  Letter from New York CityNovember 2025Dear Readers,We have a short newsletter this month, but it is still full of good bookish stuff, from a closer look at a small but mighty collection of criticism to a film adaptation of a book by NYRB Classics author Linda Rosenkrantz. We also have a generous offering of events this month, with readings and talks happening across the country for Robert Glück's Jack the Modernist, Peter Cole's translations of Hayim Nahman Bialik, Jan Kerouac's Baby Driver, Sophie Duvernoy's translation of Effingers by Gabriele Tergit, and Haleh Liza Gafori's Rumi translations. Scroll down for all of that and more.Happy reading,The NYRB StaffHidden Gems: Seduction and BetrayalB-sides and other lesser-known books from the NYRB Classics Series  Hardwick’s slim essay collection Seduction and Betrayal is one of those books that is far more than the sum of its parts. While one can certainly dive into the deep end and tackle one of the larger tomes of Hardwick’s work (a couple of which are also published by NYRB Classics), this slimmer, more curated selection has long been cherished as one of Hardwick’s most thrilling compendiums. Assembled from Hardwick’s essays on women in literature—both writers and characters—the collection spans four particularly productive years of the inimitable author's career and paints a portrait not only of the subjects within, but, obliquely, of Hardwick herself. The reading room at the University of Kentucky in 1939 Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick (1916–2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, into a world of southern gentility where she felt herself a perpetual alien. Her parents were strict Christians and she bucked against the constraints of organized religion. Though her family wasn’t poor, her father was a faltering businessman and routes of escape for his daughter were few. The whip-smart Hardwick found deliverance in the form of education: she graduated from the University of Kentucky and went on to pursue PhD work at Columbia University in New York City. She would never return to live in the South again.In New York, Hardwick thrived. She dropped out of Columbia in 1941, realizing she did not want to be fated to a lifetime of academic writing, another restrictive prison of sorts for her lively mind. She kept writing, though, and it was soon rewarded. She published her first novel, The Ghostly Lover, in 1945, and began writing for The Partisan Review. Her reputation as a promising novelist and gimlet-eyed critic gained her friends and admirers in the upper echelons of New York literary society. She won a Guggenheim in 1947 and was awarded a fellowship at Yaddo, where she would begin a romance with Robert Lowell.  An early edition of Hardwick's first novel, The Ghostly Lover  Robert Lowell in the 1960s, photo by Elfa DorfmanLowell, married to novelist Jean Stafford at the time, would leave his wife for Hardwick. They married in 1949, weeks after Lowell was hospitalized for his first major mental breakdown. Their relationship, by all accounts, was both personally tortuous and intellectually invigorating. The marriage was marked by numerous other mental breakdowns and, eventually, a final betrayal. In 1970, Lowell took up with a younger writer, Caroline Blackwood, while teaching at Oxford. Hardwick, who was left to care for their daughter, Harriet, alone on top of keeping her own writing career going, would write that she felt very much "like a widow."Though a difficult period personally, the years following her separation from Lowell proved generative for Hardwick as a writer. In 1974, she published Seduction and Betrayal, which collected essays previously printed in The New York Review of Books, of which Hardwick was a co-founder. The essays are sharp, as they always were, but also take to particular task the unfair lot of women in the world and in literature. In her portraits of the Brontës, she interrogates the special treatment afforded to the one male Brontë sibling, Branwell, and praises Emily for eschewing the typical romantic tropes of the day. In her essays on Ibsen's female characters, she criticizes misreadings of Nora in A Doll's House and misconceptions about Hedda Gabler being a "hysteric." She praises Sylvia Plath's visceral final poems and questions if our reading of them would be same if she hadn't committed suicide. But she is not blindly, universally complementary of the female writers and characters under her microscope. She is fair-minded and fiercely exacting, while also detectably "world weary," as critic Maggie Doherty points out. First edition of Seduction and Betrayal (1974) First edition of Sleepless Nights (1979)It was during these years without Lowell that Hardwick would also begin what is considered her fiction masterpiece—the short novel Sleepless Nights. Rejecting traditional plot structure, Hardwick paints a dark but mesmerizing picture of a woman's life through a flowing series of memories and musings. Narrated by "Elizabeth," the novel moves from memories of the character's childhood in the south to her lonely present where she is "here in New York, no longer a we.” While the personal parallels are conspicuous, so is Hardwick's intention to obscure the border between fact and fiction. Elizabeth Hardwick, photo by Dominique Nabokov Before the publication of Sleepless Nights, Hardwick would reconcile with Lowell, spending his last months with him in Maine and New York City. After Lowell's death, Hardwick lived a second life of sorts, writing prodigious amounts of criticism, mostly for The New York Review of Books, and a landmark biography of Herman Melville. She became an inspiration to a new generation of writers who wanted to learn from her meticulous prose. As one of her former students, Darryl Pinckney, writes in his introduction to her Collected Essays, for Hardwick, "literary criticism had to be up there with its subjects." Seduction and Betrayal encapsulates this standard, a true example of criticism as literature. It's no wonder readers return to it over and over again.For