Round-up – New Classics, December 2024

from Blackburn and Dazai to Taylor and Valéry

December is a relatively sparse month for new classics publications. Editors worry that classics will be elbowed out of the limelight by big names, loud campaigns and stocking fillers that take over the shops in the run-up to Christmas. Nonetheless, there are several interesting classics publishing this month, including new translations of Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads, Murakami’s End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and Valéry’s collected Monsieur Teste.

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A Sour Apple Tree by John Blackburn (1958)

A gruesome wave of murder-­suicides is sweeping England, leaving the police baffled. But General Kirk of British Intelligence thinks the deaths may be connected to the one case he never solved, the one that’s nagged at him for years: John Glyde, a traitor who vanished in the ruins of the Third Reich. With the help of his colleagues Mike Howard and Penny Wise, Kirk tries to get to the bottom of the weird happenings, but the truth is far more terrible and bizarre than he could ever imagine.

Valancourt Books | 156 pages [US]

The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai (1940)

A fictional writer in his thirties named Osamu Dazai has just sent his publisher a terrible manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Shortly afterward, while moping around a park in suburban Tokyo, he spots someone drowning in a nearby aqueduct. He doesn’t want to become a witness to a suicide and eventually decides to flee the park. But as he is leaving, he trips over the boy who had been drowning, and the two begin an unlikely conversation that turns into an intellectual spat. Hoping to ingratiate himself with the boy―a high-school dropout―Dazai finds himself agreeing to perform in the boy’s stead that very night as the live narrator of a film screening . . .

New Directions | 96 pages | translated by Sam Bett [UK / US]

A White Heron and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett (1886)

‘Sylvia would have liked him vastly better without his gun; she could not understand why he killed the very birds he seemed to like so much.’ A tale for our times, ‘A White Heron’ follows Sylvia, a young woman who moves from the city to live with her grandmother in the Maine countryside. One day she is approached by a trophy hunter, who is keen to track down a rare and elusive bird so that he can shoot it and preserve it – but Sylvia finds herself enabling the bird’s escape. Painting beautiful portraits of American countryside, and tapping into deep debates around humans and their relationship with nature, this extraordinary short story collection was years ahead of its time, and is ripe for rediscovery.

Renard Press | 224 pages [UK]

Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca (1928)

Federico García Lorca’s collection of Gypsy Ballads (Romancero gitano) marked his first major publication, and the beginning of his rise to fame. Depicting life in his native Andalucía, and the Romany peoples who lived there, it takes motifs of the countryside into its view, describing the night, the sky and the moon alongside more universal themes like life and death. Written in a stylised version of the countryside ballads that proliferated at the time, the Gypsy Ballads propelled Lorca to overnight fame, and he soon became counted amongst Spain’s finest poets. Later in his career his name became synonymous with the theatre, but this new edition of the Gypsy Ballads returns the reader to where it all began. Presented here in a smart new translation, this edition is the perfect place to discover Lorca the Poet.

Renard Press | 128 pages | translated by Diego Jourdan Pereira [UK]

With Their Hearts in their Boots by Jean-Pierre Martinet (1986)

Georges Maman is a down-and-out actor sinking into despair and no longer able to scrape by, failing to make his mark even in the porno industry; Dagonard is a loudmouthed camera assistant who executes his refusal to read a room with almost surgical skill. Their paths cross one evening in a bar, and the two proceed to share a night in Paris: drink, dinner and psychological torture. Drawing from his own aborted career as an assistant director in the film industry, Jean-Pierre Martinet’s last novel (before he quit writing) describes a sordid, cynical and disturbingly humorous descent into the hell of failure and the company we keep there.

Wakefield Press | 120 pages | translated by Alex Andriesse | introduction by William Boyle [UK / US]

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland by Haruki Murakami (1985)

A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, The End of the World and Hard-boiled Wonderland is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami’s international following. Tracking one man’s descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy. This edition is a newly unabridged translation from long-time Murakami collaborator, Jay Rubin.

Vintage Classics | 464 pages | translated by Jay Rubin [UK]

Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns by Dorothy Parker (1927-8)

Dorothy Parker’s complete weekly New Yorker column about books and people and the rigours of reviewing. When, in 1927, Dorothy Parker became a book critic for the New Yorker, she was already a legendary wit, a much-quoted member of the Algonquin Round Table, and an arbiter of literary taste. In the year that she spent as a weekly reviewer, under the rubric “Constant Reader,” she created what is still the most entertaining book column ever written. Parker’s hot takes have lost none of their heat, whether she’s taking aim at the evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (“She can go on like that for hours. Can, hell—does”), praising Hemingway’s latest collection (“He discards detail with magnificent lavishness”), or dissenting from the Tao of Pooh (“And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up”).

McNally Editions | 224 pages | foreword by Sloane Crosley [UK / US]

Florence: Ordeal By Water by Katherine Kressman Taylor (1967)

Katherine Kressmann Taylor was a recently retired American living in Florence in 1966. She remained there to witness the flood and its aftermath, including the days of isolation without light, food, water that followed the initial disaster. Standing, incredulous, at the window of her pensione on the morning of 4th November 1966, Katherine saw the the brown torrent of the river Arno – thick with flotsam, oil drums, cars, chairs, trees – rising into the streets. Her infinitely moving diary of the days of the flood, and those that followed, detail how the citizens of Florence strove against the choking sea of mud that engulfed their homes, possessions, shops and art.

[This title was published in November, but I didn’t include it in last month’s round-up and I don’t want to miss any of the Manderley Press’s beautiful editions.]

Manderley Press | introduced by Vanessa Nicholson [UK]

Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry (1896-1926)

In 1892, during an intense thunderstorm, the great Symbolist poet Paul Valéry underwent an existential crisis. For the next twenty years, he wrote no poetry, devoting himself instead to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and language – and to the creation of his literary alter ego, Monsieur Teste, who first appeared in the 1896 novella The Evening with Monsieur Teste, and about whom Valéry continued to write for the rest of his life. Middle-aged Monsieur Teste lives on modest speculations on the stock market. He resides in a greenish room smelling of mint, takes a daily stroll with his wife, and would be entirely unremarkable, were it not for the fact that he is a being made up of pure consciousness, a Cartesian creature of pure rationality, intellect, and self-control.

NYRB Classics | 104 pages | translated by Charlotte Mandel | introduced by Ryan Ruby [UK / US]

Buddhist Meditation: Classic Teachings from Tibet (11th-19th centuries)

Drawn from Tibet’s rich contemplative literature, Buddhist Meditation offers classic exercises focused on the opportunities and challenges of life; cultivating inner calm; fostering a wider perspective on oneself in relationship to others; working with negative emotions; and the highest values of the Buddhist tradition, love and compassion. Several dozen meditation instructions are collected in twelve chapters. All major traditions of Tibetan Buddhism are represented.

Penguin Classics | 256 pages | translated by Kurtis R. Schaeffer [US]

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And finally, a reminder that if you’re near London tomorrow (Thursday), do come along to Hatchards on Piccadilly at 6.30pm for our Classics Book Club discussion of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. All the details are here. (And it’s half price if you get yourself a free Hatchards reward card.)

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The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.

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