| Letter from New York CityJanuary 2026Dear Readers,Happy New Year! We hope that the holiday season was kind to you and that you were able to squeeze some reading time in between festivities. As always, we would love to know what books our readers enjoyed over the past year. Write to us at books3@nybooks.com with a sentence or two about your favorite reading from 2025. We will select one person at random to win a free bag of books (continental U.S. addresses only) and will share some of our favorites in the next newsletter. We are kicking the new year off with some new NYRB apparel, a special sound installation in NYC, and, of course, new books. Scroll down for all of that, plus the return of our popular cover quiz and other bits of news. Happy reading,The NYRB StaffP.S. The image above is a preview of books coming later this winter and spring. If you have ever thought you would like to show off your love for John Williams's Stoner or Elaine Dundy's Dud Avocado in a public manner, boy are you in luck. We have created a limited series of baseball caps featuring titles from across our series, including Stoner, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, Elsa Morante's Lies and Sorcery, Diane DiMassa's Hothead Paisan, and many others. Get yours here. And feel free to write in with suggestions for future baseball caps at rcorders@nybooks.com. Please note that these caps are currently being sold via The Reader's Catalog, an affiliate NYRB business, and are not currently available for purchase on nyrb.com. It has been ages since we did a classic cover quiz in this newsletter, high time to see how well our readers know the series. Test your knowledge of older and recent NYRB releases by seeing if you can identify the books belonging to these small swatches of cover art. A Special At the Louvre Sound Installation This month, catch At the Louvre, an audio installation complementing the poetry collection by the same name published by NYRB Poets. At the Louvre is a collaboration between New York Review Books, The Louvre, and The Kitchen, a performance and art exhibition space in the New York's West Village which will host the installation from January 15 to January 24, 2026. At the Louvre brings together a hundred newly commissioned poems by a hundred of the world's most vibrant poets, all writing on works from the museum's collection, the museum's history, and on the embodied, sensorial experience of the museum's hallowed galleries. To complement the book's publication, a soundtrack was composed, for which 95 of the poets in the collection read their poem in their own language, thereby making a statement for an open-ended perception of the museum and, with it, of a multiple approach to humankind. This soundtrack is also an experimental, performative piece, in which voices are heard across cultures and times – echoing through the many lives of art.The poets who can be heard reading as part of the sound installation include Fanny Howe, Najwan Darwish, Kim Gordon, Amadou Lamine Sall, Lan Lan, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Nuno Júdice, Alice Notley, John Keene, Ariana Reines, Nick Laird, Ali Cobby Eckerman, and many others. The Kitchen will present this historic project for a special week-long sonic installation, free and open to the public during gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 12–6pm.More information available here. A father and son visit the old world in A New World:
An Excerpt This month NYRB reissues two more novels by Amit Chaudhuri, A New World and The Immortals. We thought we would share a short excerpt from A New World, which follows a father and son, Jayojit and Bonny, as they journey from their home in America to visit the father's family in Calcutta. Read the excerpt from A New World below. It was simple—Jayojit wanted to spend as much time as possible with him. Although it was clear that he and his wife hadn’t got on from the very beginning, some urge to rehearse what their parents had done before them had taken hold of him, of her, and, without fully understanding what they were doing, they had brought a child into the world, in a small hospital in a midwestern American town. Bonny had been born three years after the marriage. The first two years were the years of amorous energy. Yet it had been absurd. Both Amala and Jayojit had grown up with the same background, listened to the same music, liked the Beatles; she, predictably, shied away from the Rolling Stones as so many girls he used to know in school had. He had clung to the loyalties he thought he was shaped by; she had seamlessly allowed herself to shed her early enthusiasms, which probably hadn’t been very intense in the first place, and, listening to the incomprehensible music of the eighties, would say, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ At first, he found this touching. Both of them had decided, at some point in their lives, without articulating it to themselves, like a pact they’d made with several others without knowing it, that an arranged marriage was the best option. Bonny now went to a school in San Diego, near where his mother lived. He was at that stage when only the simplest arithmetic—addition, subtraction, multiplication—was taught, when five-sentence compositions were assigned to be written. Jayojit had to meet the head teacher to request from the school an extra month off for Bonny’s holidays. ‘I don’t think it should be a problem, Dr Chatterjee.’ The lady knew he taught at a college. ‘Vikram’s bright; he should pick things up as easily at home as he does at school. You know, I envy you your trip. The furthest I’ve been into Asia is Paris.’Jayojit had laughed on cue. Then, suddenly, curious for knowledge, he’d asked:‘How’s he doing? Anything in particular he’s good at . . . or weak in, for that matter?’He cherished the notion of his child’s success, although, in his own life, he’d come to disdain conventional ideas of success and achievement.‘He’s good at English, I’d say. I teach them English.’‘Oh, really?’‘Yes.’ Did she seem disappointed that Bonny hadn’t told him already? ‘He’s quite good.'Other children have problems with little things like distinguishing between its and it apostrophes, and constructions like “had had”, but a few, like Bonny, don’t. He’s also good at making sentences and spelling.’He began to go out for walks with Bonny in the afternoon.The Admiral said, ‘Does dadu have homework to do? I could help him.’ ‘Not really, baba. He’s too young for homework; he has to do some drawings and listen to some stories, that’s all. Last month he wrote a two-sentence story about going to the beach.’ He laughed. The Admiral listened gravely, as if to the description of a thesis. ‘Listen: “The beach is full of sand and it sure gets hot. Mary went out to the sea and got afraid.’’’ Jayojit had it by heart. ‘That apparently got an alpha.’ Feigning surprise.At times, in his old school, Bonny’d have to self-consciously play the ‘Indian’ role when nations were being discussed, and he’d been told by his father: ‘Hey, d’you know what Vikram means: it means strong, powerful, heroic.’‘Really?’ Bonny had said. ‘That’s weird.’As they went out now they could hear voices coming from some of the other flats, where housewives were watching videos as their children slept. The noise of fights and crescendos took Jayojit aback at first.Sometimes they did not take the lift and went down the stairs; Bonny, in particular, liked running down. Bits of garbage would be lying here and there on each landing.When they had arrived downstairs, they were met by a hall. The hall was usually swept by breezes, especially now, in April. At one end, on the far right, there was a row of wooden post-boxes with numbers painted on them, where a postman could be seen sometimes at half-past four, and near the centre of the hall there was a ping-pong table.‘It’s amazing the time at which these men come,’ Jayojit had thought as he’d watched, three days ago, a man arrived with a bag of letters at four o’ clock. ‘But if you tell them anything, they won’t give your mail tomorrow.’There were terrible stories about the post-office, how registered letters lay waiting, and how overseas mail, with blue stickers saying Par Avion, was delivered weeks late. ‘It’s worse than inconvenient, it can be downright fatal,’ someone had said. Even phone bills didn’t come on time. Each time Jayojit wrote to his parents from America he felt a renewed sense of irritation and helplessness.‘Baba!’ said Bonny urgently, pausing in the centre of the hall. Jayojit, preoccupied, stood there seeming to watch him, although his mind was elsewhere. He did not know how to think of these first days together of their visit, if ‘visit’ it could be called.
A New World and The Immortals, along with a new collection of Chaudhuri's essays, are now on sale on our website and wherever books are sold. Image above: Mailboxes in stairs, Kolkata, India © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar / CC BY-SA 3.0 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.Jan. 27. P.M.—Up meadow to Cliffs and Walden road. I came upon a fox’s track under the north end of the Cliffs and followed it…. Their tracks are larger than you would expect, as large as those of a much heavier dog, I should think. What a life is theirs, venturing forth only at night for their prey, ranging a great distance, trusting to pick up a sleeping partridge or a hare, and at home again before morning! With what relish they must relate their midnight adventures to one another there in their dens by day, if they have society! I had never associated that rock with a fox’s den, though perhaps I had sat on it many a time. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, etc., etc. They are the only outlaws, the only Robin Hoods, here nowadays. Painting: Bruno Liljefors, Fox in snow covered winter landscape,1893 The January selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club is Friday by Michael Tournier. If you join the NYRB Classics Book Club by Wednesday, January 14, Friday will be your first selection. "Antonius creates vivid characters and mercilessly skewers British imperial life. But her greatest strength is lush descriptive prose. On every page there are jeweled sentences . . . [The Lord] remains a noteworthy literary achievement for its ability to re-create the world of Palestine on the eve of its destruction as it might have appeared to people living through it." —Elliot Colla, The Washington Post, on The Lord by Soraya Antonius"Chateaubriand’s Memoirs is a testament to literature’s persistence not despite but in and through the terrors—and occasional joys—of living." —Jack Hanson, The Yale Review, on Memoirs from the Beyond the Grave by François-René de Chateaubriand"Driver is a welcome addition to our strangely threadbare library of readable books about the world of work." —Stephen Smith, Financial Times, on Driver by Mattia Filice"Some novels are mirrors, and this is one of those, and some novels are hit jobs on a certain kind of fantasy, and this is one of those too." —Emily Temple, Literary Hub, on Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, "Lit Hub’s 43 Favorite Books of 2025" Image at top of newsletter: books forthcoming from NYRB in Winter/Spring 2026 |
