Bøger udgivet af The New York Review of Books, Inc

European history of the past century is full of examples of philosophers, writers, and scholars who supported or excused the worst tyrannies of the age. How was this possible? How could intellectuals whose work depends on freedom defend those who would deny it?   In profiles of six leading twentieth-century thinkers—Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojève, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida—Mark Lilla explores the psychology of political commitment. As continental Europe gave birth to two great ideological systems in the twentieth century, communism and fascism, it also gave birth to a new social type, the philotyrannical intellectual. Lilla shows how these thinkers were not only grappling with enduring philosophical questions, they were also writing out of their own experiences and passions. These profiles demonstrate how intellectuals can be driven into a political sphere they scarcely understand, with momentous results.In a new afterword, Lilla traces how the intellectual world has changed since the end of the cold war. The ideological passions of the past have been replaced in the West, he argues, by a dogma of individual autonomy and freedom that both obscures the historical forces at work in the present and sanctions ignorance about them, leaving us ill-equipped to understand those who are inflamed by the new global ideologies of our time.

A compelling biography of the Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski that takes readers to Paris in the Roaring Twenties, to the front lines during WWII, and into the late 20th-century art world.Józef Czapski (1896-1993) lived many lives during his ninety-six years. He was a student in Saint Petersburg during the Russian Revolution and a painter in Paris in the roaring twenties. As a Polish reserve officer fighting against the invading Nazis in the opening weeks of the Second World War, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets. For reasons unknown to this day, he was one of the very few excluded from Stalin's sanctioned massacres of Polish officers. He never returned to Poland after the war, but worked tirelessly in Paris to keep alive awareness of the plight of his homeland, overrun by totalitarian powers. Czapski was a towering public figure, but painting gave meaning to his life. Eric Karpeles, also a painter, reveals Czapski's full complexity, pulling together all the threads of this remarkable life.

The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II.During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier Józef Czapski brought Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust's masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work's originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust's great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust's world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.

Newbery Medal-winning author Nancy Willard''s trilogy of adventure tales, now in one volume. Children won''t be able to put down these stories of the journeys of a boy and his orange cat, Plumpet.Anatole has a knack for seeking and finding adventure, often with Plumpet, his orange cat, who is accustomed to ghost trains, amnesiac soldiers, flying horses, and wallpaper portals, just a few of the enchantments encountered along the way. From his perilous search for wild fennel to cure his grandmother’s asthma, to his high-stakes game of checkers to save his uncle from a wizard’s evil spell, Anatole’s missions will keep young readers turning the pages of this omnibus edition of the Newbery Medal–winning author Nancy Willard’s trilogy of fantasy tales: Sailing to Cythera, The Island of the Grass King, and Uncle Terrible. David McPhail’s pen-and-ink illustrations throughout are beautifully detailed engagements with Willard’s world of make-believe. Anatole may be small but he is determined to right the wrongs he finds in each of the lands he enters. Whether kindness or evil will prevail is a matter of suspense, but Anatole is always on the side of the light.

Available for the first time, Victor Serge's intimate account of the last decade of his life gives a vivid look into the Franco-Russian revolutionary's life, from his liberation from Stalin's Russia to his "Mexico Years," when he wrote his greatest works.In 1936, Victor Serge-poet, novelist, and revolutionary-left the Soviet Union for Paris, the rare opponent of Stalin to escape the Terror. In 1940, after the Nazis marched into Paris, Serge fled France for Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his life. His years in Mexico were marked by isolation, poverty, peril, and grief; his Notebooks, however, brim with resilience, curiosity, outrage, a passionate love of life, and superb writing. Serge paints haunting portraits of Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and "the Old Man" Trotsky; argues with André Breton; and, awaiting his wife's delayed arrival from Europe, writes her passionate love letters. He describes the sweep of the Mexican landscape, visits an erupting volcano, and immerses himself in the country's history and culture. He looks back on his life and the fate of the Revolution. He broods on the course of the war and the world to come after. In the darkest of circumstances, he responds imaginatively, thinks critically, feels deeply, and finds reason to hope. Serge's Notebooks were discovered in 2010 and appear here for the first time in their entirety in English. They are a a message in a bottle from one of the great spirits, and great writers, of our shipwrecked time.

