February News and Highlights

Letter from New York City February 2026 Dear Readers, While our city continues to dig itself out from under mountains of frozen snow, the staff at NYRB have been hard at work preparing for an avalanche of new books coming this spring. This month we have a much-anticipated reissue of Richard Hell's novel Godlike. While a lot of people know Hell as a punk legend, we have long known him around here as a gifted poet and fiction writer, and Godlike is one of his best works. Scroll down to read an excerpt from the novel, get some book recs from fellow newsletter readers, find out about forthcoming events, and more.  Happy reading, The NYRB Staff P.S. New York Review Books will be exhibiting at the AWP Annual Conference in Baltimore early next month, from March 4–7. If you are attending the conference, you can find the latest titles from NYRB and free issues of The New York Review of Books at Booth #1232.    Your Favorite Books of 2025 We received many responses to our query about which books, publsihed by NYRB or not, you enjoyed the most last year. It was difficult to choose, but see some of our favorite replies below. You will have to indulge us for choosing so many recommendations of NYRB titles. Congratulations to Deb M. on winning the bag-of-books raffle!  "J.L. Carr’s idyllic A Month in the Country reminded me of what a novel can be; this small tale filled with vivid and memorable characters performing everyday tasks, living their normal lives in simplicity and community, concerned with the mundane details of real life, kept me engrossed and provided an afternoon’s worth of escape into the world of Oxgodby. Every summer cannot be filled with epic adventures, and I know of few people whose lives are dramatic enough to fill the pages of genre fiction’s latest best-seller, so Tom Birkin’s account of his summer restoring an old painting, dreary as it may have at times been for him, filled me with warmth and hope." —Michael B.  "A note from Willa Cather's Lucy Gayheart - 'Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or property, but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts--that and nothing more.' The joy of being a reader, I find, is this capability to turn inwards, ever important in a world that is making it difficult to control what happens to one's person." —Geneva G.  "Of several good books I read in 2025, two stand head and shoulders above the rest: Omar El Akkad's searingly eloquent One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This—which turned my soul inside out—and From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey, which I savored from cover to cover on the night that I knew would be the last one I'd spend with a beloved dog suffering from terminal cancer. One book was an Illumination, the other a consolation; just before Christmas, I told a friend that one could not give a better gift to a reader than both of them together." —Julia G.  "The Five Wounds by Kristin Valdez Quade. The particular Pynchon novel I was looking for was out at my local library, but right next to his books was this one, which had been on my To Read list since it came out a few years ago.  A really solid, satisfying book--intelligent and empathetic but clear-eyed, with finely drawn characters, a vivid setting, and dialogue that sounds real. It's just got everything you want in a novel, including clean, graceful writing. I've been recommending it right and left." —Andy M.  "I read Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years while traveling through Romania in April. The book became so monumental in my thinking and feeling all spring that I was desperate to get it into the hands of as many people as possible; I bought two additional copies upon returning home, one for my father, the other for a friend of mine." —Nadia N.  "My current enthusiasm for Hungarian novels began a few years ago with Magda Szabó published by NYRB. This winter I was immersed in The Transylvanian Trilogy by Miklós Bánffy. I was particularly struck by his vivid descriptions of the wild mountains and the candle lit feasts and dances of the aristocracy. This led to a rereading of Between The Woods And The Water in which Patrick Leigh Fermor travels through the same forests staying in the castles. To my delight, he also explained that 'sz' in Hungarian is pronounced as a French 'j'!" —Devon H.  "After circling her bibliography for the better part of a year, I finally took a crack at Eve Babitz in 2025 and fell head-over-heels in love with her, thanks to NYRB's offerings of Eve's Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company. I cannot begin to explain how excited I am to dive into I Used to Be Charming later this month and of course Too L.A. later this year—I feel like Babitz and I were carved from the same piece of sky or otherwise share the same heartbeat, and I'm so so thankful that NYRB is keeping her work alive and available for readers." —Rachel S. "At seventy I have at last read Proust, Dostoyevski, and other classics, filling my mind with other worlds, other minds. I discover lives I might have had, and ways of being never considered." —Greg C.  (Greg did not mention specific translations, so we would like to recommend Swann's Way as translated by James Grieve, published in the NYRB Classics series.) "'I had only to move forward,' thinks Don Diego de Zama, 'farther and farther. But I feared the end. For, presumably, there was no end.' Would that it were so—no end. To one's visit to Antonio Di Benedetto's Asunción; to the experience of 'a certain abject nobility,' as Edwin Frank put it, in which Zama is soaked." —Connor D.      P.S. We would like to reply to reader Dorlynn who noted her desire for more translations of Inés Caganti after reading Free Day: You are in luck. A new translation of Cagnati's novel Crazy Genie joins the NYRB Classics series next month.    