NYRB Classics

Walkabout

by James Vance Marshall & Lee Siegel

A plane crashes in the vast Northern Territory of Australia, and the only survivors are two children from Charleston, South Carolina, on their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide. Mary and her younger brother,...

The Judges of the Secret Court: A Novel About John Wilkes Booth

by David Stacton & John Crowley

David Stacton’s The Judges of The Secret Court is a long-lost triumph of American fiction as well as one of the finest books ever written about the Civil War. Stacton’s gripping and atmospheric story revolves...

Lolly Willowes

by Sylvia Townsend Warner & Alison Lurie

In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break way from her controlling family—a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension...

The Enchanted April

by Elizabeth von Arnim & Cathleen Schine

A recipe for happiness: four women, one medieval Italian castle, plenty of wisteria, and solitude as needed.

The women at the center of The Enchanted April are alike only in their dissatisfaction with their...

The Wedding of Zein

by Tayeb Salih, Denys Johnson-Davies & Hisham Matar

“The Wedding of Zein” unfolds in the same village on the upper Nile where Tayeb Salih’s tragic masterpiece Season of Migration to the North is set. Here, however, the story that emerges through the overlapping,...

Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China

by David Kidd & John Lanchester

For two years before and after the 1948 Communist Revolution, David Kidd lived in Peking, where he married the daughter of an aristocratic Chinese family. "I used to hope," he writes, "that some bright young...

Nightmare Alley

by William Lindsay Gresham & Nick Tosches

Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county...

Butcher's Crossing

by John Williams & Michelle Latiolais

In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles...

Varieties of Exile

by Mavis Gallant & Russell Banks

Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their...

Paris Stories

by Mavis Gallant & Michael Ondaatje

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL

Mavis Gallant is a contemporary legend, a frequent contributor to The New Yorkerfor close to fifty years who has, in the words of The New York Times, "radically reshaped the...

The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories

by Mavis Gallant & Jhumpa Lahiri

A New York Review Books Original

Mavis Gallant is renowned as one of the great short-story writers of our day. This new gathering of long-unavailable or previously uncollected work presents stories from 1951...

The Pumpkin Eater

by Penelope Mortimer & Daphne Merkin

The Pumpkin Eater is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist’s couch, and her smart, wry,...

Songs of Kabir

by Kabir & Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

A New York Review Books Original

Transcending divisions of creed, challenging social distinctions of all sorts, and celebrating individual unity with the divine, the poetry of Kabir is one of passion and paradox,...

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

by Milton Rokeach & Rick Moody

On July 1, 1959, at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics: Clyde Benson, an elderly farmer and alcoholic; Joseph Cassel,...

A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962

by Alistair Horne

The Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It brought down six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, returned de Gaulle to power, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil....

Tun-huang

by Yasushi Inoue, Jean Oda Moy & Damion Searls

More than a thousand years ago, an extraordinary trove of early Buddhist sutras and other scriptures was secreted away in caves near the Silk Road city of Tun-huang. But who hid this magnificent treasure and...

The Doll

by Boleslaw Prus, David Welsh & Stanislaw Baranczak

Boleslaw Prus is often compared to Chekhov, and Prus’s masterpiece might be described as an intimate epic, a beautifully detailed, utterly absorbing exploration of life in late-nineteenth-century Warsaw, which...

Conundrum

by Jan Morris

The great travel writer Jan Morris was born James Morris. James Morris distinguished himself in the British military, became a successful and physically daring reporter, climbed mountains, crossed deserts, and...

The Green Man

by Kingsley Amis & Michael Dirda

Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. As he says, “I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoretically old enough to have understood what death...

Transit

by Anna Seghers, Margot Bettauer Dembo & Peter Conrad

Anna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight....