r/nyrbclassics

Ice by Vladimir Sorokin and The Chrysalids by John Wyndham are out on loan to a friend.

I love suggestions!

Mostly a TBR shelf at this point: A fair number of these I haven’t read yet, and a couple I inherited and might not have chosen myself.

Most of my very favorite NYRBs don’t appear here. I read them as library loans, and personal copies are still to come (Szabo, Giono, Seghers, Carr, Taylor, Gallant, Zweig, etc.). Hoping to address this at the next big sale.

It’s a work in progress.

Longtime collectors: If and when you get one you don’t love, do you tend to keep it for the sake of the collection, or do you swap it out to give the shelf space to a title you like better?

I did a quick search on this subreddit for dark books and found these at my local bookstore.

Do you remember the one that started your habit? This was mine.

Found this at my local second hand bookstore, I’ve never heard of this author but that’s one thing I love of NYRB. Excited to start this and to have joined the club.

heard so much about this book, so exciting! :”)

Still small but I have gotten a few more titles this year (the last one was Crazy Genie by Inès Cagnati, which I was looking forward to since last year).

Any suggestions by male authors I should look into? I think I have gotten mostly women so far because those are the ones I have read and loved (Szabó is my fvaorite) but I'd like to start adding some "risky" ones (as in, I'm not sure I'll love them but would like to try anyway).

The last one I read was Mouchette by Georges Bernanos and it broke my heart but I loved it.

I just love the colour scheme and cover for this one. NYRB has to be the best major publisher when it comes to cover design imo.

What are some of your favorite NYRB covers?

Has anyone tried this subscription? What was your experience with it? Would you recommend joining this *book club*? Pro: new books at great prices, con: you have zero control over what you get.

I've been an avid collector and reader of NYRB classics for over a decade now. I just received Effingers in the mail and can't read to dig into it. Anyone here read it yet? What did you think?

hi everyone, i finished effingers not too long ago and have been mulling it over for the past few weeks. since i haven't seen much discussion about it on this subreddit, i thought i would share my thoughts with the group.

i don't normally gravitate towards multi-generational family stories, but something about effingers' cover really roped me in. last year i read and adored life and fate and stalingrad both by vasily grossman which, although multi-generational, focused on all the characters within the same span of time so the generations didn't get mixed up. so, i figured i would have a similar experience.

one thing about life & fate/stalingrad that i think effingers would have benefited from is a family tree. effingers is somewhat smaller in scope, not including historical figures or any real one-off characters who only exist in a certain part of the story. in theory, you have fewer characters to keep track of. unfortunately, the three main families the narrative focuses on are so closely intertwined that i found it difficult to remember how everyone was related >!especially when two (first? second?) cousins get together!<. this could be a me problem, and is part of the reason why i don't gravitate towards this type of story, so i'd be interested to know if anyone else had similar difficulties keeping track of characters.

the other thing i wanted to comment on is the way tergit handles the passage of time. effingers covers 70 years, and the span is not evenly weighted. i'd reckon that about half the narrative is just the first 22 years bringing us into the 20th century. from there, things begin to slowly speed up, introducing and killing off characters who we've really gotten to know. by the time the nazis show up in in the last ~200 pages (these are all estimates, i don't have the book on me and it's towards the bottom of a heavy stack), time starts flying by with every page. just knowing the subject matter and the timeframe, you start the novel with a sense of unease at the back of your mind, knowing that the world these characters occupy will be almost entirely destroyed by the end of the story, that the destruction is not only inevitable but deeply human both in cause and cost. when i was almost done reading i was stressed about how tergit could possibly wrap everything up in the last 50ish pages.

and then she doesn't.

i don't begrudge tergit for not wanting to write Another holocaust novel, and i understand why the story essentially cuts out right where another one could easily start. there's an epilogue, but with very few answers. at first this really frustrated, the way the narrative simply stalls out right before it ends, like a cartoon plane dropping out of the sky. but the more i thought about it, the more it began to make sense. time goes slowly when you don't notice it. it's only when you get closer to unfathomable horror (especially horror that you the reader are on the other side of) that it speeds up, going faster and faster until you're hurtling towards catastrophe you're unable to prevent and unable to look away from.

i don't think this is a perfect novel, and it definitely isn't my fave of the nyrbs i've read, but i deeply appreciate how much effingers challenged me and encouraged me to think. i've been going through a rough personal patch and doing even the most rudimentary of literary analysis was a brief blip of joy.

also, for an 800+ page book, it truly flies by. the chapters are relatively short with lots of dialogue which make it less daunting than similar books of its length. the afterword is also wonderful! sometimes i find nyrb paratext a bit lacking, but sophie duvernoy did a wonderful job of providing context on tergit's life. i found the struggle she faced in finding an audience for her novel especially moving. jewish audiences thought it was too assimilated and irreverent, while christian audiences found it too jewish. the main audience for whom her book was written about and for was killed by the millions.

anyway, those are just some of my thoughts and i'm sorry for rambling! i don't have tergit's other nyrb novel on hand, but i do have berlin alexanderplatz on deck for more inter-war berlin!

Don't know anything about this show, but spotted an NYRB Classics in a random clip of Your Friends & Neighbors! Back cover in the second image looks blank, so maybe a fake book but I wonder how Eve Babitz made its way into prop design.