With Eve's Hollywood Eve Babitz lit up the scene in 1974. The books that followed, among them Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage, have seduced generations of readers with their unfailing wit and impossible glamour. What is less well known is that Babitz was a working journalist for the better part of three decades, writing for the likes of Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire, as well as for off-the-beaten-path periodicals like Wet: The Magazine...

"In 1917, after the entry of America into World War I, E. E. Cummings, arecent graduate of Harvard College, volunteered to serve on an ambulance corps in France. Arrived in Paris with a new friend, William Slater Brown, the two young men set about living it up in the big city before heading off to their assignment. Once in the field, they wrote irreverent letters about their experiences which attracted the attention of the censors and ultimately led...

This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. 
At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water...

"The Purgatorio, the middle section of Dante's great poem about losing, and subsequently finding, one's way in the middle of one's life is, unsurprisingly, the beating heart of the Divine Comedy, as this powerful and lucid new translation by the poet D. M. Black makes wonderfully clear. After days spent plumbing the depths of hell, the pilgrim staggers back to the clear light of day in a state of shock, the sense of pervasive dread and deep bewilderment...

"The moth snowstorm, a phenomenon Michael McCarthy remembers from his boyhood when moths 'would pack a car's headlight beams like snowflakes in a blizzard,' is a distant memory. Wildlife is being lost, not only in the wholesale extinctions of species but also in the dwindling of those species that still exist. The Moth Snowstorm records in painful detail this rapid dissolution of nature's abundance and proposes a radical solution: that we recognize...

"An NYRB Classics Original Shakespeare, Nietzsche once wrote, was Montaigne's best reader. It is a typically brilliant Nietzschean insight, capturing the intimate relationship between the ever-changing record of the mutable self constituted by Montaigne's Essays and Shakespeare's kaleidoscopic register of human character. For all that, how much Shakespeare actually read Montaigne remains a matter of uncertainty and debate to this day. That he read...

"Called by Virginia Woolf "the prince" of essayists and praised by F. W. Dupee for a "whim of iron, cleverness amounting to genius," Max Beerbohm himself noted that "only the insane take themselves quite seriously." Nonetheless, from his precocious debut as a dandy in 1890s Oxford until, after World War II, when he put the pen aside, Beerbohm was recognized as an incomparable observer of modern life and an essayist whose voice was always and only...

"Every "diary" is a portrait, chronicle, tale, record, history. Notes taken day by day are not a diary but merely moments selected at random in the current of time, in the river of the passing day. A "diary" is a tale: the tale of a tranche de vie (the very definition of the novel, according to one celebrated school), of a period, a year, many years of our life. And as life follows the logic of a tale, it has a beginning, middle, and end (a life is...

"The Orphic Voice is a book about the relationship between poetry and our place in and knowledge of the natural world written by one of the most original, distinguished, and visionary literary thinkers of the late twentieth century. Taking its bearings from the Greek myth of Orpheus, whose singing had the power to move the rocks and trees and to quiet the animals, The Orphic Voice is an exercise in what Sewell calls mythic thinking. Myth is not, she...

"Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the NYRB Classics series, a collection of twenty favorite selections. In Greek mythology, Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of red thread to guide him through the labyrinth, and the Red Thread offers a path through and a way to explore the ins and outs and twists and turns of the celebrated NYRB Classics series, now twenty years old. The NYRB Classics series is known for translating great books from throughout the ages...