Introduction by Norman Manea
The Kremlin Ball*
curzio malaparte
Translated from the Italian and with a foreword by Jenny McPhee
Introduction by Jenny McPhee
Basic Black With Pearls
helen weinzweig
Afterword by Sarah Weinman
Ivory Pearl*
jean-patrick manchette
Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Introduction by Doug Headline
Afterword by Gary Indiana
Compulsory Games*
robert aickman
Edited and with an introduction by Victoria Nelson
The Seventh Cross*
anna seghers
Translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo
Afterword by Thomas von Steinaecker
Jigsaw
sybille bedford
With an introduction by the author
Sand*
wolfgang herrndorf
Translated from the German by Tim Mohr
Afterword by Michael Maar
Havoc
tom kristensen
Translated from the Danish by Carl Malmberg
Introduction by Morten Høi Jensen
Kolyma Stories*
varlam shalamov
Translated from the Russian by Donald Rayfield
Journey Into the Mind’s Eye
lesley blanch
Introduction by Georgia de Chamberet
A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940*
iris origo
Introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Afterword by Katia Lysy
War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943–1944
iris origo
Introduction by Virginia Nicholson
jean améry
Translated from the German by Adrian Nathan West
Moderan*
david r. bunch
Foreword by Jeff VanderMeer
Once and Forever
kenji miyazawa
Translated from the Japanese by John Bester
Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl*
uwe johnson
Translated from the German by Damion Searls
Omer Pasha Latas*
ivo andrić
Translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth
Introduction by William T. Vollmann
Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp*
józef czapski
Translated from the French and with an introduction by Eric Karpeles
Portraits without Frames*
lev ozerov
Edited by Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk
Translated from the Russian by Maria Bloshteyn, Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irinia Mashinski
Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941–1942*
józef czapski
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Introduction by Timothy Snyder
2019
The Kindness of Strangers
salka viertel
Introduction by Lawrence Weschler
Afterword by Donna Rifkind
Nothing but the Night
john williams
Negrophobia: An Urban Parable
darius james
Introduction by Amy Abugo Ongiri, with a new preface by the author
Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics
michael walzer
Introduction by Jon Wiener
Max Havelaar*
multatuli
Translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke and David McKay
Introduction by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Notebooks: 1936–1947*
victor serge
Edited by Claudio Albertani and Claude Rioux
Translated from the French by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman
Rock, Paper, Scissors*
maxim osipov
Edited by Boris Dralyuk
Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson
Preface by Svetlana Alexievich
Picture
lillian ross
Foreword by Anjelica Huston
My Friends
emmanuel bove
Translated from the French by Janet Louth
Castle Gripsholm
kurt tucholsky
Translated from the German and with an introduction by Michael Hofmann
Abel and Cain*
gregor von rezzori
Translated from the German by David Dollenmayer, Joachim Neugroschel, and Marshall Yarbrough
Introduction by Joshua Cohen
Life with Picasso
françoise gilot and carlton lake
Introduction by Lisa Alther
Stalingrad*
vasily grossman
Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
A King Alone*
jean giono
Translated from the French by Alyson Waters
Introduction by Susan Stewart
Three Summers
margarita liberaki
Translated from the Greek by Karen Van Dyck
The Storyteller Essays*
walter benjamin
Edited and with an introduction by Samuel Titan
Translated from the German by Tess Lewis
Käsebier Takes Berlin*
gabriele tergit
Translated from the German and with an introduction by Sophie Duvernoy
Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind
Introduction by Nick Hunt
The Word of the Speechless*
julio ramón ribeyro
Edited and translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver
Introduction by Alejandro Zambra
Nada*
jean-patrick manchette
Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Introduction by Luc Sante
Free Day*
inès cagnati
Translated from the French and with an introduction by Liesl Schillinger
APPENDIX
From “A Symposium on Editing,” The Threepenny Review, Spring 2008*
OF THE things editors do, picking books and polishing (or should that be nitpicking?) books, I mostly pick. The series of books that I’ve overseen since its beginning some ten years ago is a mixture of books that have fallen out of print and shouldn’t have and translations of books that have never made their way into English at all. Translations, it’s true, can call for polishing, sometimes a lot of it, but for all the theoretical problematizing of translation and promoting of purportedly new and improved translations that has gone on of late, translation is an essentially self-abnegating activity and the problem—anything but easy to resolve!—is to make the translation good enough. The translator discovers what might be called a level at which to deal with the original, and the editor helps the translator to maintain that level successfully. Great literature, Hegel somewhere said, translates—which is why the strange efforts of some contemporary translators effectively to untranslate, or exoticize, the text strike me as misguided. They suggest how far we have come, in our provincial global moment, from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century freedom of the empowered imagination, in which the Russian novels, and later Eliot and Proust and Joyce, could travel swiftly across all sorts of linguistic borders to enter, and actively constitute, a common world.*
But as I was saying, what I mostly do as an editor is worry about what book to publish next, and here my job is rather unusual, in that the books I have to pick from are almost always (translations again aside) written and the writers I have to deal with dead. What I’m looking for, however, is not so much canonical books, classics in the classic sense, as books that may be little kno
wn but remain unexpectedly current, able to instruct and delight or, to put it less classically, puzzle and surprise. “Interesting” may be the ultimate brush-off, but these are books that I hope will be—precisely, entertainingly, seriously—interesting. They may be canonical texts from literary locations left, for one reason or another, mostly unexplored by American readers, for example the Soviet Union or modern Italy; they may be the great book that a great writer is not known for; they may be the work of writers eccentric to the major trends of their period, or works in genres whose fortunes have fallen (the historical novel) or never risen high (the adventure novel); they may be what I call accidents: an oddly right and beautiful book that comes out of nowhere by an author who may well have gone nowhere, never writing anything as good or even anything else at all. Those, I suppose, are my favorites, because so close to the uncertain sources (and ends) of all art, good and bad.
