Twenty-five years may not seem such a long time (how accomplished and complete did you feel at that age?) but sometimes, it can span centuries. That's the beauty, after all, of publishing classics: the work of one publisher can bring to readers the work of thousands of other presses.
Since September 30, 1999, when New York Review Books Classics brought its first 10 titles into the world under the stewardship of founder and longtime editor Edwin Frank, the press has breathed new literary life into works spanning many and, along the way, invited a redefining of the word “classic” itself. Books by such canonical cornerstones as Dante, Balzac, and Stendhal find their place here, but so too do the stylish modernism of Robert Walser, the sociophilosophical experiments of Andrey Platonov, and the sideways histories of Iris Origo, authors whose positions as touchstones of American literary culture were earned more recently.
That status was in no small part due to the careful curation of such publishers as NYRB—the “Criterion of books,” per one Reddit user—who saw the glint of diamonds in the mine that is the backlist. As Frank himself put it in the pages of PW on the occasion of NYRB's 20th anniversary, “The missing books were good books; they were fascinating books. There had to be an audience for them.”
There certainly is, and we’re part of it. Here, we’ve selected 25 gems that the publisher has unearthed over its 25 years on earth—plus one from this year, for good measure. Our methodology was simple: we thumbed through the NYRB's many hundreds of books and picked some titles of particular influence, others that felt of the press’s quintessence, and others we simply felt compelled to shout our love for. Then we argued good-spiritedly for a long while about what had to stay and what therefore had, alas, to go. But here or not, the books are out there. Go get them, read them, and argue about them for at least another 25 years.
1999: Lolly Willowes
“She, Laura Willowes, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil.” How many early 20th-century English novels of manners can you think of that could contain such a sentence—and with it illustrate the lengths a single woman might go to take space from a posh and controlling family, no less? It’s hardly a wonder that Warner, a lesbian writer born in the last decade of the Victorian era, is considered a pioneer of feminist literature. Her writerly interests, too, were seemingly immeasurable; among the four other titles of hers published by NYRB are the tale of an erstwhile bank clerk called to ministry on a remote volcanic island in the South Pacific and another of Benedictine nuns in a Norfolk convent during the Black Plague. Warner was one of a kind, and other publishers have clearly taken note—a new edition of Lolly Willowes, published by Modern Library Torchbearers with an introduction by Mona Awad, is forthcoming in February. —John H. Maher
2000: The Pure and the Impure
It's surprising that Colette herself considered this 1932 novel—a compelling if diffuse collection of vignettes and dialogues that limn the contours of desire across the sexual spectrum—to be her best and most autobiographical work. (One might expect the French master to have picked Chéri or The End of Chéri, widely regarded as masterpieces and reissued by NYRB in 2022.) Contemporaneous critics didn't quite know what to make of this one, which was originally subtitled in English "A Case-Book of Love," in part because of its many queer subjects (most of them her real-life friends and neighbors, including British lesbian poet Renée Vivien) and depictions of "unconventional" lifestyles and relationships. Despite its premise, the book is more interested in psychology than sex, though that doesn't make it any less juicy a read. —Sophia M. Stewart
2001: Sleepless Nights
Hardwick's fragmentary, semi-autobiographical novel—a work of proto-autofiction, if you will—is a collage of memories and observations assembled by an elderly woman, also named Elizabeth, looking back on her life. Sleepless Nights is essentially plotless ("If I want a plot I’ll watch Dallas," Hardwick once said), rendering in precise, poignant detail the people and places that once filled its narrator's days. Indeed, Elizabeth acts more as a portraitist than a memoirist. The novel—Hardwick's third and best, penned at the age of 63 after a successful career writing literary criticism, several volumes of which have also been reissued by NYRB—was universally praised upon its publication, and has since become a modern classic. It was also a stark and spearheading depiction of womanhood; when Joan Didion, months out from the release of The White Album, reviewed it, she praised Hardwick for having "illuminated lives traditionally misrepresented as tragic instances of the way all women live." —SMS
2002: Paris Stories
The title of this first of five volumes by the Canadian expatriate and longtime New Yorker contributor to get the NYRB treatment is technically accurate: all these stories were written in Paris. But its stories span cosmopolitan Europe in the 20th century, telling the stories, as Ondaatje puts it in his introduction, of “lost sons, émigrés, refugees from the nuclear family or the establishment, all trying to scramble back but with no weapons to do so.” The book could almost be seen as a mission statement for the NYRB itself: its character-driven narratives, distinguished by impeccable prose informed strongly—but never overwhelmingly—by contemporary history and politics, are the work of a writer’s writer (Brandon Taylor is a passionate and prominent fan) whose books, in her lifetime, never reached the stateside audience they deserved. —JHM
