A fierce indictment of colonialism, Max Havelaar is a masterpiece of Dutch literature based on the author’s own experience as an adminstrator in the Dutch East Indies in the 1850s.A brilliantly inventive fiction that is also a work of...

A perverse and delicious tell-all view of the Soviet elite in the 1920s.   Perhaps only the impeccably perverse imagination of Curzio Malaparte could have conceived of The Kremlin Ball, which might be described as Proust in the corridors of...

A new translation of philosopher Walter Benjamin's work as it pertains to his famous essay, "The Storyteller," this collection includes short stories, book reviews, parables, and as a selection of writings by other authors who had an influence on...

Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories brings together eighty-one brief texts spanning Robert Walser’s career, from pieces conceived amid his early triumphs to later works written at a psychiatric clinic in Bern. Many were published...

German scientist and man of letters Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an 18th-century polymath: an experimental physicist, an astronomer, a mathematician, a practicing critic both of art and literature. He is most celebrated, however, for the casual notes...

The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II.During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing...

An NYRB Classics Original   Set in the early years of Mao's China, Naked Earth is the story of two earnest young people confronting the grim realities of revolutionary change. Liu Ch'üan and Su Nan meet in the countryside after...

On Being Blue is a book about everything blue—sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things—and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do.Gass writes:Of...

An NYRB Classics OriginalFirst published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature. Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and...

“It is a shameful thing to win a war.” The reliably unorthodox Curzio Malaparte’s own service as an Italian liaison officer with the Allies during the invasion of Italy was the basis for this searing and surreal novel, in which the...

A New York Review Books OriginalIn 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city...

A New York Review Books Original. Victor Serge is one of the great men of the twentieth century, anarchist, revolutionary, agitator, theoretician, historian of his times, and a fearless truthteller. He was also a great writer, the author of dazzling...

The largest one-volume edition of Thoreau’s 25-year journal, with “some of the most vigorous and original prose in English” and insights on Walden and other works (Washington Post).Henry David...

Starting in 1970, Jean Genet—petty thief, prostitute, modernist master—spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as...

The third part of the epic autobiography of Chateaubriand, the aristocratic Frenchman who lived through the beginning of the French Revolution and who would become the founder of the Romantic movement in Europe, now in a new, unabridged English...

A young girl bravely faces dragons to save her mother in this magnificently illustrated folk tale inspired by Chinese mythology, from the author of The Tiger Prince.A stunning story book for kids ages 4-8 who love adventure stories and Disney movies...

A heart-warming picture book for kids ages 3-7 about a bear who finds pleasure in solitude and the great outdoors—from the creator of the Benny and Penny series.The first reissue of Geoffrey Hayes’s classic children’s book in over two...

A New York Review Books OriginalOne of Honoré de Balzac's most celebrated tales, "The Unknown Masterpiece" is the story of a painter who, depending on one's perspective, is either an abject failure or a transcendental genius—or both. The...

Get the story of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick from the weird-but-lovable villain, Captain Ahab, in this silly and thrilling kids picture book for ages 5-9!Ahab’s beautifully illustrated, off-kilter adventure on the high seas offers...

Displaced after the fall of the Soviet Union, an indigenous family works to reclaim their former self-sufficient way of life in this lyrical work of anthropology and colonial Russian history.The work of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin has...