New York Review Books Classics

Patrick Leigh Fermor set off as a teenager to make his way across Europe, as recorded in his classic memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. Later he fought with local partisans against the Nazi occupiers of Crete. A Time to Keep Silence stands out among Leigh Fermor s various tales of travel and adventure because it is more an inward than an outward voyage. Here Leigh Fermor chronicles his several sojourns in some of Europe...

"A Legacy is the tale of two very different families. The Merzes are members of the Jewish upper bourgeoisie of Berlin and direct descendants of Henriette Merz, friend of Goethe and Mirabeau. But this imposing legacy has long since ceased to mean much of anything in the Merzes' huge town house, where the family devotes itself to little more than enjoying its comfort and ensuring its wealth. The Feldens are landed Catholic aristocracy, well off but...

"The hero of The Invisibility Cloak lives in contemporary Beijing--where everyone is doing their best to hustle up the ladder of success while shouldering an ever-growing burden of consumer goods--and he's a loser. Well into his forties, he's divorced (and still doting on his ex), childless, and living with his sister (her husband wants him out) in an apartment at the edge of town with a crack in the wall the wind from the north blows through while...

Giuseppe Levi is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking-when he isn't provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that...

"A longtime cult-classic in Denmark, this novel about dissolution and despair has been out of print in the US for over eighty years until now. Ole Jastrau is the very model of an enterprising and ambitious young man of letters, poised on the brink of what is sure to be a distinguished career as a critic. In fact he is teetering on the brink of an emotional and moral abyss. Bored with his beautiful wife and chafing at the burdens of fatherhood, disdainful...

"Set in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s, in the days leading up to the Revolution--Manchette's unfinished masterpiece with a fearless female protagonist. Four of the ten titles in Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated 1970s cycle of hard-boiled novels, which the author originally dubbed neo-polars, or "neo-crime novels," have now appeared in English translation. Manchette is beginning to have a significant following among English-language readers,...

"A King Alone is set in a remote Alpine village that is cut off from the world by rugged mountains and by long months when the ground is covered with snow and the heavens with cloud. One such winter, villagers begin mysteriously to disappear. Soon the village is paralyzed by terror, which gives way to relief and eager anticipation when the outsider Langlois arrives to investigate. What he discovers, however, will leave no one reassured, and his reappearance...

"A stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by one of the most interesting minds of the 20th century, now back in print for the first time since 1969. Sophie Blind is starting a new life. She has left her husband Ezra and taken her three children to Paris. She has lovers there and another in New York. She is lecturing and writing. And she is compulsively reviewing her own history, having resumed the "lifelong struggle" of "coming into...

"From Nikolai Leskov's enormous and varied literary output over some forty years, we have selected six works which represent each period and the contrasting genres and subjects of his fiction. Two of these stories - 'The Unmercenary Engineers' and 'The Innocent Prudentius' - have never been translated into English before. Of the other four, 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' received a definitive, accurate translation by Robert Chandler some years ago, and...

"The prolonged German siege of Leningrad during the Second World War was among the most destructive sieges in history, leading to mass starvation and well over a million deaths. The contemporary Russian poet and scholar Polina Barskova, born in Leningrad, has done extensive research on the siege in archives in St. Petersburg, research that has borne fruit in Living Pictures, an extraordinary dramatization of life under the most extreme of circumstances....

"Telluria is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe, China, and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology or identity, a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds, in which no one power dominates. What does, however, travel everywhere...

""O, it has happened little by little, as many things simply happen little by little, Mother said, and told us everything about Herr Veilchenfeld, as far as it was known to her." Germany, late 1930s. Walking into town on a hot summer evening, the elderly professor of philosophy Herr Veilchenfeld encounters a group of local drunks. He is humiliated and assaulted; his hair is shorn. The police "don't interfere in such minor matters." What happens to...