  Letter from New York CityDecember 2025Dear Readers,We hope that you all are having a pleasant holiday season thus far. Below, we have the finale to our NYRB Classics "gems" series, featuring a very seasonal little book, and other news. If you are looking for last-minute gift ideas, we suggest supporting your local independent bookstore, if you are lucky enough to have one within walking, driving, or public-transit-ing distance. We know that it's easier to hit an order button on your phone or computer, but there's nothing like shopping in a real-life bookstore, with booksellers who know and love the books on the shelves. (And for those who are short on time, your bookstore probably does take special and online orders, too, just FYI.)Hearty thanks to our bookstores and to all who have read, bought, loved, and recommended NYRB books this year. See you in 2026. Happy holidays, and happy reading,The NYRB StaffPerfection and The Dragon Flower on The New York Times 'Best Books of the Year' lists... A couple of our books landed on The New York Times best-of lists this year. Vincenzo Latronico's novel Perfection was one of them, selected by The New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year. In the citation for the book, the NYT staff wrote, "As a portrait of the cool kids who flocked to Berlin in that period, the book — beautifully translated by Sophie Hughes — amounts to a biting and incisive satire of the expat scene."Perfection was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award for Literature in Translation.  Chen Jiang Hong's picture book Dragon Flower was selected as one of the ten Best Illustrated Books for Children by The New York Times and the New York Public Library. In her citation for the book, prize judge Tracey Baptiste wrote, "This book’s stunning illustrations evoke traditional Chinese folk art. Chen’s color palette, style and even his depictions of the young heroine, Mae, and the dragon’s eyes feel like a modern extension of classic paintings." Interior spread from The Dragon Flower Congratulations to Vincenzo Latronico and Chen Jiang Hong! ...and Baby Driver received high praise. The New York Times's Dwight Garner also gave the NYRB Classics reissue of Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac high praise: "Its republication now feels like a gift — possibly this year’s most important literary salvage mission. Baby Driver is a potent and subversive cultural document, detailing a life that runs almost exactly parallel to the author’s own."Find Baby Driver at your local bookseller or on our website.Hidden Gems: Rock CrystalB-sides and other lesser-known books from the NYRB Classics Series  We are concluding our "hidden gems" series with an NYRB house favorite, one perfectly suited to the upcoming winter season. Adalbert Stifter's novella Rock Crystal is one of those books that, in spite of being fiercely loved by most who find it, continues to fly under the radar. Thomas Mann, who credited the story as an influence, once declared Stifter "one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature." He was beloved by W. H. Auden, who wrote of Rock Crystal, "What might so easily have been a tear-jerking melodrama becomes in his hands a quiet and beautiful parable about the relation of people to places, of man to nature." Hannah Arendt praised the "strange, innocent wisdom" of Stifter's work and Susan Choi has expounded on Rock Crystal's power. Stifter wrote and published thousands of pages of fiction, including two epic novels, Der Nachsommer and Witiko. However it is Rock Crystal, a humble eighty-page novella, that became one of Stifter's most enduring literary accomplishments.  Stifter's birthplace in Oberplan  Portrait of Stifter Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868) was born in Oberplan in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, to a wealthy linen weaver, Johann Stifter. Johann died when Adalbert was only twelve years old in a tragic accident involving an overturned wagon. His death left the family impoverished and dependent on the generosity of Adalbert's uncle. The remainder of Stifter's personal life was not especially happy. When we was twenty-three, he fell in love with a young woman named Fanny Greipel. Her parents, however, forbade the match because of Stifter's lack of fortune and put an end to their five-year correspondence. Fanny married and died in childbirth soon after. It is said that Stifter never recovered from this heartbreak. His marriage to another woman, Amalia Mohaupt, was marred by unhappiness. The couple was unable to have children of their own and two of their adopted daughters, both nieces of Amalia, met tragic ends as children, one perishing of the typhus, the other drowning herself in the Danube. Der Königssee (Lake Königssee) by Adalbert Stifter Stifter's professional successes were somewhat uneven. A brilliant student from a young age, he studied law at the University of Vienna but failed to obtain a degree. He became a tutor to the aristocracy of Vienna, to some success, though money remained tight. A staunch liberal and supporter of the 1848 revolutions, Stifter permitted his name to go forward for Frankfurt Parliament. As a suspected "radical," however, these ambitions were dashed. Maintaining a fondness for children and childhood education, Stifter sought a position in the educational ministry instead, becoming Inspector for Schools in Upper Austria. A gifted painter, Stifter would occasionally sell his art for money as well. He was especially drawn to dramatic natural landscapes, a predilection he would echo in his stories, the work he would become best known for. Seestück bei Mondbeleuchtung (Seascape by Moonlight) by Adalbert Stifter Stifter published his first novella, Der Condor, in 1840. The story, about a young woman who accompanies scientists on a balloon flight beyond the stratosphere, was an instant success. From that point to the end of his life he never stopped writing. Rock Crystal, written in 1845, became one of several stories in Stifter's 1853 novella collection, Bunte Stein, or Motley Stones. The collection included stories Stifter wrote between 1943 and 1952, all of which are named after various rocks and minerals. In "Granite," a young boy recalls a long story told by his grandfather. "Limestone" centers on a kind but mysterious priest whose miserly life belies a secret philanthropic ambition. The stories, which were conceived as tales for younger readers, were not meant to be pedagogical in the traditional sense. As Isabel Fargo Cole points out in the introduction to her translation of Motley Stones, the children in the stories are not traditionally "good" but rather simply good at surviving "the recklessness, neglect, abuse, or clueless good intentions of the adults." Rock Crystal boasts the most harrowing example of child endangerment in the collection, making it one of the more unforgettable stories in