Category Archives: NYRB Classics Spotlight

NYRB Classics Spotlight: Varieties of Exile

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Malvern staff member Fernando is a New York Review Books Classics enthusiast, and he has an excellent recommendation for y’all…

Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant

Perhaps overshadowed by her contemporary Alice Munro—another female, Canadian writer of short stories—Mavis Gallant’s work deserves a wider readership. To date, NYRB Classics has released four collections of her work, all filled with nuance and comic moments of deep humanity. I’ve never read anything written quite the way her stories unfold, how encounters with peripheral people in our lives also shape us. Varieties of Exile is a good introduction, although I would say Paris Stories (which collects the work she wrote while living in that city) is a good place, too.

Also recommended, the short story collection You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There by Elizabeth Taylor. (Not that Elizabeth Taylor!)

NYRB Classics Spotlight: The Case of Comrade Tulayev

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Malvern staff member Fernando is a New York Review Books Classics enthusiast, and he has a splendid recommendation for y’all…

The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge

Sometimes the dirty politics of your time catch up to your immediate reality. Just ask Russian anarchist writer Victor Serge (1890 – 1947). He lived in Paris as a young man, then in 1919 traveled Russia supporting the Bolshevik revolution. In 1933, after a few imprisonments, he was deported and settled in France, where he began his career as a novelist. This is his last novel, which stirs together the themes Serge explored his entire life, revolving around the Soviet Great Terror of the early 20th Century. Perfect for fans of political thrillers. In the same vein, check out Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning, also available through NYRB Classics.

NYRB Classics Spotlight: Butcher’s Crossing

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Malvern staff member Fernando is a New York Review Books Classics enthusiast, and he has an excellent recommendation for y’all…

Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams

There’s something like a quiet magic in the art of the “meaning of life” western, as opposed to a violent, shoot-em-up kind of western. This book is perhaps the kind of western Herman Melville would have written—it retains elements of realism yet elevates moments into the realm of the epic:

But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought. It was a freedom and a goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year.

To aficionados of the genre, this book is considered the greatest western written in the late twentieth century, along with Warlock by Oakley Hall. They make a good pair, really—Hall’s Warlock is the shoot-em-up kind of western, and can also be found in the NYRB Classics catalog. They’re both must-haves for fans of the western genre.