In the back of the only bookstore in my tiny Vermont hometown, there’s a small spinner labeled NYRB. For the uninitiated, this stands for New York Review Books. The NYRB Classics series is self-described as “the kind of books that people typically run into outside of the classroom and then remember for life.” Their mission is to find and publish books that have been left largely unacknowledged and gone out of print. This tends to include a lot of international books which were either never translated, translated badly, or were never distributed outside of their country. In my town, those books represented an outside world where arts and culture seemed to be formed, far, far away from where I was—a world which can open us up to so many new ways of looking, speaking, and understanding. When we close ourselves off to the great variety of art that there is in the world, we lose something important in return. I still come back to this collection to find something that excites me, something I’ve never seen before. I hope they’ll do the same for you.
10. Stoner, John Williams pub. 1965
This is the book that your friend who got a little too into dark academia loves, and you’ll never tell them, but you love it too. The titular character, ‘Stoner,’ goes to university and instead of fulfilling his father’s dream of an agriculture major, falls in love with English instead. This book takes you through dark, sepia-tinted days of academia and isolation, and one man’s seemingly cursed attempts at love. One might say that it’s the perfect book for Princeton students who disappointed their parents by majoring in English.
9. Life With Picasso, Francoise Gilot, pub. 1964
There are a lot of narratives that go around about Picasso. There’s a camp which portrays him as a monster, another that sanctifies him for the sake of art. I find this narrative the most compelling. It is an attempt of Francoise Gilot to understand the man that she had a child with. There has been much debate about the great men of art (see; Monsters by Clair Dederer) but Gilot doesn’t try to convince us of Picasso’s character one way or another. Instead, she recounts her life with him in chronological order, bringing us down the winding roads of a post-war Paris and to face the complicated character of the artist in his real life.
8. On Being Blue (A Philosophical Inquiry), William H. Gass, pub. 1975
Do you remember that super controversial argument about which color notebook you should use for each school subject? This book takes that heated debate to a whole new level. There are spaces and emotions in life, he argues, that are completely blue. The space between a pause in the conversation, sex, empty spaces, and the psychological experience of loneliness. It explores how color affects the way we view the world, and ties in some amazing poets like Wallace Stevens to help prove his point. A great beach read for those who stare too long at the big blue line where sky meets water.
7. Chess Story, Stefan Zweig pub. 1942
Short, slightly disturbing, but worth it. Stefan Zweig is the influence behind Wes Anderson’s The Budapest Hotel, and the parallels are clear. Zweig writes with a certain equilibrium, never letting a sentence dangle for too long. His scenes are immaculately timed, as though he writes to the beat of a metronome, and his internal rhythm seems to guide every sentence intuitively. As he takes us through the story of a chess game on an up-scale passenger ship, the images seem not only perfectly color-coordinated but also balanced in a way that helps you slide down the story’s narrative and land at the end without any idea of how you got there. Read for chess, intrigue, and a surprising amount of psychological torture.
6. The Door, Magda Szabo pub. 1987
Szabo, who is a fairly famous Hungarian novelist, was relatively unknown in the United States until recently due to a lack of translations of her work. Her novel unravels the fascinating dynamics of her own life in a semi-autobiographical attempt to understand her relationship with her maid, Emerence. Playing off Soviet-era dynamics of class and the contrast between city and village life, this book is a moving portrait of a relationship between two women who seem to be at the opposite poles of their respective society.
5. My Death, Lisa Tuttle pub. 2004
A recent widow sets out to write a biography on an eminent artist of her time, whose most radical work is a mystery. This book takes every established rule of its own world and flips it on its head in a mere 144 pages. From the first page, this vibe is reverie crossed with a fever dream. As she talks more and more to this old, eccentric artist, both her mindset and the prose of the book become muddled in mysterious ways. With a twist I bet you won’t see coming, you will leave this book feeling a little hollower on the inside.
4. Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih pub. 1966
One of the cornerstones of post-colonial literature, Season of Migration to the North is perhaps one of the best known books on this list. Salih flips the narrative of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad–in SOMN, a man goes to the mysterious and seemingly dreaded world of the European, and the things he finds there send him back home, where he appears in a mysterious flurry to a small village on the banks of a river. A young man, idealistic and naive, seeks to unravel what exactly happened to him. This book examines in depth the relationship between the colonized and the colonizers, and how exoticization takes a piece out of us all.
3. Notes of a Crocodile, Qiu Miaojin pub. 1994
Are you too artsy for your own good? Do you have Wong Kar Wai in your Letterboxd top four? Do you want to read genuine queer representation? This book is definitely for you. Set in Taiwan, these diaries chronicle a student’s life at university, consisting of all the haziness and surrealism of her contemporaries in Asian literature, but with a dry wit and exploration of sexuality that sets it apart from the rest. Wander down the streets at 2am with her–you won’t regret it.
2. Gold, Rumi [trans. Haleh Liza Gafori] pub. 2022
Mistranslation of important cultural works has become a prevalent issue, especially in the translation of Persian literature. Many so-called translators ‘interpret,’ adapting already existing English translations instead of actually providing new reading of the text. Haleh Liza Gafori’s stunning atmospheric translation prioritizes sentiment over form. Her strategy of gathering passages with the same feeling, instead of a stiff direct approach, for the first time successfully communicates the ecstatic and spiritual feeling of Rumi’s original poetry. The purpose of her translation is not to create moments within the text to interest English readers, but rather to direct the powerful rivers of emotion that flow through Rumi’s writing. It leaves you feeling the title of the book—as though the world is really made of gold.
1. The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales, Ferit Edgu pub. 2007
If I was the type to build altars for things I love, I would build an altar for this book. One of the single most creative endeavors I’ve ever read, this book follows a Turkish journalist sent to the border regions. The things he witnesses are recorded entirely in poetry and prose, horrors filtered through language so beautifully curated that it scarcely seems real. This book is about the in-between spaces and the growing pains of both nations and people. A scathing analysis of the ethnic battle lines drawn in the Middle East, this book pushes boundaries that I didn’t even know existed.