r/nyrbclassics

Realized I only have two NYRB classics with blue spines -- Stoner and the Singularity. I will buy and read a recommendation as long as it has a blue spine. Give me your favorite blues!

Pachinko or villette?

I get excited about making seasonal lists and I’m making my fall TBR. I’d love to put some fall feeling nyrb books on there. What books do you recommend for fall? I loved reading Abigail and Stoner in the fall!

Hello, this may be off-topic for this sub, and mods feel free to delete if it is, but seeing as there’s (bafflingly) been no media obituary I’m worried that the people who would most benefit from discovering this absolutely singular yet unfairly neglected author will not. I believe many of them may be here. I do hope that NYRB republishes some of his work in the future to introduce to their audience; he has actually written two introductions for the press already: Richard Hughes’ In Hazard and David Stacton’s The Judges of Secret Court. So I’m reposting the brief piece I wrote about him below.

It makes me sad to see so little out there about the death of the great John Crowley, who should at the very least be talked about in the same breath as Pynchon, McCarthy, and DeLillo, and very likely would be if it wasn’t for the ghettoization of genre in American publishing. Nevertheless, there was one very influential (and in this context, somewhat surprising) mainstream voice who didn’t just speak about him in the same breath as the abovementioned, but placed him above them all: Harold Bloom.

Despite being a fantasy and science fiction author, Crowley’s prose and craft were enough to enrapture the famously pretentious (but not anti-genre; he also liked Le Guin, Disch, Lem, Hoban, and Peake) literary critic, who repeatedly named Crowley his favorite contemporary author, included three Crowley books in the Western Canon (one more than Nabokov got) and claimed to have read Crowley’s masterpiece Little, Big at least 46 times. Bloom positively gushed over the guy, saying stuff like: “Crowley writes so magnificently that only a handful of living writers in English can equal him as a stylist, and most of them are poets…of novelists, only Philip Roth consistently writes on Crowley's level.”

Renowned literary critic Michael Dirda said much the same, calling Crowley one of the three best living prose stylists at the time of writing (I believe his other two picks were Millhauser and Salter). His other fans included poets like John Hollander and Pulitzer Prize winner James Merrill, who blurbed the second book of Crowley’s Ægypt Cycle with the following: “Crowley has devised a polygonal crystal whose bevels give out rainbows of erudition, make-believe, and menace."

While this must be a first for a fantasy author, Merrill made a very good point, and it’s a wonder that the much-talked-about (and possibly mythical) “lit bros” and “brodernists” have not descended hungrily upon The Ægypt Cycle, an impossibly complex and often impenetrable tetralogy of doorstopper volumes that reads somewhat like Pynchon doing The Da Vinci Code in the style of Ada, had he first been induced into a state of eroto-comatose lucidity. That is to say, it’s really cool, and it’s kind of a shame that the Deep Vellum types aren’t reading it, because it’s everything they’re looking for and more.

And the critic-approved, post 1980s fantasy stuff is really only part of the story. Before that, Crowley was a key part of the New Wave, and his surreal and ambitious 70s sci-fi (which might be a little too disco for Bloom, who never seems to have mentioned it) deserves equal billing, and is widely believed (though I’m not sure if this is officially confirmed) to have been a major influence on Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Wolfe is on record as an admirer of Crowley and one could certainly draw a line from Crowley’s debut novel, 1975’s The Deep, to Wolfe’s masterwork, so it’s certainly possible. Either way, his work has inspired many other authors both within genre and without—Michael Chabon has said that “life consists only of passing time between novels by John Crowley,” and places him in a pantheon alongside Pynchon, Millhauser, and Borges.

Of course, you may not give a shit about Harold Bloom or Michael Dirda, or the Pulitzer Prize, or any of that bullshit. If so, I commend you (we’re on the same page), but I didn’t write this note for you. I wrote this note for the kind of people who do, because I think they should give John Crowley a chance, because I think they should give Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison and James Tiptree Jr. a chance, and mostly because I think they should stop letting the marketing whims of megacorporations wall them off from entire ecosystems of art.

(Note here that this *is* a repost; I know NYRB readers are wise to this scam and and the press publishes many standouts from within the genre “ghetto.” So no offense!).

And if you’re not that kind of person, you can just take my word for it that the shit all rips. Books to try: Little, Big, Engine Summer, The Translator, Aegypt (also titled The Solitudes depending on publisher), and the story collection Novelties & Souvenirs (in particular, “Great Work of Time”)

RIP

Any idea when these will ship? It feels like a long time since I got my first subscription order and I honestly had almost forgotten I was a subscriber.

Has anyone received theirs yet?

I’m going on a beach vacation and of course I’m planning on reading the whole time. What nyrb books are good for beach reading? I’m thinking Dud Avocado or Three Summers.

What are your favorite portrayals of animals in NYRB Classics? Be they main, secondary or even tertiary characters or just well-written descriptions.

A few that I’ve encountered so far:

The cat Faro in Olivia Manning’s School for Love steals several scenes. Several cat lovers on Goodreads call put Faro in their reviews.

The dog Bréquillet is an at-times ominous, at others reassuring, but always inscrutable presence in Henri Bosco’s Malicroix.

Julius von Feldon’s three pet chimpanzees have a few slapstick scenes in Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy.

In Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel, the titular character is an animal lover who adores her brutish and slobbery dog Sultan, but the best depiction of animals is reserved for a scene in which a pair of unnamed cats play with water near the novel’s end.

The one you’ve been eyeing for a while but haven’t pulled the trigger (either read or bought). Especially interested if it’s a deep cut. I’ve loved every NYRB I’ve read but it feels like the same 10-15 books get recommended everywhere.

I may very well not be the first to notice this, but some new copies of the nyrb “Stoner” by John Williams were on display at the bookstore and when I picked a couple of them up, I noticed that the finish on the cover was not the classic nyrb finish that I love them for and in addition, the edges on the spines were much sharper angles, and the paper seemed cheaper, more similar to copy paper in a way. This was also corroborated by my friend who picked one up and immediately noticed the same thing and that they were not like our copies of “Stoner” which we both bought sometime last year. Again, sorry if this is an already solved mystery but I’m curious and hoping this isn’t a permanent brand-wide change.

Hi All,

I've been on a bit of a Latin America kick lately with reading, and want to know if anyone has good NYRB editions to recommend from authors from that part of the world?

Thank you!