The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling's essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

A lost, early classic of the graphic novel, now back in print for the first time since 1930.William Gropper was one of the great American cartoonists and illustrators of the twentieth century. A student of George Bellows and Robert Henri, he was a prolific newspaper cartoonist, WPA muralist, Guggenheim Fellow, and committed political activist--the first visual artist called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, after which he was blacklisted (though he got revenge with his pen). He was also a master of visual storytelling, best seen in his only full-length narrative work, Alay-Oop. First published in 1930, just as Gropper was coming to the height of his powers, this lost classic of the graphic novel presents an unusual love triangle: two circus acrobats and the honey-tongued schemer who comes between them. In page after page of charming, wordless art, Gropper takes us from the big top to bustling New York streets, from a cramped tenement apartment to the shifting landscape of a dream, as his characters struggle with the conflicting demands of career, family, and romance. A timeless and surprisingly modern yarn--with backflips aplenty.

A sweeping epic by Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andric about power, identity, and Islam set in 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia and Istanbul.Omer Pasha Latas is set in nineteenth-century Sarajevo, where Muslims and Christians live in uneasy proximity while entertaining a common resentment of faraway Ottoman rule. Omer is the seraskier, commander in chief of the Sultan's armies, and as the book begins he arrives from Istanbul, dispatched to bring Sarajevo's landowners to heel, a task that he accomplishes with his usual ferocity and efficiency. And yet the seraskier's expedition to Bosnia is a time of reckoning for him as well: he was born in the Balkans, a Serb and a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a bright boy who escaped his father's financial disgrace by running away and converting to Islam. Now, at the height of his power, he heads an army of misfits, adventurers, and outcasts from across Europe and Asia, and yet wherever he goes he remains a stranger. Ivo Andric, who won the Nobel Prize in 1961, is a spellbinding storyteller and a magnificent stylist, and here, in his final novel, he surrounds his enigmatic central figure with many vivid and fascinating minor characters, lost souls and hopeless dreamers all, in a world that is slowly sliding towards disaster. Omer Pasha Latas combines the leisurely melancholy of Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March with the stark fatalism of an old ballad.

Fans of Flaubert's Madame Bovary will want to read this reimagination of one of literature's most famous failures, Charles Bovary. Part fiction, part philosophy, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor is also a book about love.Charles Bovary, Country Doctor is one of the most unusual projects in twentieth-century literature: a novel-essay devoted to salvaging poor bungler Charles Bovary, the pathetic, laughable, cuckolded husband of Madame Bovary and the heartless creation of Gustave Flaubert. As a once-promising novelist who was tortured by the Nazis and survived a year in Auschwitz, author Jean Améry had a particular sympathy for the lived experience of vulnerability, affliction, and suffering, and in this book-available in English for the first time-he asserts the moral claims of Dr. Bovary. What results is a moving paean to the humanity of Charles Bovary and to the supreme value of love.

A smart and witty picture book about a king whose pride is challenged, by the renowned Spanish illustrator and children's author Guridi.It is not nothing to be the king of nothing and the formidable king of nothing presides with proper pride over his kingdom of which nothing is known except that he is the king. He parades through his kingdom, and he oversees his kingdom, and he sets out to defend his kingdom-especially when, one day, out of the blue, the last thing he would ever have expected or wanted shows up within its borders: something.What to do?The King of Nothing is a sly and witty and entertaining parable about personhood and power, about always getting your way and not always getting your way, and getting on anyway. It is a playful book of first philosophy and fundamental psychology for kids, brilliantly executed and illustrated by Guridi, a renowned Spanish artist and author for children.

