Omni Decade Crush: NYRB Classics
There are fleeting daily crushes, and then there are the ones that linger for years. I've written a few adoring asides to the NYRB Classics series here in the past (mostly so far in the past that I can't find them anymore), but I've been waiting for a while to write a real mash note, and it seems like the tenth anniversary of the series is the right time to do it. The last ten years of my reading life (which match up pretty closely with my time in the book business) have been full of great discoveries, but when I look back at the highlights (The Transit of Venus, Black Hole, Taylor Branch's MLK trilogy, The Corrections, Call Me By Your Name, Salvage King, Ya!, Newfoundland lit, Brian Moore (see below!), Ian McEwan...) I think the most exciting of them have been the NYRB Classics, both the individual books I've loved and the series as a whole. I realized it was happening a few years ago when I noticed that my favorite books from two straight years of reading (Francis Steegmuller's Flaubert and Madame Bovary and Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica) were both NYRBs, and since then they have yet to fail me. I pick my spots and still have read only a dozen at most of their books--both because I have so much else to read and because I'm choosy and am a little afraid of breaking the streak, but I have never read a book of theirs I haven't loved: The Slaves of Solitude, Stoner, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, most recently Hard Rain Falling (which, come to think of it, might be my favorite book I've read in 2009).
There's nothing I love more than a lost classic--those books that just barely stay alive over time, passed on by word of mouth, that you read not because everybody has told you to (though sometimes those books are wonderful too), but often because just one very convincing person has. Sometimes they find their moment and, like Melville or Hurston, become part of the broader landscape, sometimes they remain cult favorites, sometimes they drop almost entirely off the radar. In grad school I always found myself rooting for those one-hit wonders like Albion Tourgee, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charles W. Chesnutt, or Henry Blake Fuller, who are still, sometimes barely, being talked about a hundred years after they wrote, and whose books somehow seem to speak more directly from their time than a more use-polished classic, because of the long silence they've endured. NYRB Classics is not the only publisher that looks for those books, but because of their great taste and their excellent track record (not to mention their subtly lovely design), they've managed to bring writer after writer--mid-century crime writers, untranslated Russians, witty British social novelists, as well as less categorizable figures like J.R. Ackerley, Tim Robinson, and George R. Stewart--back into the conversation.
NYRB began their classics series in 1999 with the publication of what has become one of my own very favorite books, Hughes's hilarious, disturbing, and deliciously bizarre tale of children and pirates, A High Wind in Jamaica, and for their tenth anniversary this year we decided to blow things out a bit. For the first time, we're offering a complete set of 250 NYRB Classics, from Hughes to the latest release, Nicolas Bouvier's The Way of the World, as the NYRB 10th Anniversary Complete Collection (at the bargain price of only $2,929.91--that's a savings of over $1,000!), along with a companion set of 40 books from the New York Review Children's Collection. And we asked a few writers to choose their own favorites from the NYRB series: Francine Prose, David Leavitt, and NYRB Classics editorial director Edwin Frank. You can find all of these things on our Amazon pages, and I'll also be posting them on Omni. But our one Omni-only feature is a short Q&A with Mr. Frank himself, whose ideas and judgment lie behind the series. I stopped by the NYRB offices this spring (where I felt a little like a Star Wars fanboy getting to go to the Skywalker Ranch), and discovered, among other things, that Frank and I had worked for a time at the same place (though in different years), Jason Epstein's either just-before- or just-after-its-time project, The Reader's Catalog. Frank, to his great credit, took a germ of that idea and ran with it. Here is what he has to say about NYRB:
Amazon.com: How did the NYRB Classics series come about? You've said it had something to do with a project we both worked on, The Reader's Catalog. What relation do you have with the New York Review of Books?
Frank: Essentially it grew out of The Reader’s Catalog, which was a sales catalog offering “the 40,000 best books in print” arranged into familiar categories (science, literature, Italian literature, and so on). I got a job there checking various sections to see that nothing had been left out or included that shouldn’t be. Plenty had been left out, because lots of good books had gone out of print. We started to assemble a list of these books and soon enough that list looked like a publishers list--a program.
The other thing that struck me at the time was the near total disappearance of series of books from the American market, baffling to me since I’d grown up at a time when there were lots of series--Mentor, Meridian--and imprints like Vintage were much more series-like than they are today.
