“It’s easy enough to say that the creation of the monumental implies the erasure of the everyday or the ordinary but this is often true.” New: Amit Chaudhuri on “not being a monuments person.” www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Richard Hell on Godlike.

"Godlike is Hell’s best book. Love fucks us up — but who cares. How else are we to touch eternity?" artsfuse.org/325072/book-... @theartsfuse.bsky.social

Tonight in Portland, Or.

Richard Hell is at @powellsbookschi.bsky.social tomorrow (Wednesday) at 7pm. www.powells.com/events/richa...

And Abidor, along with Richard Greeman, brilliantly translated Serge's Notebooks 1936-1947. Memoirs Of A Revolutionary is (rightly) much celebrated, but the Notebooks are also fantastic. Dip in at random, and be completely enthralled. Available from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social, as is Memoirs.

Congrats to Sonya Walger for being recognized for Lion!

Richard Hell reading tonight at Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle. 7pm.

“Godlike,” by the seminal punk musician Richard Hell, transposes a notorious affair between 19th-century French poets to 1970s New York—and testifies to punk’s paradoxical relationship with the past. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/UsuIy8

Richard Hell has lived in the same rent-stabilized East Village apartment for over 50 years. He's got some great books.

Michael Londra on Richard Hell's second novel, 20025's "Godlike" -- a @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social. Hell is the only New York artist of the past fifty years to give Lou Reed and Patti Smith a run for their money. artsfuse.org/325072/book-...

tonight! the @nysnetwork.bsky.social hosts an incredible online panel discussion on Joe Brainard’s comics, published by @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social 🫟 6:30 EST / 11:30 GMT www.eventbrite.com/e/joe-braina...

Nancy Lemann's The Oyster Diaries earns a starred review from Kirkus! "Making sense of the vicissitudes and mysteries of middle age with wit, intelligence, and a firm grounding in the spirit of New Orleans.... This book is so funny that its poignant, elegiac side kind of sneaks up on you."

Tyhe Cooper, David Hobbs, & Tausif Noor are discussing Joe Brainard (and others, and what others) The Complete C Comics this coming Tuesday for a virtual event with the Network for New York School Studies. Register below.

"This is why radical universalism is hard: It often demands that you go against your own immediate interests." For Gal Beckerman, reading Omri Boehm's "cogent, succinct book [Radical Universalism] felt like such a cold plunge, painful but reinvigorating." Universal rights are politics.

Reading Amit Chaudhuri again and wondering why his books aren't more frequently discussed: Some of the best prose being written today, with Proustian tactility and musicality. Excited to see he has a new novel this autumn, and that the @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social reissues series continues.

On the occasion of the @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social reissue of his 2005 novel, Godlike, I profiled Richard Hell for Poetry magazine. www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/177...

Richard Hell's novel Godlike has been re-released by NYRB Classics. Andrew Holter spoke to Hell on his literary trajectory, the inevitable Rimbaud and (Tom) Verlaine comparisons (and other noms de plume), the New York School poets, and his fearlessness of influence. proteanmag.com/2026/02/13/a...

Richard Hell joins #LARBRadioHour to speak about the reissue of his 2005 novel, "Godlike." Listen now on our site, or wherever you get your podcasts: https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/richard-hells-godlike-podcast-interview/

Darryl Pinckney on Elizabeth Hardwick: their relationship, her life, the evolution of her writing, and "the suffering of bad artists." It's on episode 1 of Private Life, the new podcast from @nybooks.com, hosted by Jarrett Earnest.

New on the blog today for #ReadIndies, I've written about some of my favourite books from NYRB Classics. Featuring books by Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Comyns, J. L. Carr and more! @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social #BookSky 💙📚 #TranslationThurs jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/02/12/s...

"One of the year’s best books.... Just as James Joyce’s Ulysses is a love letter to Dublin written in exile, so too is Effingers an ode to the [Berlin] of Tergit’s youth...."

"It's a heady mix of intense smut and poetic prose with an unforgettable chapter at the sauna." Mikey Friedman, founder of Page Break, picks Robert Glück's Jack the Modernist for "Sexiest Romance Novel" list @thestrategist.com. Good choice.

"In Chaudhuri's novels, every paragraph reads like the first; he writes fiction that gives these self-contained fragments 'primacy over the superstructure of narrative.' They exist for their own sake; they can be read and revisited independently." On Amit Chaudhuri at @thebaffler.com

"Manchette wastes none of his readers’ time, one short chapter after another driving the book relentlessly to its end." @chrispower.bsky.social on Jean-Patrick Machette's Nada. If you like Manchette we recommend you check out Jean Echenoz.

“How many of us would have the presence of mind to act the same way—to recognize when it’s time to flee our country forever, without hesitating like Lot’s wife on her way out of Sodom?” —Adam Kirsch on Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers

We approve this choice.

