New York Review Books

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is retold with riotous ?60s flair in Dino Buzzati?s phantasmagorical graphic novel, a story with ?shades of Fellini, shades of Dickens, [and] shades of the great Italian horror director Mario Bava? (Los Angeles Times).There?s a certain street?via Saterna?in the middle of Milan that just doesn?t show up on maps of the city. Orfi, a wildly successful young singer, lives there, and it?s there that one night he sees his gorgeous girlfriend Eura disappear, ?like a spirit,? through a little door in the high wall that surrounds a mysterious mansion across the way. Where has Eura gone? Orfi will have to venture with his guitar across the borders of life and death to find out.Featuring the Ashen Princess, the Line Inspector, trainloads of Devils, Trudy, Valentina, and the Talking Jacket, Poem Strip?a pathbreaking graphic novel from the 1960s?is a dark and alluring investigation into mysteries of love, lust, sex, and death by Dino Buzzati, a master of the Italian avant-garde.

A CLASSIC 1930s COMIC STRIP: The New Yorker?s first art editor satirizes the petit bourgeoisie in these stylishly eccentric cartoons with echoes of Cheever and Wodehouse.Rea Irvin was The New Yorker?s first art editor and creator of the magazine?s iconic mascot, the butterfly enthusiast Eustace Tilly. In 1930, he ventured into new territory with the comic strip The Smythes. The Smythes?comprised of John, Margie, and their two forgettable children, Willie and Maudie?are a niceish suburban family, restless in their social stature, and eager to climb a sometimes wobbly social ladder (a ladder made even wobblier by the Great Depression). Irvin?s distinct, graceful line renders the Smythes in all their glory and hilarity as they navigate ill-fated dinner parties with pompous socialites, fend off robbers dressed as Santa, and get chased out of restaurants by cleaver-wielding chefs. With flavors of the upper-crust humor of Wodehouse and the suburban surrealism of Cheever, The Smythes drolly captures the joys, heartbreaks, and humiliations of being in a family. Handpicked by acclaimed cartoonists R. Kikuo Johnson and Dash Shaw?who also penned the introduction together?this new selection of Smythes strips also includes an afterword by comics historian Caitlin McGurk that sheds new light on Irvin?s work and life. An unsung masterpiece of cartooning, The Smythes is finally available to a new generation of readers ready to marvel at the full reach of Irvin?s artistic abilities.

In the mid-1960s, legendary artist and writer Joe Brainard (I Remember) teamed with poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O?Hara, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan, and many more for these pioneering collaborative comic strips?unavailable for decades and collected here for the first time.?PEOPLE OF THE WORLD… RELAX!?In the creative hotbed of 1960s New York, Joe Brainard was a whirlwind. He was a maker of paintings, assemblages, collages, book covers, poetry reading fliers, and more. But some of his most exciting work was done with his friends. In 1964, the twenty-two year old Brainard turned his talents to rewiring the lowly comic book form into something new and surprising. He invited his friends Frank O''Hara, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Peter Schjeldahl, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, and others?all of them New York School poets?to collaborate with him on comics that they would write and he would draw.The results were unlike any comics seen before. Previously available only on the rare-book market (at very high prices) but available here under one cover for the first time, the two issues of C Comics still feel as fresh as when the first page rolled off the mimeograph machine over sixty years ago. Brainard?s energetic line and joyful humor charge across every page, illustrating Frank O?Hara''s recasting of a cowboy as a mash note?writing lover, Ron Padgett?s experiments with traditional cartoon sound effects (ROAR! GRRR! SKREE!), surprising cameos by Ernie Bushmiller?s Nancy, and heaps of Dadaesque delights.This edition includes a foreword from Padgett and an essay by comics historian Bill Kartalopolous, who details the creation (and creators) of C Comics. A masterpiece of collaboration and spontaneity, C Comics is a testament to the vastness of Brainard?s creativity and his ability to push any artistic form in a new and powerful direction.

A heart-warming picture book for kids ages 3-7 about a bear who finds pleasure in solitude and the great outdoors?from the creator of the Benny and Penny series.The first reissue of Geoffrey Hayes?s classic children?s book in over two decades!Bear by Himself is a sweet tale of the joys and rewards of solitude. In seven simple yet lyrical sentences, we follow Bear by himself from the country into town, from day to night, from adventure and contemplation to bedtime and dreamland. Through this journey, readers get to see how Bear?s senses are heightened and his imagination enriched by his ability to pause and enjoy the world around him.First published by Harper & Row in 1976, this classic children''s picture book was Geoffrey Hayes?s first. He went on to become a successful author, illustrator, and cartoonist, best known for his Benny and Penny series. NYRB Kids is excited to bring back this classic, long out of print, with Hayes?s original illustrations. Bear and his adventures provide a much-needed example of how to have fun by yourself and explore the wonderful world around you, lessons as timeless as Bear himself.

