#NYRBWomen24
A Year-long Group Reading Project:
23 NYRB Classics written by Women (15-20pp per day)
• January thru December 2024 •
23 NYRB Classics written by Women (15-20pp per day)
• January thru December 2024 •
#NYRBWomen24 Current
#NYRBWomen24 Next
#NYRBWomen24 Archive
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• 20-30 November 2024 •
Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. by Eve Babitz 
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"Babitz takes to the page lightly, slipping sharp observations into roving, conversational essays & perfecting a kind of glamorous shrug." - Katilin Phillips, Bookforum Links of Interest
- Eve Babitz, Collage Artist - Eve Babitz calling Joan Didion [video] - Conversation between Eve Babitz & Hunter Drohojowska-Philp [video] 3 Aug 2011 |
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• 1-19 November 2024 •
Alice James: A Biography by Jean Strouse 
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"Jean Strouse has written a Jamesian novel, subtle, evasive, embroidered, splendid..." - John Leonard, The New York Times |
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• 15-31 October 2024 •
Ghosts by Edith Wharton 
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"These ghost stories are not mere genre, not chills and thrills. They are about the liberty of the form itself..." - Maureen Howard |
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• 1-14 October 2024 •
Divorcing by Susan Taubes 
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"[Divorcing] is about much more than the breakup of a marriage. Perhaps it is mostly about misogyny and how it can discourage and deaden a clever woman. It is also about being haunted by the ghosts of the Holocaust and the ghosts of a marriage. And it is about the kind of rupture, both personal and historical, that can’t be neatly resolved, not in life nor in a novel." —Deborah Levy, The Guardian |
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• 19-31 August 2024 •
The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer 
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"A strange, fresh, gripping book...Mortimer peels several layers of skin off the subjects of motherhood, marriage, and monogamy, so that what we're asked to look at is frequently red-raw and painful without being remotely self-dramatizing. There's a dreaminess to some of the prose..." - Nick Hornby, The Believer |
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• 1-18 August 2024 •
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford 
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"Stunning. Reads like extravagantly mannered fiction, except that it is fabulously true. Mitford is at once touching & wildly funny, and there is not one of her highly coloured characters that is not violently alive and uncomfortably kicking." - Tatler |
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• 1-19 May 2024 •
Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot & Carlton Lake 
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"Picasso launched — and lost — three lawsuits trying to prevent its publication. Some forty French artists and intellectuals...signed a manifesto demanding that the book be banned. They evidently found it acceptable for Picasso to have used Gilot's likeness in hundreds of his artworks — but scandalous if she portrayed him in hers." - from the Introduction by Lisa Alther |
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• 21-30 April 2024 •
Last Words from Montmartre by Qiu Miaojin translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich 
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"...urgent, ecstatic, unbridled, and breathtakingly intimate...part confession, part love letter, part fiction, part memoir, part suicide notes...a thrilling testament to her original mind and impassioned heart." — Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum |
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• 1-20 April 2024 •
Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury 
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"Think of her as Jane Austen with the gloves off." — The Japan Times Links of Interest
- Eileen Chang's bio on Wikipedia |
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• 15-31 March 2024 •
Käserbier Takes Berlin by Gabriele Tergit translated from the German by Sophie Durvernoy 
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"Tergit's prose is energetically rendered by Sophie Duvernoy ... Tergit's gift for engaging dialogue enlivens the novel. But beneath the witty comedy and acute observation lies a sober reminder of the dangers brewing: references to mounting debt and widespread bankruptcy; and as the election poster go up, auction are held and suitcases of the vulnerable stand ready." — Rebecca K. Morrison, TLS |
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• 1-14 March 2024 •
Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman by Hannah Arendt translated from the German by Clara Winston & Richard Winston 
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"Arendt probes so deeply into her subject's inner life, and writes so vividly about her frustrations and sorrows, that the biography often reads like a novel ... an imaginative mix of biography and social commentary that still feels, as the scholar Barbara Hahn writes in her introduction, thoroughly 'ahead of its time." — Lily Meyer, NPR |
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• 1-29 February 2024 •
Mary Olivier: A Life by May Sinclair 
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"May Sinclair's great literary works tell of the inner lives of quiet women." — Joanna Griffiths, London Review of Books |
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• 17-31 January 2024 •
Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints by Teffi translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, & others 
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"Teffi reimagines old Russian wonder tales with an inimitable blend of ingenuousness, slyness, and mischief. Poised between provoking fear and fascination, belief and disbelief, her stories give glimpses of uncanny sightings, weird figures, and shivery experiences that break into - and enliven - the humdrum daily round. This a hugely enjoyable and surprising collection..." —Marina Warner |
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• 1-16 January 2024 •
Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries 1917-1922 by Marina Tsvetaeva edited & translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell 
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"Is there prose more intimate, more piercing, more heroic, more astonishing than Tsvetaeva’s? Was the truth of reckless feelings ever so naked? So accelerated? Voicing gut and brow, she is incomparable. Clad in the veil of translation, expert translation, her recklessness commands, her nakedness flames." —Susan Sontag |
#NYRBWomen24 is a continuation of #NYRBWomen23.
Here are the books we read previously.
Here are the books we read previously.
