Anyone read this? Worth a read?

Anyone read this? Worth a read?
Also general NYRB rec thread, would like to know what the essential NYRB books are apart from Stoner

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Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of my favorites. It's like Suttree and Ulysses but more plot-driven
Dead Souls is fantastic as well

I adore this collection. Very uniquely crafted short stories that are sometimes allegorical and sometimes like fairy tales. Really fun and interesting premises to the stories: "The Unbitten Elbow" is about a guy whose life goal is to bite his own elbow, and then it turns into a satire of academia and Kant; "Yellow Coal" is about a world where it's possible to convert human spite into a fuel source; "The Collector of Cracks" includes a fairy tale about a man who preaches to cracks every night, but one night forgets to let the cracks return to their homes, leading to chaos (there's also a really interesting frame narrative).

Overall: really interesting to read, especially if yer someone who likes stuff like Kafka & Gogol.

>"The Unbitten Elbow" is about a guy whose life goal is to bite his own elbow, and then it turns into a satire of academia and Kant
Do I have to have read Kant?

No, not at all, there are just some slight digs at things like the thing-in-itself (there's also a dig at Max Stirner, which Yea Forumsizens may appreciate).

I actually teach "The Unbitten Elbow" in the freshman-level composition course (ENGL101/ENGL102) that I teach in uni & the 18/19 year olds actually tend to like the story, even though they don't pick up all the references/ideas.

They’ve got a sale on it seems. Thinking of pickin up Prometheus in Chains, any others on the list that’re highly recommended?

Haven't read that Krzhizhanovsky, but have read others, its really good. Fun and frightening.

My personal favs from NYRB have been High Wind in Jamaica, The Summer Book, The Slynx, Butchers Crossing, A Season of Migration to the North.

Hadrian VII

Nightmare Alley is a fantastic piece of noir involving circus freaks and huckster mesmerists and alcoholism.

>High Wind in Jamaica

Yes.

It's good, but I wasn't blown away. Depends how into whimsy you are.

don't forget the Tarot cards.
and the film is bloody great too.

This. It's gay, but in a good way. The best gay writing--or perhaps the gayest good writing. See if you can stomach a few ropes of hot, thick, milky prose down your eager throats. Open wide!
>Zwischen arrived upon the jostling scene moments after everyone else, protesting: this was not one of his regular consultation days. Dame Sybil, huffed, outraged at this footling nicety: "Sod your bleeding regular consultation days, you mucky formalist Hun quack!" Zwischen gasped in umlauts, cowering backward up the grand staircase to the Czgowchwz sickroom. Sloshing neat tequila into a handy snifter, Dame Sybil fumed: "Officious little bugger!" Swallowing gulps of firewater, she loped into the music room "to play the shit out of something demonic by Scriabin" to achieve release.

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Beware of Pity

For me, its the Ice Trilogy

>The Summer Book
based

I finished this last night and it was pretty great. A helpless downfall into alcoholism, kind of similar to Under the Volcano in a way, maybe not quite as good in my eyes as UtV is one of my all-time favorites. Still an interesting look at interwar European life, Copenhagen specifically. I think it might be the first Danish author I've read actually.
I can also vouch for both of these being fucking fantastic. I'd compare Berlin Alexanderplatz to Dos Passos but with all the focus on poor lowlifes instead of Dos Passos' half poor lowlifes, half rich dudes. Similar urban intensity. Gogol is Gogol, although I don't know what translation NYRB uses, my version was Everyman's Library. I haven't had any problems with NYRB translations though, I think they tend to put a lot of effort into getting good ones.

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All of Walser's.

>UtV
? for a noob

Under the Volcano

I love it when NYRB decides to just up and publish like half of an author's oeuvre at once. It's one of the most patrician things they've ever done with Walser, the other patrician moves are publishing a ton of Zweig's novellas, pretty much every novel Gregor von Rezzori ever wrote, like 5 books from Victor Serge, the gigantic biography of Shelley by Richard Holmes, and publishing not just Hadrian the Seventh but a fucking biography of the obscure author who wrote it by just some guy who thought it was a nice read and spent the next decade of his life researching him

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Has anyone subscribed to their monthly book thing?

I’ve thought about it but I’m too much of a poorfag to justify dropping $100+ on a hope that I randomly get shit I like.