I am concerned too, in taking on a book, that it contribute to some ongoing and, I admit, elusive sense of the seriesness of the series; that the book build on or break away from what we have already done; that the series should function in some small way as a model of inquiry into ways of writing and imagining and knowing.
All of which is to say what is of course true of any editor: that the decision to publish is intuitive, whether arrived at impulsively or after deliberation or simple stalling. Thinking about the whole business the other day I was reminded a little of how I used to feel when I was a halfway decent chess player: attack here, develop, defend there. Push this piece. Protect that one. It is an absorbing game.
Also a melancholy one. Who is the opponent in this game? The present, which one hopes somehow to shake out of the muddled excitement and torpor of its self-preoccupation, so making it take note of what else there has been and might be. But then the present is not only the opponent but—necessarily, it would seem—the audience. This is a series of books from the past published for the present’s sake, a present that in our own case has lost a sense of the past as having authority by virtue, among others, of its very pastness; a present, in other words, for which the past is of interest primarily as a novelty. So the game is played on the present’s ground. And yet all the time I feel the claim of the past to be accepted precisely for what it was, the claim of lineage, and that this more than anything is the claim that needs to be impressed on our present, if only because it will, after all, soon itself be past. One knows the readers of one book, poring over their Talmuds and Korans and Bibles in the subway, uniquely devoted as great scholars also are (A. E. Housman with his Manilius), readers for whom the reader, rather than the book, exists as the afterthought. I envy them. My own work will take me to libraries where I wander along the shelves of unknown names, of authors, of books, and to pull one at random is to discover, more often than not, that it is not bad—to the contrary, more often than not it is not at all bad—but still it is done with. Could one publish for the sake of the dead? The dead, mercifully, appear to be uninterested in publishing. Still there is something bitter in the thought that literature as we now know it is condemned only to be alive.
—EDWIN FRANK
*Here slightly revised.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
EVE BABITZ (b. 1943) is the author of several books including Slow Days, Fast Company, Sex and Rage, and a volume of previously uncollected journalism, I Used To Be Charming. She has written for publications including Ms. and Esquire and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799–1850) was born in Tours, France. In his many novels and stories, collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, Balzac set out to offer a complete picture of the society and manners of his time.
ANTONIO DI BENEDETTO (1922–1986) was born in Mendoza, Argentina. He began his career as a journalist, writing for the Mendoza paper Los Andes. In 1953 he published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Mundo animal. His novels Zama, El silenciero, and Los suicidas were dubbed the “trilogy of waiting” by his fellow novelist Juan José Saer. In 1976, di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured by Argentina’s military dictatorship; after his release in 1977 he went into exile in Spain, returning to Buenos Aires shortly before his death.
RACHEL BESPALOFF (1895–1949) was raised in Geneva. She intended to pursue a musical career, but after an encounter with the thinker Lev Shestov, devoted herself to philosophy. In 1942, she left France for the United States, where she worked as a scriptwriter for the French Section of the Office of War Information before teaching French literature at Mount Holyoke.
DAVID R. BUNCH (1920–2000) was born in rural western Missouri and served as an army corporal during World War II. While working as a cartographer for the Defense Mapping Agency in St. Louis, he began publishing stories in science-fiction magazines and in 1971 he published Moderan, a collection of stories set on a future earth devastated by war and environmental exploitation. A poetry chapbook, We Have a Nervous Job, followed in 1983, and Bunch! (1993), a later book of short stories, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.
