New York Review Books

Told in comic strip form, this whimsical and soothing bedtime story for kids ages 4-8 will help struggling young sleepers drift off to dreamland! We all sometimes have a hard time going to sleep. But did you know that Sleep itself can have trouble sleeping, too?Sleep is a friendly figure with a magic wand, who visits all living things and sends them off to dreamland when night falls. You know about Sleep, she visits you every night without fail. But what about Sleep, doesn’t she need her slumber too? Everyone she stops to ask just dozes off!Sleep travels the world, seeking cozy places to settle down, from atop a bunch of baby chicks, to Santa’s beard, to a baobob canopy; she listens to a lullaby, a meditation; she floats down the Amazon and rides an updraft in Siberia. Nothing does the trick: sleep keeps evading Sleep! Until a cat’s soft purring snore sends Sleep just where she needs to go. Goodnight, Sleep.Saehan Parc''s playful story and cute, dreamy illustrations will help young readers float off to dreamland.

Hungry bridge trolls, limousine werewolves, and other absurd characters populate these delightfully irreverent gag cartoons from the golden days of webcomics.Beginning at the dawn of the new millennium, the animator Brad Neely materialized as one of the funnier voices on the internet. Youtube hits like the foul-mouthed George Washington, his demented audiobook retelling of Harry Potter in Wizard People, Dear Readers, and the alarmingly prescient Adult Swim TV show China, IL (starring the voices of both Greta Gerwig and Hulk Hogan) all reveal how Neely captured a kind of freewheeling online spirit that is fading fast.During this ascent, Neely was also quietly mastering another form, the webcomic, where he spliced together historical figures, fairy tales, wildlife, and absurd gag setups into truly laugh-out-loud cartoons: hungry bridge trolls ready to devour local “chappies”; Caesar’s real killer (Jeffrey); the Boo-Boo Maker; limousine werewolves; superheroes trying and failing to rescue Christ; and more eye-blasting thrills.Gathered here for the first time along with Neely’s reflections about his work, Creased Comics is a portal into a truly individual creative mind, and a snapshot of some of the best days for webcomics.

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 landmark work dedicated to the author''s partner, this set of linked poems explores love and loss through the lens of myth, faith, and art. Heavily influenced by the work of C. P. Cavafy, Plante''s paen to his beloved will stay with readers long after the last verse.In 1965, the novelist David Plante met the poet and editor Nikos Stangos, with whom he lived until Stangos''s death in 2004. Over those years, Plante learned Greek and immersed himself in Greek poetry and found himself entranced by the profoundly straightforward and unmetaphoric style of the great C.P. Cavafy. Plante''s verse tribute to Stangos, The Death of a Greek Lover, combines the austere and the sensual in ways reminiscent of Cavafy, while possessing a passionate sincerity of its own. This beautiful sequence of short poems, a book-length elegy, brings a singular new sensibility and music to poetry in English.Plante''s fiction mixes exact social and psychological observation with an unmistakable and unsettling sense of transcendent meaning. The extraordinarily direct expression of love and loss found in The Death of a Greek Lover is similarly accompanied by an ongoing exploration of how poetry, myth, and faith can speak to our sorrowing selves.

A young girl clings fiercely to the damaged love of her mother—a taciturn farmworker cast out by her family and scorned by her village—in this devastating and lyrically rendered novel from a French-Italian maverick.Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a ramshackle house by a willow-lined river in rural France. Every morning, Genie walks to the neighboring farms to do what work there is to be done. When farmers and villagers greet her, she says nothing, and keeps walking. Once, she was a lighthearted girl from the best family in the valley; now they all call her “Crazy Genie.” While her mother works, Marie waits, yearning for her mother to notice her, longing for the moment when they will be back in their lonely house by the river.Told in Marie’s ingenuous, straightforward voice, Crazy Genie is the second novel by Inès Cagnati, who grew up in poverty in rural France in the 1940s, the child of Italian immigrant agricultural workers. Rich in observation and detail, and devastating in its portrayal of a child’s unconditional love and of society’s callous prejudices, Crazy Genie, together with her first novel, Free Day, confirms Cagnati''s astonishing power as a writer.

An outrageous spectacle of love between two untamed poets, a 27-year old man and a teenage boy, written by one of America’s original punks and finest writers.Based on Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s notorious affair, but set in the epochal downtown poetry scene of filthy 1970s New York, Godlike is a tribute to poetry and the beauty and mess of art, desire, and New York City.New York poet Paul Vaughn has a trick for enjoying poetry readings: He simply imagines the reader died a long time ago. Paul is twenty-seven, married, and an admired poet himself. R. T. Wode’s mission is to give offense. He’s also a poet, freshly landed in the city, and, at age sixteen, unknown.Paul worships T. They embark on a tempestuous affair, dropping acid and crashing parties and perambulating the grit and grime of New York City circa 1972. Paul is in love with T., but T. is in love with experience. Their relationship disintegrates.A novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty by legendary musician and poet Richard Hell, Godlike transposes the notorious romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud to the East Village in its squalid, glorious ’70s heyday. The book comprises a version of Paul’s 1997 hospital notebooks: diaries amidst poems and essays, along with, most pertinently, the poet’s third-person memoir-novelette of his youthful time with the now-famous T. Godlike is infused as well with evocations—and sometimes actual poems—of many New York poets of the era, from Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett to Edwin Denby and James Schuyler. It achieves a lyricism both profane and profound as it conjures the frenetic vitality as well as the existential malaise of an era. It’s a searching meditation on art, life, love, and the impossibility of everything.

The central works of one of France''s most renowned poets, now translated into English for the first time in a bilingual edition.Emmanuel Hocquard''s Elegies, written over some twenty-five years, lie at the core of his oeuvre, one of the most admired in contemporary French poetry. They sound the depths of the past, finding it ever deeper, and they pose the question: To whom does the past belong? Like air and water, Hocquard suggests, the past is a commons shared by all. His Elegies are full of quotidian detail—the life of the street and the marketplace, overheard conversations, glimpses of private existence—even as they make room for the ancient world from which the form of the elegy descends. Hocquard has distinguished between two types of elegiac poet—what he calls the classic and the inverse. The classic ruminates on the past; the inverse remakes it. Hocquard is an inverse elegiac poet: Rich with the past, his poems lead us into an ever-expanding present.

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.

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 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.

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.