Currently My Favorite Publisher

I have always played favorites with particular publishers. When I was in high school and hung around at Schroeder’s Books on Public Square in Cleveland, I was enthralled by the New Directions paperbacks. As I went to college and for years afterwards, I was particularly interested in Penguin Books (though I have been disappointed in how poorly they age). Then, for a while I collected the pocket sized hardback Oxford World Classics. Now, I find myself quite addicted to New York Review Books.

In fact, I recently counted how many NYRB titles I read in 2017. The total came to fifteen titles! They included, in the order I read them:

• Teffi’s Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi
• Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama
• Natsume Soseki’s Mon [The Gate]
• John Williams’s Stoner
• Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph
• Georges Simenon’s Tropic Moon
• Georges Simenon’s Mr Hire’s Engagement
• Kingsley Amis’s Girl, 20
• Kingsley Amis’s One Fat Englishman
• Patrick Modiano’s Young Once
• Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up
• Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago
• Kingsley Amis’s Take a Girl Like You
• Raymond Quenaeau’s Zazie in the Metro
• Henry Green’s Loving

Looking back over this list, there wasn’t a single clinker in the bunch. And my plans for 2018 call for me continuing to plow through the NYRB list.