Our list of some of the best Nyrb books & series in recent years. Get inspired by one or more of the following books.
1. The Corner That Held Them (New York Review Books Classics) (2019)
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a…
2. Abel and Cain (New York Review Books Classics) (2019)
The Death of My Brother Abel and its delirious sequel, Cain, constitute the magnum opus of Gregor von Rezzori’s prodigious career, the most ambitious, extravagant, outrageous, and deeply considered achievement of this wildly original and never less than provocative master of the novel. In Abel and Cain, the original book, long out of print, is reissued in a fully revised translation; Cain appears for the first time in English.The Death of My Brother Abel zigzags across the middle of the twentieth century, from the 1918 to 1968, taking in the Jazz Age, the Anschluss, the Nuremberg trials, and postwar commercialism….
3. All for Nothing (New York Review Books Classics) (2018)
In East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family’s manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish twelve-year-old son, Peter. As the road fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof begins to receive strange visitors–a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron,…
4. The Peregrine (New York Review Books Classics) (2004)
From fall to spring, J.A. Baker set out to track the daily comings and goings of a pair of peregrine falcons across the flat fen lands of eastern England. He followed the birds obsessively, observing them in the air and on the ground, in pursuit of their prey, making a kill, eating, and at rest, activities he describes with an extraordinary fusion of precision and poetry. And as he continued his mysterious private quest, his sense of human self slowly dissolved, to be replaced with the alien and implacable consciousness of a hawk. It is this…
5. Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa (New York Review Books Classics) (2018)
Kenji Miyazawa is one of modern Japan’s most beloved writers, a great poet and a strange and marvelous spinner of tales, whose sly, humorous, enchanting, and enigmatic stories bear a certain resemblance to those of his contemporary Robert Walser. John Bester’s selection and expert translation of Miyazawa’s short fiction reflects its full range from the joyful, innocent “Wildcat and the Acorns,” to the cautionary tale “The Restaurant of Many Orders,” to “The Earthgod and the Fox,” which starts out whimsically before taking a tragic turn. Miyazawa…
6. Anniversaries (Boxed Set): From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (New York Review Books Classics) (2018)
Late in 1967, Uwe Johnson set out to write a book that would take the unusual form of a chapter for every day of the ongoing year. It would be the tale of Gesine Cresspahl, a thirty-four-year-old single mother who is a German émigré to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and of her ten-year-old daughter, Marie—a story of work and school, of friends and lovers and the countless small encounters with neighbors and strangers that make up big-city life. An everyday tale, but also a tale of the events of the day, as gleaned by Gesine from The New York Times: Johnson could hardly…
7. Lucky Jim (New York Review Books Classics) (2012)
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one…
8. Three Summers (New York Review Books Classics) (2019)
Three Summers is the story of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the Second World War. Living in a big old house surrounded by a beautiful garden are Maria, the oldest sister, as sexually bold as she is eager to settle down and have a family of her own; beautiful but distant Infanta; and dreamy and rebellious Katerina, through whose eyes the story is mostly observed. Over three summers, the girls share and keep secrets, fall in and out of love, try to figure out their parents and other members of the tribe of adults, take note of the weird ways of…
9. Notebooks: 1936-1947 (New York Review Books Classics) (2019)
In 1936, Victor Serge—poet, novelist, and revolutionary—left the Soviet Union for Paris, the rare opponent of Stalin to escape the Terror. In 1940, after the Nazis marched into Paris, Serge fled France for Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his life. His years in Mexico were marked by isolation, poverty, peril, and grief; his Notebooks, however, brim with resilience, curiosity, outrage, a passionate love of life, and superb writing. Serge paints haunting portraits of Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and “the Old Man” Trotsky; argues with André Breton; and, awaiting his wife’s delayed arrival from…
10. Moravagine (New York Review Books Classics) (2004)
At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars’s Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it’s a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest…
Best Nyrb Books You Should Enjoy
We highly recommend you to buy all paper or e-books in a legal way, for example, on Amazon. But sometimes it might be a need to dig deeper beyond the shiny book cover. Before making a purchase, you can visit resources like Genesis and download some nyrb books mentioned below at your own risk. Once again, we do not host any illegal or copyrighted files, but simply give our visitors a choice and hope they will make a wise decision.
The Kindness of Strangers
Author(s): Salka Viertel, Lawrence Weschler, Donna Rifkind
Publisher: NYRB Classics, Year: 2019, Size: 2 Mb, Download: epub
ID: 2320049
Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics
Author(s): Michael Walzer; Jon Weiner
Publisher: NYRB Classics, Year: 2019, Size: 576 Kb, Download: epub
ID: 2394819
Images and Shadows - Part of a life
Author(s): Iris Origo
Publisher: NYRB Classics, Year: 2019, Size: 10 Mb, Download: epub
ID: 2425745
Kolyma Stories
Author(s): Varlam Shalamov
Publisher: NYRB Classics, Year: 2018, Size: 2 Mb, Download: epub
ID: 2244422
Basic Black With Pearls
Author(s): Helen Weinzweig
Publisher: NYRB Classics, Year: 2018, Size: 551 Kb, Download: epub
ID: 2289613
Inhuman Land Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942
Author(s): Jozef Czapski
Publisher: NYRB Classics, Year: 2018, Size: 13 Mb, Download: epub
ID: 2303771
Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa
Author(s): Kenji Miyazawa; John Bester
Publisher: NYRB Classics, Year: 2018, Size: 2 Mb, Download: epub
ID: 2320366
Collected Essays
Author(s): Elizabeth Hardwick
Publisher: NYRB Classics, Year: 2017, Size: 2 Mb, Download: epub
ID: 2202832
Primitive Man as Philosopher
Author(s): Paul Radin
Publisher: New York Review of Books, Year: 2017, Size: 2 Mb, Download: epub
ID: 2213756
Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767
Author(s): Thorkild Hansen
Publisher: New York Review of Books, Year: 2017, Size: 13 Mb, Download: epub
ID: 2352120
Please note that this booklist is not definite. Some books are absolutely hot items according to The New York Times, others are composed by unknown writers. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant links you could recommend? Leave a comment if you have any feedback on the list.