2003: The Day of the Owl
Of the five books NYRB has kept in print by prolific writer Sciascia, this one, his novel about a murder in Sicily and the Mafia-backed stonewalling faced by the detective on the case, is the best entry point. Critic George Scialabba identifies why in his introduction: “The narrator’s comments have a sarcastic cogency not yet jaded by too-long contemplation of the unchanging Sicilian blight.” It endures as a classic of straightforward storytelling about a not-so-straightforward investigation in a community gripped by organized crime. —David Varno
2004: Cassandra at the Wedding
Sixty years after its release, Baker's 1962 novella was the subject of an article in New York magazine titled, "Why Is Everyone Suddenly Reading Cassandra at the Wedding?: A Forensic Investigation." Reissued twice by NYRB—first in 2004 and again in 2012—the book, which follows the titular Berkeley grad student as she attempts to sabotage her twin sister's nuptials, had "modest" sales, per the article. "But over the past year," writes Nora DeLigter, "seemingly every screenwriter, editor, and Ph.D. candidate from New York to L.A. has picked it up." That same year, Neon snapped up the film rights and attached Bodies, Bodies, Bodies scribe Sarah DeLappe. Recognition of the book's tragicomic artistry was clearly belated, but Cassandra at the Wedding still found some contemporaneous fans; Carson McCullers purportedly found herself "overwhelmed" by Baker's "brilliance." —SMS
2005: Kaputt
Among the literary images forever frozen in my mind is a scene of World War II carnage early on in Kaputt, Malaparte’s 1944 fiction-reportage hybrid, in which the narrator walks through a snow-covered Swedish forest to a lake, where hundreds of dead horses have been icebound for months after fleeing from a fire, only their heads visible above the surface. The Italian journalist secretly wrote Kaputt while covering WWII as an increasingly disillusioned Mussolini supporter, and its subject, which Malaparte portrays with ironic distance, is the “gruesome gaiety” of war itself. Praising Kaputt and The Skin, also available from NYRB, Edmund White measured Malaparte a cut above other “war buccaneers” like Céline, thanks to his "unforgettable visual tableaux, haunting moments of political horror that bypass historical exposition and scene-setting and condense all the tensions of the epoch." —DV
2006: Life and Fate
As it has with many of its writers, NYRB has remained committed to Grossman—Life and Fate is only the first of six titles by the extraordinary Soviet war reporter turned novelist to be published by the press, including, in 2019, the first ever English-language translation of its prequel, Stalingrad, by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. The latter is “a masterpiece of intertwined plots that cascade together in a long sequence of militaristic horror” leading up to the Nazi siege on that Russian city in 1942, per PW’s review; the former, “obviously modeled on War and Peace,” is a “sweeping account” of the siege itself suggesting that, even in the face of unthinkable monstrosity, “the spirit of freedom can never be completely crushed.” Between them, these two novels of World War II—something of a specialty area at NYRB—encompass in miniature, if their combined nearly 2,000 pages can indeed be called that, the great subjects and themes of much of 20th century literature. —JHM
2007: Butcher’s Crossing
Just six months after its successful publication of Stoner, an all-time great campus novel, in 2006, NYRB turned around and handed readers practically the exact opposite sort of novel: an all-time great Western. Or, more specifically, a subtle deconstruction of the Western, interweaving themes of Emersonian transcendentalism and Hobbesian man-against-nature conflict with critique of the violent expansionism and nationalism that so characterized the American West. Interest in the title has only grown since its reissue, culminating in a 2022 film adaptation starring that most American of cinematic icons, Nicolas Cage. But for my money, its true spiritual on-screen parallel is Clint Eastwood’s 1992 “anti-Western” masterpiece Unforgiven. —JHM
2008: The Summer Book
Moomins, the delightful little trolls that are Jansson’s best-known creation, have finally taken America (and its bookstores) by storm after years of popularity abroad. But like many other writers on this list, the author boasted extraordinary range. Her literary novels are finally finding their due in the States as well, thanks in no small part to NYRB’s longtime commitment to her work. (The press just published its sixth title featuring Jansson, her illustrated edition of Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and her notes on the Moomins will be published for the first time in short order.) Comprised of vignettes following the misadventures of a six year old and her elderly grandmother spending a summer on an isolated Finnish isle, the masterly sparseness of both prose and plot leaves no room for the concealment of its central themes—which are no less than life and death, faith and love. —JHM
