New York Review Books: 531 books

We don’t understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today’s political dramas are unintelligible to us. The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone...

A New York Review Books Original In 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. Berlin Stories collects his alternately...

A New York Review Books Original   Élisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, a name, Irène Némirovsky, a once popular novelist, a Russian émigré from an immensely rich family, a Jew who didn’t...

In a series of riveting dispatches, Cairo native Yasmine El Rashidi provides an eyewitness account of the entire 2011 Egyptian Revolution as it unfolded, from its origins in the days leading up to the first January 25 protest in Tahrir Square through the violent confrontations with the regime and...

In this now classic book, internationally famed journalist Ian Buruma examines how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with their conduct during World War II—a war that they aggressively began and humiliatingly lost, and in the course of which they committed monstrous war crimes. As...

Blackballedis Darryl Pinckney’s meditation on a century and a half of participation by blacks in US electoral politics. In this combination of memoir, historical narrative, and contemporary political and social analysis, he investigates the struggle for black voting rights from Reconstruction through...

A breathtaking introduction to Chinese multidirectional poems, told through the story of Su Hui, the greatest writer of these poems who embroidered a silk with 840 characters--equaling as many as 12,000 multidirectional poems--for her distant husband. For nearly two thousand years, the condensed...

Selected as one of the sixty-five masterpieces for the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works The fu, or rhyme-prose, is a major poetic form in Chinese literature, most popular between the 2nd century b.c. and 6th century a.d. Unlike what is usually considered Chinese poetry, it is a hybrid...

The deepest and most varied of the Tang Dynasty poets, Tu Fu (Du Fu) is, in the words of David Hinton, the “first complete poetic sensibility in Chinese literature.” Tu Fu merged the public and the private, often in the same poem, as his subjects ranged from the horrors of war to the delights...

In 1915, fourteen years before Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin published his first novel, an extensively researched Chinese historical extravaganza: The Three Leaps of Wang Lun. Even more remarkably, given its subject matter, the book was written in Expressionist style and is now considered...

Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Ian Buruma is fascinated, he writes, “by what makes the human species behave atrociously.” In Theater of Cruelty the acclaimed author of The Wages of Guilt and Year Zero: A History of 1945 once again turns to World...

Robert Bresson, the director of such cinematic master-pieces as Pickpocket, A Man Escaped Mouchette, and L’Argent, was one of the most influential directors in the history of French film, as well as one of the most stubbornly individual: He insisted on the use of nonprofessional actors; he shunned...

A compelling biography of the Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski that takes readers to Paris in the Roaring Twenties, to the front lines during WWII, and into the late 20th-century art world. Józef Czapski (1896–1993) lived many lives during his ninety-six years. He was a student in...

The definitive collection of works by one of the Tang Dynasty's most eccentric (and badly-behaved) poets, now back in print for the first time in decades. Li He is the bad-boy poet of the late Tang dynasty. He began writing at the age of seven and died at twenty-six from alcoholism or, according...