A young girl bravely faces dragons to save her mother in this magnificently illustrated folk tale inspired by Chinese mythology, from the author of The Tiger Prince.A stunning story book for kids ages 4-8 who love adventure stories and Disney movies like Moana and Encanto!For months, Mae and her parents have been traveling across the country in search of a magic flower. Mae?s mother is ill, and this rare flower is the only thing that can save her, but it grows in a secret place, guarded by dragons. Mae vows to herself that she will find the flower and save her mother. One night she wakes to a vision of light that beckons her to follow, but does she have the courage to face the dragons?A new book by the talented author and illustrator Chen Jiang Hong, The Dragon Flower is a strikingly illustrated story of bravery, compassion, and kindness that young readers will want to turn to again and again. A wonderful companion piece to Chen Jiang Hong?s The Tiger Prince, also published by NYRB.

When World War I breaks out, a young architecture student in Munich does everything in his power to avoid being enlisted into the German military in this perceptive, wickedly humorous novel by a prominent twentieth-century writer, journalist, and film critic.Siegfried Kracauer?s Ginster is the great World War I novel you?ve never heard of. Here, the sheer horrors are kept offstage, as in Greek tragedy, and merely reported from time to time. The setting is the German home front. Its Chaplinesque antihero?Ginster?spends the war gumming up the German war machine as he maneuvers to stay out of its clutches and save his own skin.Which he does; however, there is a deeper struggle going on between Ginster?s dreamy self-absorption and the pitiless organization of society, war or no war. Ginster has no wish to do anything. Alas, his reveries are forever being interrupted by the demands of an other-minded world.All the scenes of Ginster are well to the rear of the military action, yet with Kracauer narrating, military language saturates all aspects of civilian life in the homeland. Ginster?s nearest and dearest are so gung-ho, he feels that he?s at the front when he visits them.War, the author seems to say, is merely ordinary life seen from the back instead of the front. As a new European war darkens our horizon, one no more expected than was World War I, Kracauer?s novel feels timelier than ever.

A new edition of Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker?s riotous and immensely influential handbook for drawing and reading cartoons?a book that?s both a parody of humorless how-to guides and a genuine (and genuinely instructive) ode to the art of making comics.In a cartoon, what do you call the sweat drops shooting off a character?s head? Those are ?Plewds.? What about when you see a character wagging their tongue out of their mouth? Oh, that?s a ?Protusilation.? How about the lines coming off a freshly baked pie? That?s ?Waftarom.? This sort of playful comics nomenclature abounds in The Lexicon of Comicana, the revered 1980 cartooning handbook authored by Mort Walker, creator of the legendary daily comic strip Beetle Bailey.Both a send-up of lofty how-to-draw books and a sincere and hilarious love letter to the art of drawing cartoons, the Lexicon is a joyously exhaustive cheat sheet to key comics visuals that has been referenced and treasured by generations of cartoonists. This new edition includes an introduction by Chris Ware?who keeps a copy of the Lexicon next to his desk?and a meticulous appendix by Mort?s son Brian Walker, who delves deep into the visual language of comics.With the help of The Lexicon of Comicana, you?ll come away a better, wiser, richer, and funnier artist. Plus, you?ll learn what a ?Morf? is?Mort?s favorite part.

Situated between memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam is an incisive response to a modernist classic and an affecting exploration of the poetics and politics of our times.?We are supposed to know where we are with biography and autobiography, they are the literary equivalents of the portrait and the self-portrait,? writes Jeanette Winterson about Gertrude Stein?s 1932 classic, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. By narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, Stein invented a literary form that was both intimate and uncanny, blurring lines of authority and identity as it winds through a story of two women living and loving together through a tumultuous moment in history. Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein?s project to tell another story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration in a differently discordant age. At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao?s life journey from Vietnam during the war and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin?s Autobiography draws in subjects as varied as photography, tropical fruit, New York real estate, and queer theorist Eve Sedgewick?s eyeglasses, weaving a landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender in our time.