the next few days, Seduction and Betrayal will be 25% off on our website. NYRB Classics also publishes Sleepless Nights, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, and The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick. Those books are not on sale but are also very worth reading.Linda Rosenkrantz on the Big Screen Linda Rosenkrantz's book Peter Hujar's Day has been adapted into a film starring Ben Whishaw as the eponymous photographer and Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz herself. In the movie, Hujar describes the routines and rituals that define an artist's life to his friend Rosenkrantz, capturing a single day's activities, from interactions with cultural icons of the day, including Allen Ginsberg, to the texture and energy of downtown New York in its heyday.The original record of Rosenkrantz's interviews with Hujar resurfaced after 30 years collecting dust in a file cabinet and became the 2021 book Peter Hujar's Day, now adapted to film by Ira Sachs. Rosenkrantz had previously used recordings of conversation among friends in her groundbreaking novel from 1968, Talk, which was reissued by NYRB Classics in 2015.Peter Hujar's Day comes out in theaters in New York and Los Angeles this Friday, November 7. More information here. Rebecca Hall playing Linda Rosenkrantz in Peter Hujar's Day Upcoming EventsToday, November 5, 7pm ET at Artists Space, NYC: Robert Glück discusses his novel Jack the Modernist with Kay Gabriel. More info here.Friday, November 7, 6:30pm PT at Point Reyes Presbyterian Church, Point Reyes Station, CA: Haleh Liza Gafori reads from and performs her translations of Rumi from Water and Gold, followed by a conversation with Rebecca Solnit. Hosted by Point Reyes Books. More info here.Monday, November 10, 7pm ET at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, NYC: Peter Cole discusses his new translations of Hayim Nahman Bialik in On the Slaughter with Steven J. Zipperstein, who will talk about his new book Philip Roth: Stung by Life. RSVP here.Tuesday, November 11, 7pm at McNally Jackson Seaport, NYC: Jewish Currents presents Peter Cole discussing his translations of Hayim Nahman Bialk with Marta Figlerowicz. Tickets here.Tuesday, November 11, 7pm MT at Wheatgrass Books, Livingston, MT: Amanda Fortini discusses and reads from Jan Kerouac's Baby Driver, for which she provided the introduction. More information here.Wednesday, November 12, 5pm ET on Zoom: Amanda Fortini and Meghan Daum discuss Jan Kerouac's Baby Driver. RSVP here. Online event.Tuesday, November 18, 6:30pm at Goethe-Institut, NYC: Sophie Duvernoy discusses her new translation of Gabriele Tergit's Effingers with Noah Isenberg. RSVP here.Thursday, November 20, 7pm GMT at the French Institute of the United Kingdom, London: Mattia Filice reads from the new English translation of his novel Driver. More info here.Thursday, November 20, 6pm at Mast Books, NYC: a celebration of the release of Joe Brainard's The Complete C Comics with Tyhe Cooper and other special guests. More info to come.Wednesday, December 3, 5:30pm at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University, St. Louis, MO: a lecture on Joe Brainard's The Complete C Comics by comics historian Bill Kartalopolous. More info here.November with Thoreau  Our monthly foray into Henry David Thoreau's The Journal: 1837–1861. This month, we have an entry from November 4, 1858. Thoreau was forty-one.Nov. 4. A rainy day. . . . If, about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of the town and look over the forest, you will see, amid the brown of other oaks, which are now withered, and the green of the pines, the bright-red tops or crescents of the scarlet oaks, very equally and thickly distributed on all sides, even to the horizon. All this you will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,—if you look for it. Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is, you will think for threescore years and ten that all the wood is at this season sere and brown. Objects are concealed from our view not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because there is no intention of the mind and eye toward them. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of nature are for this reason concealed to us all our lives. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more. Painting: Winslow Homer, Autumn Trees, 1878.November BooksThe November selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club is Ginster by Siegfried Kracauer. If you join the NYRB Classics Book Club by Wednesday, November 12, Ginster will be your first selection. In the Press"[Dragon Flower] has all the paradoxical richness and simplicity of a fairy tale....Young readers will cheer for the doughty girl, who braves the razored depths to haul the baby dragon to safety in this satisfying, sumptuously illustrated fable." —Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street Journal, on Chen Jiang Hong's Dragon Flower"War has long been described as a machine, but Siegfried Kracauer’s harrowing and hilarious German home front novel, Ginster, shows what machines really are: a massive conglomeration of many tiny, boring individual parts." —Mary Marge Locker, The New York Times"The novel is a remarkable achievement of tone, acknowledging the crap aspects of the work – the early mornings and late nights; the drab, harshly lit staff lounges in which bad meals are wolfed ahead of the next departure....The terseness of the language and its irregular rhythms convey both a monotony and a relentless hurry – the need always to be somewhere else, and not a second late. " —Chris Power, The Observer, on Mattia Filice's DriverImage at top of newsletter: East 32nd Street, outside of the NYRB offices, November 2025.You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. You can choose the types of mailings you wish to receive: |
miércoles, 5 de noviembre de 2025
November News and Highlights
Novedades: «Pessoa» de Richard Zenith y «La educación soviética» de Olga Medvedkova
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