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Out this week: Paul Celan’s Letters to Gisèle, a big collection of the poet’s missives to his wife, the French artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. 💌 The letters cover twenty years of their relationship, during and after the end of their marriage. Celan, known for his dark and difficult poems, writes letters that are at turns tender and doting, anxious and haunted, many spilling over with declarations of love for Gisèle. In these letters, Celan sometimes translates his poems into French for the benefit of his Francophone wife, creating versions of his poems that exist nowhere else, many of them quite different from their published form. On the whole, the letters give a glimpse into the mind of a significant artist, one of the most important of the 20th century. The book also includes letters from Celan to his son Eric. #paulcelan #giselecelanlestrange #poetry #translation #translatedliterature

A new collection of essays to celebrate the upcoming sixtieth anniversary of the passage of the New York City Landmarks Law, Beyond Architecture: The New New York explores the current and future status of historic preservation in New York City through the eyes of preservationists (of course), architects, writers, and cultural & architectural critics. Edited by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, this volume (out today!) is meant to inspire reflection, hope, and excitement about the future of the new New York, the city's complex history, and its never-ending transformation.

My Essay “Some Observations in the Galapagos: How Looking at Animals Can Help Us See,” appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Orion Magazine, just out. Excerpted from my new book The Picture Note Taken: On Life and Photography, the essay explores the visual and philosophical suggestions of Michel Negroponte’s 14-minute 2021 film A World Before God—a transportive romp with creatures under water and above who, unafraid of humans, seem to ask us who we really think we are. I hope you will read it and see the film! A reading of the essay and screening of the film will take place at 5 PM on Friday, December 27 at Catskill Art Space, 48 Main Street, Livingston Manor, NY 12768. Copies of my book will be available courtesy of The Hound Books of Roscoe NY. Please come if you can. Links to article and reading are in my profile. @orion_magazine @catskillartspace @nyrbooks @thehoundbooks @michelneg1

NYRB never disappoints! Get your poetry cravings fixed with some great new editions! So good! At the Louvre A unique collaboration between New York Review Books and the Louvre Museum, At the Louvre presents a hundred poems, newly commissioned exclusively for this volume, by a hundred of the world’s most vibrant poets. They write about works from the museum’s collection. They write about the museum and its history. They write what they see and feel, and together they take us on a tour of the Louvre and its galleries like no other, one that is an irresistible feast for the ear and mind and eye. Set Change Set Change draws on the poetry Andrukhovych wrote in the eighties and nineties, before he turned his attention to prose. The collection shows him beginning on a quest to represent and do justice to Ukraine’s long history of violence. He explores the overlapping and shifting borders of Eastern Europe, while also venturing into realms of fantasy and myth. Again and again, he returns to the idea of the city as a space of carnivalesque disguise and discovery. Drawing on the rich resources of Ukrainian literature, from the amplitude of the baroque to the austerely powerful configurations of the lost modernist generation, Andrukhovych’s poems are ironic and elegiac, witty and allusive, lyrical, experimental, and political. As translated into English by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, they offer readers a powerfully transformative vision of the place of poetry in a fractured world. #nyrb #nyrbpoets #poetry #poetrylovers #book #bookstagram #booklover #bookworm #bokish #bookstore #indiebookstore #setchange #yuriandrukhovich #ostapkin #poets #bilingualpoetry #athelouvre #contemporaryworldpoetry

“Should New York City preserve, say, it’s shrinking flower district? What would that mean, practically speaking? Would it mean specialized breaks and subsidies? The flower district is but one of dozens and dozens of business clusters that once defined the commercial geography and cultural identity of the city.” Michael Kimmelman’s contribution to Beyond Architecture on “intangible heritage” had a beautiful spread in the New York Times yesterday. Beyond Architecture is a collection of essays on landmark preservation, construction, housing, and architecture edited by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel. The book goes on sale next week.