the book. The frontispiece for the first edition of Adalbert Stifter's collection Bunte Steine (Motley Stones), illustrated by Ludwig Richter  Ludwig Richter's illustration for Rock Crystal (Bergkristall)  Blühnbach by Edward Theodore Compton (1913) The plot of Rock Crystal couldn't be simpler. A brother and sister go to visit their grandparents on Christmas Eve in a neighboring town in the Alps. On their way home, a violent snowstorm descends and they become lost in the mountain pass. The rest of the story is about their survival, how they find sustenance in the coffee concentrate gifted to them by their grandmother; how, once the storm stops, the glittering stars keep them awake with wonder, saving them from hypothermia; how they are found in the morning, and all returns to the way it was before (mostly). It is Stifter's gift for painterly description that makes this deceptively simple story an enduring work of art. His depictions of the mountain, the snow, and the "white darkness" of the storm are lyrical and vivid. The cavern the children find shelter in is "blue, bluer than anything on earth." There is the blooming of the northern lights above the heads of the children, a "faint green luminescence" that "grew brighter and brighter until the stars paled away a shudder of light." Stifter describes the sun rising after the storm as "a blood red disc" that leaves "the snow all around flushed as though bestrewn with thousands of roses." These and other images demonstrate why Hannah Arendt referred to Stifter as the "greatest landscape-painter in literature." Interior frontispiece for the first edition of Stifter's Der Nachsommer The first volume of Stifter's WitikoAfter publishing Motley Stones, Stifter would begin writing his two heftiest works: Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer) and Witiko. Der Nachsommer, at more than a thousand pages long, was Stifter's challenge to all who classified him as a "miniaturist." A classic bildungsroman, the book was Stifter's attempt to find a new language to tell his story, using a highly objective style far ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the novel was met with harsh criticism, as was his next novel, Witiko. Even longer than Der Nachsommer, Witiko, which was released in three volumes between 1865 and 1867, was also more experimental in its form and was met with bewilderment by readers and critics alike. Devastated by the rejection of what he considered his two most important works, Stifter entered a period of severe depression, one he was ultimately unable to escape. Dejected, and physically ailing due to cirrhosis of the liver, Stifter took his own life in January 1868. Monument to Adalbert Stifter on the promenade in Linz, where Stifter spent the later years of his life Stifter's life, like the stories he wrote, was a tale of light and darkness—of looking at the idyll and finding the abyss. Like many writers ahead of their time, Stifter was better appreciated after his death than he was while still alive. Now regarded as one of the forefathers of German literature, he wrote stories that, though a bit old-fashioned to some, have found new life and a new readership thanks to numerous translations and the heralding of his greatness by the likes of Auden, Arendt, and Choi. Rock Crystal remains one of the most beloved entry points into Stifter's oeuvre, a portal via snowy mountain pass into the writer's beguiling imagination. For the next few days, Rock Crystal will be 25% off on our website. NYRB Classics also publishes Isabel Fargo Cole's translation of Motley Stones, which includes her translation of Rock Crystal.NYRB at Press Play 2025 New York Review Books will be tabling at Press Play 2025 at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY, this weekend. Press Play is an annual weekend-long fair of books, records, art, ephemera, talks, and workshops, and it returns on December 13–14, 2025.Visit the New York Review Books and New York Review Comics exhibit (table #72) to browse a selection of our latest titles, which will be specially discounted for fair attendees.General admission tickets are free with a recommended donation. More information available here.Upcoming Event for Joe Brainard's The Complete C Comics The poet and critic John Yau joins comics scholar Bill Kartalopoulos and Tony Towle for a conversation on Joe Brainard's The Complete C Comics on Wednesday, December 10, at 6:30pm at the New York Studio School. The Complete C Comics is a collection of comic-poetic collaborations between Joe Brainard and his friends—Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Peter Schjeldahl, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, and others—made in the '60s. Previously available only on the rare book market as two separate issues, Brainard's C Comics have now been brought together under one cover with contributions by Ron Padgett and Bill Kartalopoulos in The Complete C Comics, which was published last week.More information about the event available here. The event will also be streamed live. Register to attend virtually here.December with Thoreau  Our monthly foray into Henry David Thoreau's The Journal: 1837–1861. This month, we have an entry from December 1, 1856. Thoreau was thirty-nine.DEC. 1. P.M.—By path around Walden. With this little snow of the 29th there is yet pretty good sledding, for it lies solid. I see the old pale-faced farmer out again on his sled now for the five-thousandth time,—Cyrus Hubbard, a man of a certain New England probity and worth, immortal and natural, like a natural product, like the sweetness of a nut, like the toughness of hickory. He, too, is a redeemer for me. How superior actually to the faith he professes! He is not an office-seeker. What an institution, what a revelation is a man! We are wont foolishly to think that the creed which a man professes is more significant than the fact he is. It matters not how hard the conditions seemed, how mean the world, for a man is a prevalent force and a new law himself. He is a system whose law is to be observed. The old farmer condescends to countenance still this nature and order of things. It is a great encouragement that an honest man makes this world his abode. He rides on the sled drawn by oxen, world-wise, yet comparatively so young, as if they had seen scores of winters. The farmer spoke to me, I can swear, clean, cold, moderate as the snow. He does not melt the snow where he treads. Yet what a faint impression that encounter may make on me after all! Moderate, natural, true, as if he were made of earth, stone, wood, snow. I thus meet in this universe kindred of mine, composed of these elements. I see men like frogs; their peeping I partially understand. Painting: George Henry Durrie, Winter Farmyard and Sleigh, 1860December Books THE LORD |
miércoles, 10 de diciembre de 2025
December News and Highlights
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