A young woman rejects the fast-paced consumer culture of 1980s Japan in favor of a slower, more carefree lifestyle in this tenderhearted, sweetly funny classic of slice-of-life manga.A classic of Japanese manga, Miss Ruki is a warm and vivid portrait of the lives of two young women in Tokyo during Japan?s 1980s bubble economy. The titular Miss Ruki spurns the fast-paced consumer culture of the era in favor of a lighthearted life dedicated to her hobbies, her books, and spending time with her anxious but far more pragmatic friend, Ecchan.Takano?s art moves with all the warmth, grace, and clarity of the everyday moments it depicts. Sweet and funny, these vignettes of a long-gone time still resonate today with readers and authors in Japan, with famed contemporary manga artist Keigo Shinzo noting, ?To read it is to grasp something of the essence of Japan.... This is the kind of manga I want to draw.?

The true story of the nineteenth century?s so-called ?Wild Boy of Aveyron??an abandoned French child who lived for years alone in the wilderness before being brought under the care of an innovative young physician.?Before dawn on January 8, 1800, a remarkable creature came out of the woods near the village of Saint-Sernin in southern France...?So begins Roger Shattuck?s book about the Wild Boy of Aveyron?a child tragically abandoned by his caretakers and captured years later while scavenging food from a local garden. The Wild Boy could not speak, refused all clothing, and repeatedly tried to escape from captivity. Sent to the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris and declared a hopeless case, he was left to run wild until, one day, a medical student arrived on the scene.Jean Itard, young and from the provinces, began spending time with the boy and imagining ways to help him. He hired a woman named Guérin to care for him and gradually introduced him to social interaction, engaging his senses and imagination with games, toys, and other forms of training. For a while Victor (as Itard named him) made progress, but by 1805 their sessions together had reached an impasse. Victor died in obscurity, still cared for by Madame Guérin, in 1828.The Forbidden Experiment tells the story of a troubled young man and the extraordinary doctor who tried, however imperfectly, to help him. It is also, in Shattuck?s thoughtful, accessible, and compassionate prose, a book that explores essential questions about the human condition. What separates us from animals? What is language, and how do we acquire it? Can children who have been neglected or abused learn to trust the world?First published in 1980?and inspired by François Truffaut?s film The Wild Child?The Forbidden Experiment is now back in print for the first time in more than a decade.

?[Bomarzo] is a novel that will make any reader happy.... [A] novel to be read aloud, with the whole family gathered around.? ?Roberto BolanoA lavishly written gothic historical fantasy novel that centers around Pier Francesco Orsini, the tortured duke of Bomarzo and creator of the Italian town?s famously bizarre ?Garden of the Monsters.?Pier Francesco Orsini, duke of Bomarzo, created a park of monsters in which the nightmares of the Renaissance are preserved, set in stone yet still writhingly alive. In Bomarzo, Manuel Mujica Lainez?one of the great Argentine novelists of the twentieth century?re-creates the dark and legendary duke as a brilliant memoirist recalling the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life from a modern point of view (Freudian psychoanalysis and Lolita both put in an appearance) while ensconced in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez?s own Buenos Aires.Bomarzo is a historical novel in the grand manner, a first-person portrait of an aristocratic hunchback bullied by his family and determined to prove a villain (a portrait so convincing that Edmund Wilson assumed it to be fact). It is also, of course, a commentary on such historical fictions. But above all it?s an immersive story told in a sumptuous style?a bit as if Proust were rewriting one of Poe?s Italian tales?as Gregory Rabassa?s translation (out of print for many years) conveys beautifully.

Colonial history haunts this stunning, spectral-looking graphic novel, a spiritual sequel to the author?s Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures.In Misery of Love, a spiritual sequel to the acclaimed Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures, Yvan Alagbé continues his interrogation of race and family in modern France.The book focuses on the dream-like memories of a woman named Clare, who is spending time with her family for her grandfather?s funeral. Alagbé shifts between narratives of the family, all haunted by the legacy of France?s colonial subjugation of Africa.Alagbé works in stormy grayscale washes, using comics, as he puts it, as ?a sacred dimension which celebrates, questions and perpetuates life.... I believe that life is not damnation but grace.?This is another ambitious, devastating masterpiece from one of France?s best contemporary cartoonists.

