LitMinds Blog and Interviews

Edwin Frank works at the New York Review of Books, where he is the Editorial Director of the NYRB Classics series, which reintroduces great books that have fallen out of print or out of sight in recent years.  Last month, the series celebrated the publication of its 200th work, Georges Simenon’s novel The Engagement.

We got to know Edwin through his publication of Sir Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 last October; LitMinds recently hosted an event with the author in Berkeley, California.  This week we talk with Edwin about his work at NYRB Classics, the international bent of the series, and why he likes reading dead people’s work.    


While many folks in the LitMinds community are familiar with The New York Review of Books, they might not know as much about the history of the literary magazine and the more recent creation of the NYRB publishing house.  Tell us a bit about NYRB’s legacy within the literary community.  
 
The New York Review of Books first appeared in 1963, when a strike had shut down the New York Times. The magazine was edited by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, as it continued to be until Epstein’s death last year. Robert Silvers is now the sole editor. The Review rapidly made a name for itself thanks to the quality of its regular contributors, (over the years they have included Edmund Wilson, W.H. Auden, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, J.M. Coetzee, John Banville, Michael Chabon, and Colm Toibin); for running pieces that were not just notices of new books, but extensive and thoughtful responses to them; and for its unabashedly liberal politics. In the aftermath of September 11, the Review has been a consistent and outspoken opponent of the Bush administration.
 
The NYRB Classics series, which I edit, started coming out at the end of the nineties. It was a project of Rea Hederman, the publisher of the Review and at that time also the publisher of Granta and Granta Books (an English house), rather than of the editors of the Review, from which the series has always been editorially independent. When we began it, I was mindful that all sorts of good books had gone out of print as big publishers backed away from any kind of work, literary or not, that wasn’t likely to sell in quantity. Selling books as a series is of course something people have been doing since the nineteenth century (at least).  We had the obvious thought that doing so would work to set our books apart and to suggest, or simply impose, an apparent unity in what we intended to be a wide ranging list. Our first season, for example, we published Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, and the wonderful Ivy Compton-Burnett.
 
Small publishers face many difficulties, of course, as, in a different way, do big publishers. This is, plainly enough, a time when print is losing its centrality within the culture at large. Other media can provide information and entertainment that people used to turn to print for, and often they do it very well. The prestige of literature and audience for it are sure to dwindle, though the remnant I expect will be a devout one. Certain kinds of literature that were once of great importance to many people (notably poetry--think of how popular Tennyson was) have already returned to what might be called a manuscript culture. I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. Marginalization could be good for literature—the shelves of libraries are full of worthy novels, for example, that were to the well-bred readers of the twentieth century what the devotional manuals of the nineteenth century were to their readers--though of course it could also lead to trivialization and preciosity. In any case, smaller publishers, who know their small audiences, may be in a better position to deal with the changing situation than big ones.
 
 
Can you share a bit about the importance of reintroducing classics through new publications?  
 
I never really liked the title classics: the word has become debased, perfect for shoes and cookies and golden oldies. In so far as it does retain a meaning it suggests canonicity, and though I have nothing against canonicity, the category isn’t coextensive with that of books that are still worth reading. And from the start I wanted us to mix up old and new books, wanted to bring out connections between the past and the present. I suppose you might describe the books we do not so much as classics, with its ring of the classroom, as books that are—so we hope—still in the repertory—thinking of the book as a kind of score and of reading as kind of mental performance.

 
The reemergence of interest in Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (NYRB, Oct. 2006), due to Henry Kissinger’s recommendation to the Bush Administration to read this book as a resource for the Iraq war, serves as one striking example of how a classic book can have great relevance in current events.  As we discovered through the recent LitMinds event with Sir Alistair Horne in Berkeley, California, people were very interested in the parallels drawn between Horne’s historical analysis of the Algerian war and today’s war in Iraq.  How does the reintroduction of non-fiction books, like Horne’s A Savage War of Peace, compare and contrast to that of republished fictional works?  
 
It’s as important for us to mix up non-fiction and fiction in the series as it is to feature works from different times and places. The difficulty in turning up older works of non-fiction is that style and content tend to date at different rates. That’s less the case with works of fiction, which fizzle out quickly like a match. A lot of non-fiction readers expect a more or less transparent style, one that serves to convey the information clearly – but of course there are styles of transparency. What seems fresh and forthright today stales before too long, even if the facts or thinking haven’t budged. But then the presumed facts often do budge, and are subject to matters of style, too. Once Freud explained everything and now Darwin does.
 
Then again non-fiction means so many things (as the non-committal name of the category suggests). Memoirs are in effect fictions of self, and are established as a literary genre. They may be full of lies, but if the lies have legs, that’s good enough (if only to enrage people). Some histories live on as masterpieces of style and characterization—in effect of art. Think of Carlyle’s French Revolution, which is not the place to go for the history, but is a thrilling book. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy teaches the happy lesson that a triumphant style can bring even the deadest of facts and theories to life.
 
Horne’s book is a case of an outstanding work of research, synthesis, and exposition (especially when one considers what a complicated story he has to tell) that fell victim to the America’s vast carelessness about the rest of the world. Events have made both the importance and drama of the subject, along with Horne’s talents as a historian, newly evident. The same might be said of C.V. Wedgwood’s great history of The Thirty Years War, which we published several years back.
 
 
To date, NYRB has published more than 200 classics during your tenure as the editorial director.  Drawing from your experience, tell us about a couple of the books that have had an unexpected response or reception by readers.
 
What takes off is usually a surprise. Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, having been around in English for almost thirty years, is now being widely recognized as the masterpiece it is. When published I think it was received as one more piece of dissident literature, so politely reviewed, but not embraced--in a sense, not read. Now people see it as a defining work of Soviet literature, all the more so because it reveals the terrible inhumanity of the Soviet Union in light of its greatest triumph, the defeat of Hitler. I’ve also been delighted and not a little amazed to see English, August, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s wonderful comedy about the Indian civil service take off, not to mention Carlo Emilio Gadda’s modernist mystery That Awful Mess of the Via Merulana, or our recent anthology of Paul Schmidt’s translations of the great Russian poets of the Revolution, The Stray Dog Cabaret. But we survive not through bestsellers but because, to a greater or a lesser degree, people inevitably continue to take an interest in the range of books in the series.
 
A book I wish people would pick up more of—hardly anyone ever does—is L.H. Myer’s The Root and the Flower. It is a wonderfully vivid novel set in Akbar’s India, a novel of ideas, a novel of growing up, a novel about the power of sex and about the perversions of power, a Buddhist novel, for that matter, praised by Ursula Le Guin, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Eliot Weinberger. I like it a lot, too.
 
 
NYRB is one of a select group of publishers that contributes to Reading the World, a collaboration of independent booksellers and publishers that are “interested in bringing international voices to the attention of readers.”  As an editor, how do you approach the decision to publish written works from a variety of global perspectives?   Why is it important and timely to have an increasing focus on international authors and publications?

In the simplest sense, publishing fiction from elsewhere and from other languages is like reporting the news—news of what’s going on in those countries, of how people think, of how they imagine the world, of what counts for them as art-- and interesting and important for the same reason.

Tell us a bit about your personal reading and writing interests.  Beyond your work as NYRB’s editorial director, what do you enjoy reading?
 
I read a lot of poetry, most of it by dead people.