Letter from New York CityFebruary 2026Dear 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 StaffP.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...
Godlike goes on sale this Tuesday. Find it on our website here.Events with Richard Hell:Tuesday, March 3, 7pm ET |
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viernes, 6 de febrero de 2026
February News and Highlights
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