krishnapur melancholy unforgiving post-office

books:

Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)

40 reviews
John Williams

NYRB Classics, 2006

"Moved me..."
William Stoner is the only child of Midwestern farmers struggling to eke out an existence. One of the local elders mentions that the University of Missouri is offering a college degree in Agriculture and he suggests that the son consider it. Never having traveled outside of his farming community, William decides to attend college in 1910. He lives with relatives and pays for his room and board ...

Red Lights (New York Review Books Classics)

3 reviews
Georges Simenon

NYRB Classics, 2006

It's quarter to three, there's no one in the place
Except you and me So set 'em' up Joe, I got a little story I think you should know We're drinking my friend, to the end Of a brief episode Make it one for my baby And one more for the road Frank Sinatra's haunting signature song, "One for My Baby, (And One More for the Road) is an eerily suitable theme song for Georges Simenon's ode to a late night drinker, "Red Lights". Simenon was ...

Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics)

43 reviews
Vasily Grossman

NYRB Classics, 2006

Genius of the highest order
This masterpiece published by New York Review of Books Classics enters my Top 5 among novels by James Joyce (Ulysses), Proust (La Recherche du Temps Perdu), Tolstoy (War and Peace) and Gaddis (JR): it is pure genius in its epic scope. Inspired by Tolstoy's War and Peace and the siege of Russia by Napoleon, Grossman depicts the siege of Stalingrad by Hitler. Grossman narrates the epic from the ...

The Strangers in the House (New York Review Books Classics)

1 review
Georges Simenon

NYRB Classics, 2006

I have been a stranger in a strange land
Exodus ii. 22. Georges Simenon was nothing if not prolific in both his literary and public life. Born in Belgium in 1903, Simenon turned out hundreds of novels. Simenon's obsession with writing caused him to break off an affair (he was prolific in this area of his life as well) with the celebrated Josephine Baker in Paris when he could only write twelve novels in the twelve month period in ...

The Siege of Krishnapur (New York Review Books Classics)

32 reviews
J.G. Farrell

NYRB Classics, 2004

Trapped in the Flag
At the climax of this magnificent novel, the book's protagonist, Hopkins, the British civil administrator or Collector of Krishnapur, finds himself trapped in a Union Jack whose flagstaff has been shot down, knocking him to the ground. He recognizes it as the scenario of a persistent nightmare that had been troubling since his small enclave had been put under siege several months before. But it ...

The Dud Avocado (New York Review Books Classics)

11 reviews
Elaine Dundy

NYRB Classics, 2007

Wit in the Pit
Too many books are weak lemonade; a few, straight bourbon with no chaser. Elaine Dundy's "The Dud Volcano" is a bottle of chilled Champagne: invigorating, light, irresistibly sippible. Its picaresque heroine, Sally Jay Gorce, is no prude, though certainly no whore. She's a hoot: a fully realized character whose narrative voice immediately grabbed my attention and never let go until the very last ...

A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (New York Review Books Classics)

40 reviews
Alistair Horne

NYRB Classics, 2006

Read it before you start a Mid-East War
What every President should know before getting seriously involved anywhere in the Mid-East or Muslim world. It would seem that we are damned if we do, and equally damned if we don't. It's not so much the book's details (although the book is magnificently detailed), as it is the portrayal of the depth of hatreds and the commitment to violence as the sole means to the proponents ends.

The Post-Office Girl (New York Review Books Classics)

3 reviews
Stefan Zweig

NYRB Classics, 2008

"Which way shall I fly? Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
. . . and in the lowest deep a lower deep, Still threatening to devour me, opens wide, To which the hel l I suffer seems a heaven." John Milton, Paradise Lost There are some books that you can finish, put back down on the table and five-minutes later have it virtually erased from your consciousness. Stefan Zweig's "The Post-Office Girl" stayed with me long after I put the book down. It is ...

Warlock (New York Review Books Classics)

10 reviews
Oakley Hall

NYRB Classics, 2005

maize
Page 408 of Warlock contains the following: "Men are like corn growing. The sun burns them up and the rain washes them out and the winter freezes them, and the cavalry tramps them down, but somehow they keep growing. And none of it matters a damn so long as the whisky holds out." I don't usually read books that talk about whisky and cavalry, but this one was really good. Although a lot ...

Dirty Snow (New York Review Books Classics)

9 reviews
Georges Simenon, Louise Varese, ...

NYRB Classics, 2003

Despair is an expression of the total personality
doubt only of thought. Soren Kierkegaard Frank Friedmaier, the protagonist of Georges Simenon's novel "Dirty Snow" seems to have no doubts about his life. In fact he seems to be more a creature of base animal instinct than of anything resembling thought. If he has doubts about anything they are not evident. But his words and deeds bespeak an unconscious despair so profound that the reader ...

The Slaves of Solitude (New York Review Books Classics)

5 reviews
Patrick Hamilton

NYRB Classics, 2007

Tempest in a Tearoom
The most atypical of Patrick Hamilton's novels (and perhaps the most beloved), THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE takes place in a suburban boarding house in 1943 where the heroine Miss Roach--intelligent, lonely, and on the cusp of middle age--has moved to escape the dangers of the Blitz. Commuting from the publishing house where she reads manucsripts in London, she spends her nights wandering the deserted ...

Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (New ...

8 reviews
Patrick Leigh Fermor

NYRB Classics, 2005

Gar nichts!
The title above is German for "Absolutely nothing!", Fermor's droll reply to "What are you studying?" when visiting a scholar with his newfound Transylvanian friend Istvan, who laughs about such blasphemy all the way back from the visit. The polymathic Fermor had contemplated his answer a few moments before answering-"Languages? Art? Geography? Folklore? Literature? None of them seemed to fit." ...

The Thirty Years War (New York Review Books Classics)

26 reviews
C. V. Wedgwood

NYRB Classics, 2005

A Panoramic and Poltically Sophisticated History
For the English-language reader Wedgwood's book, which has been in print for over sixty years, is still an excellent introduction and synoptic narrative of this lengthy and turbulent period of European history. It gives brief and judicious biographical sketches of the major political and military actors of three generations: The principal antagonists at the outset -- Ferdinand II of Austria and ...

The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York Review Books Classics)

21 reviews
Robert Burton

NYRB Classics, 2001

Vivisect your mind
Where to begin discussing this book? How about again and again? For it begs never to be put down, and if finished (as if that's even possible) to be picked up again and pored over. Again. And again. And again . . . It got Samuel Jonson out of bed earlier than he wished. It kept me up later than I wished, and still "reading" it in my mind over and over again, musing on the insanity of it - the ...

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy (New York Review Books Classics)

3 reviews
Patrick Hamilton

NYRB Classics, 2008

Authentic atmospere of London between the wars
Patrick Hamilton (1904 - 1962) was an English playwright and novelist, who has an extraordinary number of admirers with glowing reviews cited in the Amazon editorial comments. He has a distinctive style: a Dickensian voice, sympathy for the dispossessed, black humor. Michael Holroyd wrote an excellent introduction to the book in another edition; it captures the "authentic atmosphere of what it ...

Unforgiving Years

2 reviews
Victor Serge

NYRB Classics, 2008

"Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us
and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison." Heinrich Heine Victor Serge did not have to invent entirely new beasts to pen his vision of the Second World War in the "Unforgiving Years". The beasts that were unleashed by the ...

A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (New York Review ...

17 reviews
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Jan Morris

NYRB Classics, 2005

Simply wonderful
Patrick Leigh Fermor's work is a joy to read. I brought it with me this past summer when I was living/traveling in the former Yugoslavia and I have as many fond memories of reading that book on long bus rides as some of the places I experienced. I ended up giving it away to a friend I had met as a present and I miss it dearly now and plan on purchasing it again when I have the funds. His ...

Chess Story (New York Review Books Classics)

4 reviews
Stefan Zweig

NYRB Classics, 2005

New translation of Zweig's last work
This is a new translation of Stefan Zweig's novela, Royal Game. This translation's title, Chess Story, is the literal translation of the title which Zweig gave the work, Schachnovelle. It is a story of chess obsession against the backdrop of the Third Reich's insanity. The story takes place on a cruise ship en route from New York to Buenos Aires in 1941. The world chess champion, Mirko ...

A Time to Keep Silence (New York Review Books Classics)

3 reviews
Patrick Leigh Fermor

NYRB Classics, 2007

"The Inner Empire"
"A Time To Keep Silence" is travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor's beautifully written account of visits to a number of European monasteries (Benedictine and Cistercian) and later to the ruins of an even older Turkish desert community in his efforts to understand the continuing appeal of the monastic way of life. An outsider, Fermor frankly acknowledges his contemporary bias, making it clear he's ...

Butcher's Crossing (New York Review Books Classics)

5 reviews
John Williams

NYRB Classics, 2007

Brilliant! On a Par with McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN
If such a thing as the Great American Novel can be said to exist, it would very likely encompass the country's 19th Century westward expansion. After all, it was this irresistible land grab - with its ruthless expulsion and genocide of native Americans, its hunting to exinction of buffalo, and its struggles against Nature in search of the better life - that defined America's cultural personality ...

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