FRANÇOIS-RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND (1768–1848) was born in Saint-Malo, on the northern coast of Brittany, the youngest son of an aristocratic family. After an isolated adolescence, spent largely in his father’s castle, he moved to Paris not long before the Revolution. In 1791, he sailed for America but quickly returned to Europe, where he enrolled in the counterrevolutionary army, was wounded, and emigrated to England. The novellas Atala and René, published shortly after his return to France in 1800, made him a literary celebrity. One of the first French Romantics, Chateaubriand was also a historian, a diplomat, and a staunch defender of the freedom of the press.
ALFRED DÖBLIN (1878–1957) was born in German Stettin (now the Polish city of Szczecin) to Jewish parents. He studied medicine at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, specializing in neurology and psychiatry. His novel The Three Leaps of Wang Lun was published in 1915 while he was serving as a military doctor. Döblin’s best-known novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, was published in 1929. He went into exile after Hitler’s rise and was in Los Angeles during World War II, after which he returned to his native Germany.
EURIPIDES (c.480–c.406 BC) competed in twenty-two of the annual Athenian dramatic competitions and won the first prize five times; today eighteen of the ninety-some plays he is believed to have written survive. Little is known of the life of the writer whom Aristotle called “the most tragic of tragedians.”
EDWIN FRANK was born in Boulder, Colorado, and educated at Harvard College and Columbia University. He is the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984–2013.
MAVIS GALLANT (1922–2014) was born in Montreal and worked as a journalist at the Montreal Standard before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing fiction. In 1950, she settled in Paris, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Over the course of her career Gallant published more than one hundred stories and dispatches in The New Yorker.
VASILY SEMYONOVICH GROSSMAN (1905–1964) was born in Berdichev, Ukraine. After making a name for himself as an up-and-coming writer, he worked throughout World War II as a reporter for the army newspaper Red Star. In 1952, Grossman published For a Just Cause, the first volume of a diptych about the battle of Stalingrad (his preferred title for the book was simply Stalingrad) that concludes with Life and Fate, completed by the end of the decade. The manuscript of Life and Fate was considered unpublishable by Soviet authorities and confiscated by the KGB. Grossman’s final novel, also unpublished, was Everything Flows.
ELIZABETH HARDWICK (1916–2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. She was the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays, as well as a co-founder of The New York Review of Books.
TOVE JANSSON (1914–2001) was born in Helsinki into Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority. After attending art schools in Stockholm and Paris, she returned to Helsinki and won acclaim for her
paintings and murals. From 1929 until 1953, Jansson drew humorous illustrations and political cartoons for the anti-Fascist Finnish-Swedish magazine Garm, where her most famous creation, Moomintroll, a hippopotamus-like character with a dreamy disposition, made his first appearance. Jansson went on to write about the adventures of Moomintroll in a long-running comic strip and in a series of books for children that have been translated throughout the world. She also wrote eleven novels and short-story collections for adults. In 1994 she was awarded the Prize of the Swedish Academy.
KABIR (c. 1440–1518), the North Indian devotional, or bhakti, poet, was born in Benares (now Varanasi). Next to nothing is known of his life, though many legends surround him. He is said to have been a weaver, and in his resolutely undogmatic and often riddling work he debunks both Hinduism and Islam. The songs of this extraordinary poet, philosopher, and satirist have been sung and recited by millions throughout North India for half a millennium.
GYULA KRÚDY (1878–1933) was born in Nyíregyháza in northeastern Hungary. He began writing short stories and publishing brief newspaper pieces while still in his teens, and worked as a newspaper editor for several years before moving to Budapest, where he found success as a novelist with Sindbad’s Youth. Forgotten in the years after his death, Krúdy was rediscovered in 1940, when Sándor Márai published Sindbad Comes Home, a fictionalized account of Krúdy’s last day.
SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY (1887–1950) studied law and classical philology at Kiev University and, after becoming well-known in literary circles, moved to Moscow in 1922. Lodged in a cell-like room on the Arbat, Krzhizhanovsky wrote steadily for close to two decades, paying no heed to the political demands of the Soviet state. Unpublished during his lifetime, his books only began to come out after the fall of the Soviet Union.
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR (1915–2011) was born in London, the son of a zoologist. Expelled from school, he decided to become a writer and, in 1933, set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, a journey he described in A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and The Broken Road (published posthumously in 2013). In the Second World War, he joined the Irish Guards, served as a liaison officer in Albania, and fought in Greece and Crete. He was awarded the DSO and OBE. Leigh Fermor lived partly in Greece and partly in Worcestershire for much of his life. In 2004 he was knighted for his services to literature and to British–Greek relations.