Bøger i NYRB Classics serien

"Mr. Fermor's elegant rococo fantasy about a volcanic eruption on an imaginary Caribbean island is just close enough to reality to raise a genuine shiver--possibly even a genuine tear. In truth, it is a small timeless masterpiece." --Phoebe Lou Adams, The Atlantic An NYRB Classics Original Patrick Leigh Fermor's only novel displays the same lustrous way with words as his beloved travel trilogy (A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road), the memoir of his youthful walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This slim book starts with the meeting of an English traveler and an enigmatic elderly Frenchwoman on an Aegean island. He is captivated by her painting of a busy Caribbean port in the shadow of a volcano, which leads her to tell him the story of her childhood in that town back at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tale she unfolds, set in the tropical luxury of the island of Saint-Jacques, is one of romantic intrigue and decadence involving the descendants of slaves and a fading French aristocracy. Then, on the night of the annual Mardi Gras ball, a whole world comes to a catastrophic and haunting end.

A timeless work of social satire, set in the 1920s and considered one of the most insightful Modernist depictions of England's working class Living is a book about life in a factory town and the operations of a factory, from the workers on the floor to the boss in his office. The town is Birmingham and the factory is an iron foundry, like the one that Henry Green worked in for some time in the 1920s after dropping out of Oxford, and the stories--courtships, layoffs, getting dinner on the table, going to the pub, death--are all the ordinary stuff of life. The style, however, is pure Henry Green, at once starkly constrained and wildly streaked with the expedients and eccentricities of everyday speech--cliché and innuendo, clashing metaphors, slips of tongue--which is to say it is like nothing else. Epic and antic, Living is a book of exact observation and deep tenderness, the work, in Rosamond Lehmann's words, of an "amorous and austere voluptuary" whose work continues to transform the novel.

Originally published: Great Britain: John Murray (Publishers), an Hachette UK company, 2013.

The Door, a riveting novel by Magda Szabo, is a must-read for all literature enthusiasts. Published by the New York Review of Books in 2015, this book has since been a sensation in the literary world. The Door falls under the genre of contemporary literature, a genre that Szabo has masterfully woven her narrative into. The story is a profound exploration of the bond between two very different women, their struggles, and the door that represents a barrier and a bridge to their understanding. Magda Szabo, with her eloquent writing style, brings to life the characters and their emotional journey. This book is not just a story, but an experience that will leave you contemplating long after you've turned the last page. Published by the New York Review of Books, it is a testament to their commitment to bringing quality literature to readers worldwide.

"Kingsley Amis's most ambitious reckoning with his central theme--the degradation of modern life--Take a Girl Like You also introduces one of the rare unqualified good guys in Amis's rogue-ridden world: Jenny Bunn, a girl from the North English country has come south to teach school in a small smug town where she hopes to find love and fortune. Jenny is independent, likable, optimistic, openhearted, intelligent, and exceedingly good-looking, but the men who flock around her are all too willing to overlook her virtues in the hopes of getting her in the sack. But then Jenny, though no prude, is set on remaining a virgin until marriage. Jenny's fundamental, unshakeable decency and her determination to live life on her own terms--though she is surrounded with a host of brilliantly rendered schemers and fools, male and female, but chiefly male--are in the forefront of Amis's novel"--