At the Review, Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein were excited about the publishing program and encouraged it. Barbara, who had worked in publishing as a young woman, took an especially lively interest. The magazine and the book division have, however, been editorially independent from the start, though of course contributors to the Review do at times suggest books, and the magazine does from time to time publish introductions commissioned for books.
Amazon.com: How do the books come to you? Through your own reading and research, or through recommendations from other writers and readers you know? Are the writers who write your introductions often the ones who bring the books to you?
Frank: All sorts of ways. Readers write in recommending things, writers do the same, as do agents. Used bookstores, reference books, blogs, and libraries are all sources too. Henry James’s The Other House I discovered in a library, pulling it off a shelf when I didn’t recognize the title. When it turned out to be a novel I’d never heard of I felt dizzy with surprise and delight.
Sometimes introducers introduce the book to us; sometimes it’s we who first introduce the book to the introducer: for example, I sent Michael Cunningham The Pilgrim Hawk and he fell in love with it.
Amazon.com: A few years ago, Mark Moskowitz's documentary, Stone Reader, followed his rediscovery of one forgotten novel, Dow Mossman's The Stones of Summer. There's a kind of romance to these lost classics that have barely survived the obscurity of time through the words of a few mouths or a single passionate reader. I know that sense of reading something nearly lost is part of the thrill for me of discovering (thanks to you) a book like Stoner or Hard Rain Falling. Is that part of the pleasure of publishing them?
Frank: Finding something lost gives us a sense of new possibility, don’t you think? There’s more out there than you were taught in school; more than your friends know about, too. It’s reassuring to think that old good things can survive the action of time--and when an old thing rings true and new it allows you to think the world can be remade.
Amazon.com: I think of a quintessential "lost classic" as a novel with a small but rabid following, like the first book in your series, A High Wind in Jamaica, but you've had success with everything from Alastair Horne's book on the French war in Algeria, A Savage War of Peace, to George R. Stewart's Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, to your recent reprint of Masanobu Fukuoka's food manifesto, One Straw Revolution. What is it about a book that says to you (or you hope says to readers) that it's an NYRB book?
Frank: Frankly, my sense of what an NYRB Classic is keeps changing as new, unexpected books (One Straw Revolution is a perfect example) turn up. Or you could say, that what draws me to a book is its being unexpected. The book should be something that shifts your perception of writing or of the world, that fill in a gap--or possibly opens one. (Maude Hutchins’s Victorine, for example, makes you think very differently about the literature of the 1950s than, say, Revolutionary Road.)
Amazon.com: This may sound a little morbid, but are there writers today whom you have your eye on as future NYRB Classics, writers who should last but who haven't yet found a wide audience?
Frank: Answering this I‘m caught between not wanting to tip my hand and not wanting authors I admire to go out of print. I was very happy when we finally obtained Brian Moore’s The Lonely Pssion of Judith Hearne, which will come out next year. Moore was a remarkable, virtuosic author whose lean narratives were admired by Greene and Didion, but who never found the popular following he deserved--partly because he went out of his way not to repeat himself from book to book. He was an experimental writer in a pragmatic not dogmatic sense, fascinated by the range of stories and kinds of stories the world affords.
Another way of answering this is to point to publishers doing work that is different but complementary to ours: Dalkey has published Danilo Kis and Victor Shklovsky; New Directions Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Cesar Aria; Archipelago the wonderful, dislocating novels of Magda Tulli. These are all great writers and too little-known in America.
Amazon.com: Do you know if there is anyone who has collected the full NYRB Classics set of 250 books on their own?
Frank: We’ve had people buying complete sets ever since we announced our first 50, so yes, they’re out there. Happily for us, and I hope, them too.
--Tom
Elinor on October 21, 2009 at 03:58 PM
It also doesn't hurt that the series is so beautifully designed.
Aging Lit Major on October 22, 2009 at 06:32 AM
I'm loading up my wish list! Thank you for this post.
Reed on October 22, 2009 at 09:41 AM
I have read 50+ NYRB titles, and there's not a dud in the bunch. Some aren't quite as freakishly brilliant as others, but they're all fascinating to a greater or lesser degree.
Tom on October 22, 2009 at 10:40 AM
"Freakishly brilliant" is an excellent way of putting it. There are plenty of good books out there, but the NYRBs I've read have been far more singular and memorable than the usual. They've all felt necessary, somehow, which is all the more moving when many of them have flown under the radar for so long.