“Monsieur Teste is a monster, and is meant to be—an awesome, wholly individualized machine—yet in a sense he is also the sort of inhuman being Valéry aimed to become himself: a Narcissus of the best kind, a scientific observer of consciousness, a man untroubled by inroads of worldly trivia, who vacations in his head the way a Platonist finds his Florida in the realm of Forms.” —William Gass Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, an enigmatic exploration of the nature of consciousness and language, is on sale today in a stunning new translation by Charlotte Mandell.

Three books that came out this week. At the Louvre presents a hundred poems, newly commissioned exclusively for this volume, by a hundred of the world’s most vibrant poets. They write about works from the museum’s collection. They write about the museum and its history. They write what they see and feel, and together they take us on a tour of the museum and its galleries like no other. In 1967 the US military began its largest ground operation of the Vietnam War. Operation Cedar Falls was designed to seal off the area not far from Saigon and close to the Cambodian border known as the Iron Triangle, which was effectively governed by the National Liberation Front. A young journalist named Jonathan Schell accompanied the American armed forces into a village in the Iron Triangle called Ben Suc, which was quickly levelled and its residents moved into American camps (with no plans for where to relocate the residents in the future). Schell’s reportage, which became the book The Village of Ben Suc, changed the way Americans viewed the war, and remains a classic book of wartime reporting. Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the most compelling and influential contemporary Ukrainian writers. Set Change compiles poetry that Andrukhovych wrote in the eighties and nineties, when he drew on the rich resources of Ukrainian literature while coming to terms with the long history of violence and shifting borders of Eastern Europe. Andrukhovych’s poems are ironic and elegiac, witty and allusive, lyrical, experimental, and political. As translated into English by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, they offer readers a powerfully transformative vision of the place of poetry in a fractured world.

“Samuel Larned had lived one whole year on crackers and the next exclusively on apples. One Fruitlander believed that clothes hindered spiritual growth and that the light of day was pernicious. Another crowed like a cock at midnight if a happy thought struck him. One, holding that words only betrayed the true spirit, greeted the rest with ‘Good morning, damn you.’” Now reading in the NYRB office: The Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes.

Now on sale and in the latest @nytbooks, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Tove Jansson. 🫖 This is not the Disney version of Alice but something far stranger, slightly scarier, and a lot more beautiful, if we may say so. This is the first time Jansson’s edition is available widely in the US. Follow the 🐇 #tovejansson #aliceinwonderland #illustration #moomins #whiterabbit #childrensbooks #classicchildrensbooks #whimsical

Saul Steinberg’s All in Line is out today! Featuring an introduction by @lianafinck and an afterword by Iain Topliss, this is a new edition of one of the legendary New Yorker cartoonist’s earliest collections of drawings, originally published in 1945, only a few years after Steinberg arrived in the U.S. after fleeing from the fascist government in his native Romania. The book captures both Steinberg’s initial impressions of his new home country and his wartime impressions while serving in the U.S. Naval Reserve in China, India, North Africa, and Italy. Fanciful delight and grim reality sit side-by-side in this volume, a lively record of Steinberg finding his way (and his line) as an artist in America.

“Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness—these were the things that called her thoughts away from the comfortable fireside.” Now reading at the NYRB office: Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Seeing Further, Esther Kinsky’s follow-up to her polyphonic ecological novel Rombo, presents readers with only a single voice, that of a keenly perceptive narrator who stumbles upon a dilapidated movie theater while traveling through Hungary’s Great Alföld. She soon embarks on the colossal (and somewhat quixotic) task of renovating the theater in an attempt to preserve a shared way of seeing. For isn’t that what we’re losing with the collapse of moviegoing? “The cinema used to have presence,” the narrator writes, “it had weight in almost everyone’s life, not as an exceptional experience, but as a commonplace in a less privatized world that first the television invaded bit by bit, and later the permanent accessibility of private screens caused to fully unravel.” An ode to the cinema as a space of collective imagining, and containing nearly four dozen black-and-white photos, Seeing Further is out today!