A collection of dazzling, playful, and linguistically inventive poetry by one of Germany''s finest writers, in a classic translation that honors the author''s amazing verbal acrobatics.Christian Morgenstern?s The Gallows Songs are some of the most delightful and imaginative creations of twentieth-century German poetry. Composed originally after an outing Morgenstern took with his friends to Gallows Hill near Potsdam, these lively, puckish poems envision Gallows Hill as a fantastical world populated with fabulous animals, bizarre mechanisms, and some truly unruly punctuation.Morgenstern felt that people often used their familiar language unthinkingly, without ever pausing to marvel at the glorious arbitrariness of words. Through poems chock-full of irresistible wordplay and unabashedly exuberant rhymes, he invites us to meditate?but also to med-it-nine and med-i-ten?on all the incidents and accidents of language that make the world of words so vibrant.True to the spirit of Morgenstern?s linguistic mischief, Max Knight?s translation sparkles with uncommon wit as it reinvents in English Morgenstern?s daring verbal acrobatics, and is itself a feat of poetic genius.

A sweeping anthology of classical Japanese poetry, including poems about love, war, trees and mountains, everyday life, and so much more. One of the most important works of Japanese literature of all time, available here in an accessible translation.Winner of the 1982 American Book Award for TranslationThe first and greatest anthology of classical Japanese poetry, the Man''yoshu is considered, along with The Tale of Genji, to be one the most important works in classical Japanese literature. In Japanese the title means ?Anthology of Ten Thousand Leaves,? the ?anthology of anthologies? from the first flowering of an artistic and literary sensibility in Japan during the Asuka and Nara periods?the seventh and eighth centuries. Exhibiting an astonishing variety, the poems range from the grand animistic rhetoric of the laments for the imperial family to the stark and curiously modern ?Dialogue of the Destitute,? from the elegant banquet verse of aristocrats to the ?poems of the frontier guardsmen.? As its name suggests, The Ten Thousand Leaves represents a culling of what was considered the best from an epoch of cultural and literary innovation perhaps unparalleled in Japanese history.This edition incorporates books one through five of the twenty that make up the original Man''yoshu and includes an introduction by the translator, Ian Hideo Levy, that provides a general historical and cultural background for this monumental work.

Two novels by one of the Soviet Union''s most inventive writers, written in the tradition of Gogol and Dostoyevsky but with a twentieth-century, modernist edge.Konstantin Vaginov was an early and exemplary figure of Soviet modernist writing in all its agonized and glorious contradictions. Born into an educated middle-class family at the turn of the century, Vaginov came of age with the Bolshevik revolution. His novels of the late 1920s and early 1930s are daringly experimental and tragically nostalgic, mourning the irrevocable loss of prerevolutionary intellectual culture with mercilessly ironic prose. Hopelessly adrift in the brave new Soviet world, Vaginov?s protagonists attempt to conjure the recent and distant past by stockpiling old books and songs, vulgar baubles and bad jokes, newspaper clippings, coins, and graffiti.This volume contains two novels. The first, Goat Song, is an ironically literal translation of the Greek word ?tragedy? (tragodia?goat song). It features thinly veiled portraits of Vaginov?s contemporaries, the luminaries and leftovers of the once-flourishing Petersburg, Petrograd, and Leningrad arts community, as they flounder and self-destruct in their new bracingly materialist circumstances. Echoing Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Bely, Goat Song is both a classic Petersburg city text and its swan song: ?Now there is no Petersburg. There is Leningrad; but Leningrad has nothing to do with us?the author is a coffin-maker by trade, not a cradle expert.?The second novel, Works and Days of Wistlin, follows the nonchalant novelist Wistlin as he unscrupulously mines the lives of his friends and fellow citizens for literary material. Like the flea-market trinkets hunted by Goat Song?s marginal figures, Wistlin?s eccentric and frivolous victims are yesterday?s relics and nobody?s concern. His exploitation of human material is a wry commentary on the concurrent efforts to industrialize and collectivize the Soviet economy, at a horrific human cost.NYRB Classics will also publish Vaginov?s final novels, Bambocciata and Harpagoniana.

A landmark translation of passionate, fiercely intelligent poetry about coming of age by one of the most influential Italian writers of the twentieth century.Cesare Pavese?s 1936 collection of poems, Lavorare stanca, is increasingly regarded as one of the most astonishing and powerful books of twentieth-century poetry. William Arrowsmith?s translations capture the spirit and complex vitality of Pavese?s voice.This bilingual edition also contains a thorough introduction to Pavese?s work, notes to individual poems, and two critical essays that he wrote about Lavorare stanca, the book by which he hoped to be remembered. ?Lavorare stanca,? he once declared, ?is a book that might have saved a generation.?