritual customs in Russia by one of the most essential twentieth-century writers of short fiction and essays. Though best known for her comic and satirical sketches of pre-Revolutionary R…
An autobiographical exploration of the role and meaning of music in our world by one of India's greatest living authors, himself a vocalist and performer. Finding the Raga is more than a book that tries to make sense of Indian classical music and of…
An NYRB Classics Original Winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation 1915: Jean Dartemont heads off to the Great War, an eager conscript. The only thing he fears is missing the action. Soon, however, the vaunted "war to end all wars" seems…
Classic horror stories by one of masters of the form. Full of bone-chilling tales, this collection includes The Birds, the basis for the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same title, and other creepy classics. Daphne du Maurier wrote some of the most com…
A harrowing account of life in Italy in the year leading up to World War II, available in the US for the first time. In 1939 it was not a foregone conclusion that Mussolini would enter World War II on the side of Hitler. In this previously unpublish…
During the Blitz, Henry Green served on the London Auxiliary Fire Service, and this experience lies behind Caught, published when the bombing had only recently ended. Like Green, Richard Roe, the hero of this resolutely unheroic book, comes from the…
A smart, funny classic about a young and beautiful American woman who moves to Paris determined to live life to the fullest. The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the…
A New York Review Books OriginalWinner of the Best Translated Book AwardDeception--the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others--is the subject of this, Tove Jansson's most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson takes a darker loo…
In 1953, twenty-four-year old Nicolas Bouvier and his artist friend Thierry Vernet set out to make their way overland from their native Geneva to the Khyber Pass. They had a rattletrap Fiat and a little money, but above all they were equipped with t…
This collection of essays exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made Daniel Mendelsohn "required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture" (The Daily Beast). Here Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, tel…
Now available in paperback, The Moth Snowstorm is a one-of-a-kind environmental work that combines memoir, anecodotes, and hard facts to make a case for preserving an ever-dwindling natural world. The moth snowstorm, a phenomenon Michael McCarthy re…
A bestseller upon its original publication in the 1980s, these diaries reveal life during WWII in Tuscany and include stunning rediscovered photographs In the Second World War, Italy was torn apart by German armies, civil war, and the Allied invasio…
Who but Russell Hoban could weave a tale of life's pleasures and pain around a candy pig? And who but Quentin Blake could make the most poignant of stories so lighthearted and delightful? In this episodic picture book by an inimitable author-illustr…
How to introduce children to Shakespeare, not just to the stories behind the plays but to the richness of Shakespeare's language and the depth of his characters: That's the challenge that Leon Garfield, no slouch as a wordsmith himself, sets out to…
A magnificently illustrated Chinese folklore tale about a tigress, a seer, a King, and the prince, who must leave his family and learn the ways of the tigers so that the war between man and animal can end. Deep in the Great Forest, a tigress is mour…
An NYRB Classics Original The trouble begins in Venice, the first stop on Erzsi and Mih ly's honeymoon tour of Italy. Here Erzsi discovers that her new husband prefers wandering back alleys on his own to her company. The trouble picks up in Ravenna,…
A New York Review Books Original Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman's final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan G…
Winner of the 2003 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL The nameless narrator of The Moon and the Bonfires, Cesare Pavese's last and greatest novel, returns to Italy from California after the Second World War…
