May News and Highlights

Letter from New York City May 2026 Dear Readers, It's finally warming up here in New York City after what felt like a long, cold winter and early spring. In the interest of giving everyone more time to spend out in the sun, we are keeping this month's newsletter brief. Please enjoy a couple of excerpts from new releases, both of which might inspire some outdoor reading—or indoor, depending on what the weather is like where you are.  Take care, and happy reading, The NYRB Staff   "Call me Ahab." This month, NYRB Kids publishes a new take on a classic American tale. The Spanish author-illustrator Manuel Marsol's Ahab and the White Whale retells Herman Melville's Moby-Dick from the perspective of the obsessive captain of the Pequod. In Marsol's hands, Ahab is less an angry, tortured dictator of the high seas, but a man so obsessed with his search that he forgets what he wants to find. Marsol's Ahab travels the world in search of the sea giant who took his leg, clambering up "mountains that seemed to tremble when struck by the waves" and down into "man-eating islands." On each page, Marsol's illustrations invite readers to find what Ahab cannot, for all his effort, seem to see himself: the whale hiding in plain sight.  Scroll down to see some pages from Ahab and the White Whale, which goes on sale later this month, and see if you can find the elusive marine mammal on each page. Ahab and the White Whale is now available for sale on our website or for pre-order with your favorite bookseller.    "All we remember, finally, is words.": An Excerpt from Light While There is Light by Keith Waldrop A reissue of Keith Waldrop's Light While There Is Light joins the NYRB Classics series this month. Waldrop's heavily autobiographical book is the sort that defies precise categorization. It is sometimes referred to as a memoir, other times a novel. Waldrop used the oxymoron "fictional memoir" to describe it. The book tracks Waldrop's family history, particularly as it relates to Waldrop's mother, a religious zealot who moved her family around the United States in search of a satisfactorily holy brand of Christianity. As Ben Lerner writes in his introduction to the NYRB Classics edition, Waldrop handles the subject matter with tender patience: "I don’t think I’ve ever read a less judgmental book, let alone a less judgmental family history. Waldrop refuses to psychologize or allegorize, to excuse, pity, or condescend."  We thought we would share the first few paragraphs of the book, which you can read below.  I've read many stories of revenants and apparitions, but my ghosts merely disappear. I never see them. They haunt me by not being there, by the table where no one eats, the empty window that lets the sun in without a shadow. Few memories give me a sense of my childhood—perhaps, later, more will surface. Among those few is the darkened room from which proceed my mother's moans. This is not a particular moment I remember; it is the background of many years, nearly all my early life. She moans for so many reasons that it will be difficult more than to suggest their range. Probably I am ignorant of her most exquisite pains. I know not to make light of lamentations. Sometimes I could get her to play the piano. She sat at the battered old upright, her eyes shut, picking out what she could remember of a Chopin polonaise or some cheap waltz from 1920. And then—what really moved her—"Brilliant Variations," by someone named Butler, on "Pass Me Not" or other hymn. I was fascinated by the way she kept her eyes closed. To glance at the music, just as to read a paragraph of print, gave her migraines.  I knew of course the words to the hymns she played, and, whether or not I sang them, they sounded in my inner ear, even through Butler's brilliance. Some day the silver cord will break And I no more as now shall sing Ghosts gather in such lines. But O the joy when I shall wake Within the palace of the King. It is not for her that I write this. She is dead, safe at last, out of all relation. I can recall, still, what she looked like at particular times, how she moved in certain spaces. But little by little she fades, replaced by an unsubstantial description somewhere in the memory. Best to make it as definite as possible. All we remember, finally, is words.  Light While There Is Light is now on sale on our website.  Photograph: from the book, which appears with the caption "My mother, after her operation"   Upcoming Events Wednesday, May 6, 6pm CT at The Garden District Book Shop, New Orleans, LA: a celebration of Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints, The Oyster Diaries, and The Ritz of the Bayou with the author. RSVP here.  Thursday, May 7, 6:30pm ET at the Society of Illustrators, NYC: Dash Shaw, R. Kikuo Johnson, and Caitlin McGurk discuss Rea Irvin and his comic strip, The Smythes. Tickets available here.  Thursday, May 7, 6pm CT at Pass Christian Books, Pass Christian, MS: Nancy Lemann reads from and discusses her books Lives of the Saints, The Oyster Diaries, and The Ritz of the Bayou.  Friday, May 8, 5pm GMT, Online Event via Watkins Books, London, UK: Haleh Liza Gafori reads from and discusses her translations of Rumi, Gold and Water. RSVP here.  