Amit Chaudhuri pursues what he calls a “poetics of unfinishedness.” As Apoorva Tadepalli writes, nowhere is this more apparent than in the unusual course he’s struck in his fiction.

We've just discovered "The Lonely Voice" show, hosted by Peter Orner and Yvette Benavides on @texaspublicradio.bsky.social. Their current episode is on Varlam Shalamov, who wrote heartbreakingly beautiful stories from/about the Gulag. Worth reading & remembering after the banning of Memorial.

"A fitting and worthy winner of our Best Collection of Classic Comics Award for 2025 and a much recommended acquisition." @brokenfrontier.bsky.social on Rea Irvin's The Smythes

We are sad to learn of the death of James Sallis. A great crime reader and friend of NYRB's from when he wrote an introduction to Manchette's The Mad and the Bad. Pick up one of Sallis's books in his honor.

The first sentence in Richard Hell's Godlike is catching people's attention— "It was March and the weather was like a pornographic high-fashion magazine."

"It ain't cheap, but it's worth every penny." We'll take it. A review of Joe Brainard's (with others) The Complete C Comics, "as pure and fresh as the day they were made." internationaltimes.it/a-thing-of-b...

"This is eccentric, assured, elastic and inspiring work — vital reading for anyone who longs for comics to break out of their ruts and run screaming through the fields. As such, The Complete C Comics is a major addition to the comics canon and an ideal gift for the non-conformist(s) in your life."

"Did he not feel threatened, a journalist once asked. 'No, the mafia doesn’t read books,' he replied. 'And if you have to ask yourself if you are afraid then you cease to live.'" Caroline Moorehead has written a biography of Leonardo Sciascia.

Review! The Smythes – A Truly Handsome Collection of Rea Irvin’s 1930s Domestic Comedy Strips from New York Review Comics @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social. www.brokenfrontier.com/the-smythes/

"Filice turns labour into literature, in a free-flowing and vibrant mix of free verse and prose, with an acute sense of the sights, sounds, and smells of and from the driver’s cab, all, of course, set to the rhythm of the rails." Great review of Driver in ASLEF (Britain's train union publication)

A brief celebration of Richard Hell's GODLIKE, from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social - along with a little Badiou and Godard and the usual Rimbaudian suspects. www.alinastefanescuwriter.com/blog/2026/1/...

"If any novel deserves to be called epic, it's Effingers. Inspired by [Gabriele] Tergit’s own family history, this account of the rise and fall of a German Jewish clan has an addictive immediacy that will make you reluctant to put it down...."

I'll pick up any edition of Trilce and so should you. Also, @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social, I really appreciate this "translated and with glosses by" approach. Gives my sad anglo ass more agency in choosing to engage with or disregard meaning and context. bookshop.org/a/4820/97816...

Chateaubriand was right about everything.

Get ready for Hub City's first big reissue project: acclaimed novelist Nancy Lemann’s only work of nonfiction, The Ritz of the Bayou. @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social is publishing Lives of the Saints & The Oyster Diaries, so we're taking a tandem publication approach and all books are coming out April 7!

Congratulations to @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social, R. Kikuo Johnson and Dash Shaw on REA IRVIN'S THE SMYTHES winning in the Best Collection of Classic Material category in the 2025 Broken Frontier Awards. www.brokenfrontier.com/broken-front...

Naomi Fry recommends Gwendoline Riley's The Palm House on the New Yorker's Critics at Large podcast, and not just because it's short and the font is large. About 12:30 min into the episode. www.newyorker.com/podcast/crit...

“I was not interested in creating that rhythm of tension and release in order to arouse. That’s what pornography does.” —Robert Glück

"Latronico’s prose strips the deluginous images on our screens of their sticky allure, making them appear brittle and dry—an austere triumph of the written word." Niuniu Zhao picks up vincenzo.bsky.social’s PERFECTION (@nyrb-imprints.bsky.social) in NYRA no. 49. nyra.nyc/articles/hel...le

Nothing to do with NYRB but a fascinating article (and we have some crickets fans on staff).

"It's not really that healthy to have a robot with a personality." Nancy Lemann talks to a new robot for @parisreview.bsky.social. She's loyal to the old one, though. We are reissuing Lemann's Lives of the Saints and publishing her new book, The Oyster Diaries, in April.

"Tergit refuses to present the Holocaust as the telos of a necessarily failed German-Jewish symbiosis. She never condemns European Jews for not seeing the writing on the wall. She focuses on a way of life rather than its destruction." Review of Gabriele Tergit's Effingers by @ds228.bsky.social

"an essential reference book for any aspiring (or established!) cartoonist to have in their collection."