A collection of chilling and prescient stories about ecological apocalypse and the merging of human and machine.Welcome to Moderan, world of the future. Here perpetual war is waged by furious masters fighting from Strongholds well stocked with "arsenals of fear," earth is covered with vast sheets of plastic, and humans vie to replace more and more of their own "soft parts" with steel machinery. What need is there for nature when trees and flowers can be pushed up through holes in the plastic? Who requires human companionship when new-metal mistresses can be ordered from the shop? But even a Stronghold master can doubt the catechism of Moderan. Wanderers, poets, and his own children pay visits, proving that another world is possible."The effect is as if Whitman and Nietzsche had collaborated," Brian Aldiss wrote of David R. Bunch's stories. Originally published in science-fiction magazines in the 1960s and '70s and passionately sought by collectors, the stories have not been available in a single volume for nearly fifty years, and this new edition of Moderan will include ten previously-uncollected stories. Like Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, and borrowing from the Bible and the language of advertising, Bunch coined a mind-bending new vocabulary. His intent was not to divert readers from the horrors of modernity but to make them face it squarely.

A poetic portrait of Paris that combines prose poetry, diary, and memoir by award-winning writer and poet Henri Cole.Henri Cole's Orphic Paris combines autobiography, diary, essay, and poetry with photographs to create a new form of elegiac memoir. With Paris as a backdrop, Cole, an award-winning American poet, explores with fresh and penetrating insight the nature of friendship and family, poetry and solitude, the self and freedom. Cole writes of Paris, "For a time, I lived here, where the call of life is so strong. My soul was colored by it. Instead of worshiping a creator or man, I cared fully for myself, and felt no guilt and confessed nothing, and in this place I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew." Written under the tutelary spirit of Orpheus-mystic, oracular, entrancing-Orphic Paris is an intimate Paris journal and a literary commonplace book that is a touching, original, brilliant account of the city and of the artists, writers, and luminaries, including Cole himself, who have been moved by it to create.

A one-of-a-kind collection of work by little-known Late Tang poetic master Li Shangyin.Li Shangyin is one of the foremost poets of the late Tang, but until now he has rarely been translated into English, perhaps because the esotericism and sensuality of his work set him apart from the austere masters of the Chinese literary canon. Li favored allusiveness over directness, and his poems unfurl through mysterious images before coalescing into an emotional whole. Combining hedonistic aestheticism with stark fatalism, Li's poetry is an intoxicating mixture of pleasure and grief, desire and loss, everywhere imbued with a singular nostalgia for the present moment.This pioneering, bilingual edition presents Chloe Garcia Roberts's translations of a wide selection of Li's verse in the company of other versions by the prominent sinologist A. C. Graham and the scholar-poet Lucas Klein.

Max the dog-poet is back, this time in Paris and falling in love, in Maira Kalman's delightful picture book.It's happened. Before you can say "Pepe le Pew," Max the millionaire poet dog has landed in Paris, the city of lights. The city of dreams. Everyone is in a froufrou of delight over Max. There's Fritz from the Ritz, Madame Camembert, Charlotte Russe, and Pierre Potpurri, who wants Max to perform in his Crazy Wolf Nightclub. Amidst the enchantment and beauty that is Paris in the spring, something is missing for Max. Max has made his millions; when will he find romance?

A new translation of the only novel by lauded Romanian literary critic Matei CălinescuAn NYRB Classics Original Ugly, unkempt, a haunter of low dives who begs for a living and lives on the street, Zacharias Lichter exists for all that in a state of unlikely rapture. After being engulfed by a divine flame as a teenager, Zacharias has devoted his days to doing nothing at all—apart, that is, from composing the odd poem he immediately throws away and consorting with a handful of stray friends: Poldy, for example, the catatonic alcoholic whom Zacharias considers a brilliant philosopher, or another more vigorous barfly whose prolific output of pornographic verses has won him the nickname of the Poet. Zacharias is a kind of holy fool, but one whose foolery calls in question both social convention and conventional wisdom. He is as much skeptic as ecstatic, affirming above all the truth of perplexity. This of course is what makes him a permanent outrage to the powers that be, be they reactionary or revolutionary, and to all other self-appointed champions of morality who are blind to their own absurdity. The only thing that scares Zacharias is that all-purpose servant of conformity, the psychiatrist.This Romanian classic, originally published under the brutally dictatorial Ceauşescu regime, whose censors initially let it pass because they couldn’t make head or tail of it, is as delicious and telling an assault on the modern world order as ever.