Friday, May 15, 7pm ET at Bram and Bluma Appel Salon, Toronto: Richard Hell discusses his novel Godlike with Sean Michaels. SOLD OUT.  Thursday, May 21, 6pm ET at Rizzoli Bookstore, NYC: Amit Chaudhuri and Mark Krotov discuss Chaudhuri's books Incompleteness, The Immortals, and A New World. RSVP here.    May’s NYRB Classics x McNally Jackson Book Club Pick: An African in Greenland Join us on Thursday, May 14, at 7pm ET for this month's meeting of Unknown Masterpieces, an NYRB Classics book club at McNally Jackson Booksellers in Downtown Brooklyn. We will be discussing Tété-Michel Kpomassie's An African in Greenland (trans. James Kirkup), a delightful and finely observed account of the author's years-long journey from his native country, Togo, to Greenland to live among the Inuit people. If you are local to NYC and want to join, sign up for the book club on McNally Jackson's website here. You also can sign up for the June book club discussion about Janet Malcom's In the Freud Archives, a masterful work of journalism that comically and thrillingly describes power struggles within the insular world of psychoanalysis. RSVP here.    May with Thoreau Our monthly foray into Henry David Thoreau's The Journal: 1837–1861. This month, we have an entry from May 8, 1854. Thoreau was thirty-six. May 8. P.M.—By boat to Fair Haven. It is long since I have sailed on so broad a tide. How dead would the globe seem, especially at this season, if it were not for these water surfaces! We are slow to realize water,—the beauty and magic of it. It is interestingly strange to us forever. Immortal water, alive even in the superficies, restlessly heaving now and tossing me and my boat, and sparkling with life! I look round with a thrill on this bright fluctuating surface on which no man can walk, whereon is no trace of footstep, unstained as glass. When I got off this end of the Hollowell place I found myself in quite a sea with a smacking wind directly aft. I felt no little exhilaration, mingled with a slight awe, as I drove before this strong wind over the great black-backed waves I judged to be at least twenty inches or two feet high, cutting through them, and heard their surging and felt them toss me. I was even obliged to head across them and not get into their troughs, for then I could hardly keep my legs. They were crested with a dirty-white foam and were ten or twelve feet from crest to crest. They were so black,—as no sea I have seen,—large and powerful, and made such a roaring around me, that I could not but regard them as gambolling monsters of the deep. They were melainai—what is the Greek for waves? This is our black sea. You see a perfectly black mass about two feet high and perhaps four or five feet thick and of indefinite length, round-backed, or perhaps forming a sharp ridge with a dirty-white crest, tumbling like a whale unceasingly before you. Only one of the epithets which the poets have applied to the color of the sea will apply to this water,—melaina, μέλαινα θάλασσα. I was delighted to find that our usually peaceful river could toss me so. How much more exciting than to be planting potatoes with those men in the field! What a different world! Drawing: Boelgen (bølger) - waves - 1892, Theodor Kittelsen   May Books EAST OF DREAMS Nastassja Martin LIGHT WHILE THERE IS LIGHT AN AMERICAN HISTORY Keith Waldrop AHAB AND THE WHITE WHALE Manuel Marsol LOST IN PEACH BLOSSOM PARADISE Xiong Liang   The May selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club is Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann. If you join the NYRB Classics Book Club by Wednesday, May 13, Lives of the Saints will be your first selection.    In the Press "Lemann’s style is idiosyncratic but never remote. One wants to linger in her sugarcane groves and columned mansions, and to follow the wretched souls and would-be saints who haunt them, damned as they may be." —Sara Krolewski, Kismet, on Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints and The Oyster Diaries "There is no motive so forceful, Waldrop writes, 'as the mere emptiness of the world.' Light While There Is Light describes that emptiness and all that follows from it unlike anything I’ve ever read. Where the book should crumble into nihilism, it builds instead to a plainspoken mercy." —Dan Piepenbring, Harper's Magazine, on Light While There Is Light by Keith Waldrop "NYRB’s edition of Goat Song is a worthy addition to the publisher’s offering of Russian literature in translation, and Morse and Cebula have done a fine job of bringing these experimental works into English....This volume is sure to delight readers interested in Russian literature and the various forms of European modernism, as well as anyone interested in experimental and avant-garde literature. Even at nearly a century old, even in translation, Vaginov can still take readers on a journey into 'the magical depth of words.'" —Eric Vanderwall, Harvard Review, on Konstantin Vaginov's Goat Song   Image at top of newsletter: Tree in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, NY, May 2026. You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. 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