JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

There’s a story by Irwin Shaw in which a character chooses books by checking out the author’s photo on the back cover. If she finds the author attractive, she buys the book. But how many authors have the bone structure of Sebastian Junger? I usually rely on book reviews (I like Michael Dirda of the Washington Post because he said he would ask to be buried with The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, and Christopher Hitchens is brilliant even when you disagree with him) and friends’ recommendations (Tina got me into Stalin-era Soviet literature. I periodically leave the gulag, but she’s still in there).

NYRB Classics have me at the logo. If the book is from NYRB, the only reservations come from my wallet. Their book designs are simple and elegant, and the monochromatic spines line up beautifully on a shelf.

Published by the New York Review of Books, NYRB Classics are translations and reissues of nearly-forgotten masterpieces. These are books no one else would think of publishing. In recent months I’ve acquired (and not yet finished reading—I’m savoring them) several titles including Kaputt, the strange and astounding World War II memoir by the disaffected fascist Curzio Malaparte (Actually the author’s name was enough to sell me the book. Later I found that the odd-looking house in Capri in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt was Malaparte’s); Soul, a collection of stories by the suppressed Russian author Andrey Platonov (the story “The Return” is a killer); and Memoirs Of An Anti-Semite by Gregor Von Rezzori, the scion of an aristocratic Austro-Hungarian family in decline (He doesn’t hate Jews; he honestly addresses his feelings of attraction and repulsion towards them, the attitudes that made him complicit in the horrors of the last century).

NYRB Classics are available at Powerbooks, A Different Bookstore, and Fully-Booked. Oddly, no one thinks of arranging them on a single shelf. Yesterday I asked my contact at National Bookstore if there was any chance we could get NYRB Classics at National branches. She says they carry a few titles, and will get more in the coming months. Dibs!