Written over the course of four decades, François-René de Chateaubriand's epic autobiography has drawn the admiration of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Barthes, and Sebald. Here, in the first books of his massive Memoirs, spanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looks back on the already bygone world of his youth. He recounts the history of his aristocratic family and the first rumblings of the French Revolution. He recalls playing games on the beaches of Saint-Malo, wandering in the woods near his father's castle in Combourg, hunting with King Louis XVI at Versailles, witnessing the first heads carried on pikes through the streets of Paris, meeting with George Washington in Philadelphia, and falling hopelessly in love with a young woman named Charlotte in the small Suffolk town of Bungay. The volume ends with Chateaubriand's return to France after seven years of exile in England. In this new edition (the first unabridged English translation of any portion of the Memoirs to be published in more than a century), Chateaubriand emerges as a writer of great wit and clarity, a self deprecating egotist whose meditations on the meaning of history, memory, and morality are leavened with a mixture of high whimsy and memorable gloom.

A surreal vision of a post-alien-invasion Earth where human beings still have to deal with quotidien frustrations, ennui, and understanding their place in the world.Since the mid-1980s, the British cartoonist Chris Reynolds has been assembling a world all his own. On the surface, it seems much like ours: a place of cool afternoon shadows and gently rolling hills, half-empty trains and sleepy downtown streets. But the closer you look, the weirder it gets. After losing a mysterious intergalactic war, Earth is no longer in humanity’s control. Blandly friendly aliens lurk on the margins and seem especially interested in the mining industry. The very rules of time and space seem to have shifted: Mysterious figures suddenly appear in childhood photos, family members disappear forever without warning, power outages abound, and certain people gain the power of flight. A helmeted man named Jimmy is somehow causing local businesses to shutter and is being closely watched by the “trendy new police force,” Rational Control. The world is being remade, but in what image?This new collection, selected and designed by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth, includes short stories, a novella, and the full-length graphic novel Mauretania. It is the ideal guide to all the mystery and wonder of one of the most underappreciated cult classics in the history of comics.This NYRC edition is a hardcover with foil stamping, debossing, full-color endpapers, and extra-thick paper, and features new scans of the original artwork.

A sweet tale about kindness, jealousy, and fairness perfect for reading when a child is sick or well.Edward is sick and Elizabeth is well, and nothing could be more unfair! Edward gets to stay in bed and everyone treats him like a prince. Elizabeth has to get out of bed, get dressed, go to school, come home and do chores, finish her homework and practice the piano. "I wish I was sick too!" Elizabeth complains, and soon, to her dawning dismay, her wish is granted. Jealousy and kindness, fairness and responsibility, the passionate complaints and pleasures of childhood are well represented here by a close-knit and surprisingly intellectual cat family, drawn with good humor and sympathy by the illustrator-author couple, Aliki and Franz Brandenberg. The perfect book to read when you''re sick, or when you''re well and wish you were sick too.

An original collection of lauded philosopher Galen Strawson''s writings on the self and consciousness, naturalism and pan-psychism.Galen Strawson might be described as the Montaigne of modern philosophers, endlessly curious, enormously erudite, unafraid of strange, difficult, and provocative propositions, and able to describe them clearly—in other words, he is a true essayist. Strawson also shares with Montaigne a particular fascination with the elastic and elusive nature of the self and of consciousness. Of the essays collected here, “A Fallacy of Our Age” (an inspiration for Vendela Vida’s novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name) takes issue with the commencement-address cliché that life is a story. Strawson questions whether it is desirable or even meaningful to think about life that way. “The Sense of the Self” offers an alternative account, in part personal, of how a distinct sense of self is not at all incompatible with a sense of the self as discontinuous, leading Strawson to a position that he sees as in some ways Buddhist. “Real Naturalism” argues that a fully naturalist account of consciousness supports a belief in the immanence of consciousness in nature as a whole (also known as panpsychism), while in the final essay Strawson offers a vivid account of coming of age in the 1960s. Drawing on literature and life as much as on philosophy, this is a book that prompts both argument and wonder.