A Trick for Enjoying Poetry Readings: An Excerpt from Godlike This month NYRB Classics reissues Richard Hell's novel Godlike, a loose retelling of the infamous affair between Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, reset in the gloriously squalid East Village in 1970s New York. The novel, which Vulture just listed it as one of "8 New Books to Read This February," opens with the two characters meeting at a poetry reading in a bar. Below is an excerpt from the opening, just before their first encounter. The book gets decidedly NSFW from there... It was March and the weather was like a pornographic high-fashion magazine. But Raw’s Drink was a gutter derelict in it. The room was see-through brown broken by a debris of battered tables and cluttered walls. There was a little clearing in the far corner where a stalk of microphone stood leaning thinly.  Paul felt affection for the poor poets, his family. He probably liked them more than anyone else did. He was popular for that.  Tonight’s reader was Tom Bennett. Tom was a filthy drug addict who was too smart for his own good. His face was like a monkey’s carved from a blond wood doorstop wedge, he was going bald, and he wore reddish whiskers that looked like pond scum. He never stopped talking and he considered himself a Buddhist. Whatever else, he was in his element at Raw’s this night, and it was heartening. He was a messenger and Paul was mentally gorging on it. “God made everything from nothing, but the nothing shows through.” Paul played a favorite mental trick for enjoying poetry readings and imagined the reader had died long ago.  * The reading ended, and everyone drank on, and the room got noisier. People went out into the air and smoked grass together and came back. Paul saw the kid. He planned to find him but hadn’t gotten around to it when he sensed the attention shifting in the crowd. The kid’d gone up to three different poets in the room and told each what he thought of him. Godlike goes on sale this Tuesday. Find it on our website here.    Events with Richard Hell: Tuesday, March 3, 7pm ET e-flux Screening Room 172 Classon Ave, Brooklyn RSVP Monday, March 9, 7pm PT Elliott Bay Book Company 1521 10th Ave, Seattle, WA RSVP Wednesday, March 11, 7pm PT Powell's City of Books 1005 W. Burnside St, Portland, OR MORE INFO Friday, March 13, 7pm PT Green Apple Books on the Park 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco, CA RSVP Monday, March 16, 7pm Stories Books & Cafe 1716 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA MORE INFO Photo: Richard Hell © Nick Waplington   Two More Events for Baby Driver in PNW Amanda Fortini, who wrote the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Jan Kerouac's Baby Driver, will be doing two more events about the book in Oregon, one of Jan's many homes, this month. Fortini will be joined at both events by Jan's brother, David Stuart. Information below:  Wednesday, February 18, 6pm PT Broadway Books 1714 NE Broadway, Portland, OR INFO HERE Thursday, February 19, 7pm PT Tsunami Books 2585 Willamette St, Eugene, OR INFO HERE   More Upcoming Events Monday, February 23, 6pm ET at La Maison Française NYU, NYC: Edwin Frank discusses At the Louvre, an anthology published by NYRB Poets with the Louvre Museum and Éditions Seghers, with Philip John Usher, co-editor of Building the Louvre: Architectures of Politics and Art. IN-PERSON and ONLINE. RSVP here.  Thursday, February 26, 7pm ET at Poetry Society of America, Brooklyn, NY: Cole Swensen, translator of the recent NYRB Poets title Elegies by Emmanuel Hocquard, will be reading from recent work alongside Matthew Rohrer for the Poetry Society of America Reading Series. IN-PERSON and ONLINE. RSVP (required) here.    February with Thoreau Our monthly foray into Henry David Thoreau's The Journal: 1837–1861. This month, we have an entry from February 11, 1853. Thoreau was thirty-five. Feb. 11. While surveying on the Hunt farm the other day, behind Simon Brown’s house I heard a remarkable echo. In the course of surveying, being obliged to call aloud to my assistant from every side and almost every part of a farm in succession, and at various hours of a day, I am pretty sure to discover an echo if any exists, and the other day it was encouraging and soothing to hear it. After so many days of comparatively insignificant drudgery with stupid companions, this leisure, this sportiveness, this generosity in nature, sympathizing with the better part of me; somebody I could talk with,—one degree, at least, better than talking with one’s self. Some voice of somebody I pined to hear, with whom I could form a community. I did wish, rather, to linger there and call all day to the air and hear my words repeated, but a vulgar necessity dragged me along round the bounds of the farm, to hear only the stale answers of my chain-man shouted back to me. I am surprised that we make no more ado about echoes. They are almost the only kindred voices that I hear. It was the memorable event of the day, not anything my companions said, or the travellers whom I met, or my thoughts, for they were all mere repetitions or echoes in the worst sense of what I had heard and thought before many times; but this echo was accompanied with novelty, and by its repetition of my voice it did more than double that. It was a profounder Socratic method of suggesting thoughts unutterable to me the speaker. There was one I heartily loved to talk with. Under such favorable auspices I could converse with myself, could reflect. Drawing: Georges Seurat, L’écho, 1883–1884   February Books GODLIKE Richard Hell A PARISH CHRONICLE Halldór Laxness QUEEN Birgitta Trotzig   The February selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club is The Lord by Soraya Antonius. If you join the NYRB Classics Book Club by Wednesday, February 11, The Lord will be your first selection.    In the Press "If any novel deserves to be called epic, it’s Effingers. Inspired by Tergit’s own family history, this account of the rise and fall of a German Jewish clan has an addictive immediacy that will make you reluctant to put it down, despite its intimidating bulk—and despite the historical storm clouds you know will be looming." —The New York Times on Effingers by Gabriele Tergit "An invigorating and timely new book . . . [Boehm] has persuaded me that universalism could be more profoundly transformative than anything offered by the self-styled 'radicals' on either end of the political spectrum." —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times, on Radical Universalism by Omri Boehm   Image at top of newsletter: Prospect Park, February 2026. You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. 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