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The NYRB Rainbow
Currently at about 7/8 of a shelf.
I think it’d be pretty damn sweet to eventually have a whole bookcase of these.
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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So Much for the Granta
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
When I haphazardly restocked my bookshelves recently after moving, the only books whose order was maintained were my NYRB titles. They are perfect.
And I can spot Butcher’s Crossing from here.
Is that a Simenon on the far left? Multiple Simenon? (Seems appropriate that a few romans durs should be skulking in the shadows).
Also, I just noticed the Freud on the far right. I’ve seen complete (monochromatic) shelves of the Standard Edition before. You could even go meta on it by adding a copy of Gass’s On Being Blue.
Indeed, those are Simenon’s off there in the shadows, including perhaps the hardest of the hard, Dirty Snow.
I’m going to be perverse and point out the Kaputt. One of my recently annointed new all-time favorites…what a delightful and disturbing book that was! All hail the NYRB!
I hear Malaparte wrote a novel or two, also, and am wondering if anyone has had occasion to read them…(and that sentence does not mean I am NOT counting Kaputt as a “novel,” too…in a way, anyway…)
My last (completely random) NYRB note for the day: I wrote in and suggested they bring Alexander Theroux back into print–particularly Darconville’s Cat…but then, how about all of them? I can’t really think of another writer, now nearly completely overlooked, who deserves to be NYRB’d as much as Theroux. So what if he’s still alive????? All the better!
Apologies (and apoplexies)…but I cannot resist the temptation to point out the synchronicity inherent in the fact that, not 5 seconds after I posted the above, I clicked over to check out The Millions’ Year in Reading entries for today, and saw that none other than…you betcha…Alexander Theroux wrote one up for them…Here’s the link: it’s a classic: http://www.themillions.com/2010/12/a-year-in-reading-alexander-theroux.html
This is such a gorgeous collection! :)
That’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.
Dirty Snow a good place to start with Simenon? He’s got SO many that it’s hard to choose. But choose I must!
Wow, that’s beautiful. I tried doing the same with my NYRB collection, but I had a few covers that stood out too much (All About H. Hatterr is pink) and I could never get them organized right. Plus, the urge to put them back in alphabetical order was just too much. And my books no longer fit on one shelf (38 and counting) but now I’m boasting…
Ah, what a lovely rainbow! I only own 3 NYRB titles so my rainbow is a little… incomplete… but I expect to see it grow with time. A whole bookcase would indeed be pretty sweet.