I♥NYRB

The lovely, eclectic selection of books published by New York Review Books is meant to be read, of course, but the colours, the texture, the look, the feel lead me to believe NYRB books are designed to be fetishized.

 

Maylin of The Dewey Divas and the Dudes recently shared a little NYRB love with me (thanks for the ARCs!), so I thought I'd do my part to spread a little NYRB enthusiasm.

 

First off, check out Maylin's NYRB challenge, to read 50 NYRB Classics within the year. It's this series of posts that made me sit up and take notice of them and learn to focus my book-fetishizing tendencies.

 

Spotlight Series will be featuring NYRB Classics during the week of May 16, 2010, and you can sign up to participate by reviewing an NYRB Classic (maybe I will).

 

I haven't purposely embarked upon an NYRB challenge myself, but it seems I'm amassing quite a collection of them. I'll try not to let the acquisition too far exceed the consumption.

 

Here's a list of those I now own, with links to reviews where applicable:

• The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares (read February 2010).
• The Singapore Grip, JG Farrell.
• Clandestine in Chile, Gabriel García Márquez.
• My Fantoms, Théophile Gautier (read August 2008).
• Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham.
• The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, Elizabeth Hardwick.
• Victorine, Maude Hutchins (the cover of which is one of my favourites).
• Sunflower, Gyula Krúdy (which I'd started just before my copy of Life A User's Manual arrived in the mail, and which I was loathe to set aside).
• Memories of the Future, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. (I almost finished this book — I think I was on the last story — but had to set it aside. I just felt too bogged down and needed to clear my head of all the heavy Russian melancholy. The first story, however, is worth the price of admission. I fully intend to finish this one this month.)
• The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford.
• Letty Fox: Her Luck, Christina Stead (read October 2007; quoted once and again).
• Chess Story, Stefan Zweig (read February 2010).

Let me mention also a couple favourites, even though I don't own the NYRB editions (my reading predated their release):

• The Slaves of Solitude, Patrick Hamilton (read October 2006).
• Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, Patrick Hamilton (read March 2007).

And a couple more I'm dying to own:

• The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy.
• Rock Crystal, Adalbert Stifter.

The New York Review Children's Collection also has its charms:

• Uncle, JP Martin (read September 2007).
• Uncle Cleans Up, JP Martin (read July 2008).
• The Wonderful O, James Thurber (haven't been able to engage Helena in this one yet).

The NYRB Classics blog: A Different Stripe.
And follow @nyrbclassics on Twitter.

 

Is there a particular NYRB title that you have your eye on? Or one that you especially recommend?