2009: Hard Rain Falling
Had it been wrought by clumsier hands, this novel might be dismissed as macho Beat-era “dude lit” and find its readers only in those who can’t seem to kick their Bukowski habit. And the tale of Carpenter’s life itself is in some sense characterized by the darker side of that era of heteronormative masculinity; like his good friend, the author Richard Brautigan, before him, Carpenter died by suicide, after years of illness and mounting debt. But his finest novel, Hard Rain Falling, about two working-class pool sharks barely getting by on the margins of midcentury Portland, Ore., is almost a miracle of deftness, especially for a debut; class, the prison system, race, and queerness are all addressed with a directness and sensitivity firmly out of sync with its era. And, of course, the prose absolutely rips. —JHM
2010: Journey Into the Past
The fourth of five Zweig titles brought out by NYRB, this novella encapsulates what the Austrian writer is best known for—a melancholic obsession with the past—though it was first published in 1929, before he left Austria for England in 1934 during Hitler’s rise and then across the Atlantic in 1939, fleeing Germany’s advance. In 1942, while living in Brazil, he published his memoir The World of Yesterday, which shaped Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel, as New Yorker film critic Richard Brody has noted. In the tragic and wistful Journey, a young man falls in love with a wealthy older woman, but they’re separated by the outbreak of World War I, and when they finally reunite, they struggle to hold onto their passion amid a changed world. —DV
2011: 
Fatale
Midcentury crime master Manchette’s lean and stylish noirs continue to resonate in the space between hard genre and literary exercise, providing fertile ground for Rachel Kushner with the writing of her novel Creation Lake, as Kate Dwyer pointed out in a recent profile. NYRB’s original translation of this 1977 title, the first of seven Manchette novels they’ve kept in print, met a demand for more Manchette after the 2002 hit translation of The Prone Gunman. PW’s starred review notes how the novel’s story, about a woman assassin, anticipated La Femme Nikita. —DV
2012: The Expendable Man
Hughes’s best-known work is her 1947 crime novel In a Lonely Place, which was adapted into a film starring Humphrey Bogart, and which NYRB reprinted in 2017. First, though, the publisher put out her final book, The Expendable Man, originally released in 1963, about a successful Black doctor on a disastrous road trip through the American Southwest. A thoughtful afterword by Walter Mosley highlights Hughes’s effectiveness at writing from her protagonist’s perspective as a white woman, exploring the consequences of his decision to pick up a pregnant white hitchhiker who later winds up dead. For a novel from the '60s, Hughes’s portrayal of the intersections of race and class feels ahead of its time. —DV
2013: Speedboat
Adler's experimental debut novel about a young female journalist navigating urban America, originally published serially in the New Yorker, made waves upon its release in 1976, but by 1988 had fallen out of print. (David Foster Wallace included it on his syllabus for a 2003 course on "obscure" fictions.) Like with Cassandra at the Wedding, NYRB's 2013 reissue (along with Adler's second novel, Pitch Dark) amounted to a literary seism: "Out of the blue," wrote Anna Weiner in the New Republic, "it seemed like everyone I knew was reading and discussing Adler.... New York City booksellers pushed [Speedboat] as a recovered sacred text." Indeed, Jenny Offill and Kate Zambreno have both cited Speedboat as influencing their work, and Joan Didion called it one of her all-time favorite books. A kindred text to Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, Speedboat's plotlessness, fragmented observations, and lightly autofictional bent inaugurated a new era in women's writing, and for the American novel altogether. —SMS
2014: Agostino
This slim, erotically-charged bildungsroman by the prolific Italian modernist was written in 1942, but due to Fascist censorship wasn't published until 1944, at which point it became a bestseller and won Moravia the first literary prize of his career. Centered on the titular 13-year-old boy's angst-ridden sexual awakening, Agostino is the third of Moravia's titles to be reissued by NYRB, along with Boredom and Contempt, both released in 2004. Thanks in no small part to the fresh translation of Michael F. Moore, best known for translating Primo Levi and Alessandro Manzoni among other giants of Italian literature, this novella proves a rewarding read for hardcore Moravia fans as well as an accessible entry point for new initiates. —SMS
2015: Fat City
Gardner begins his sinewy and staggeringly deep work of fiction with a joke: the seedy dive in Stockton, Calif., where down-and-out boxer Billy Tully lives is called the Hotel Coma. From there, Tully, his teammates, and their wizened but hopeful coach all face the stark economic realities of the sport and contend with the limits of their bodies and minds in a novel that Denis Johnson loved as a young aspiring writer and inspired John Huston to adapt it into one of his best films. Gardner, at 91, is still with us, and his only book endures as a classic of midcentury realism. (Also still with us: Linda Rosenkrantz, 95, whose Talk gave Fat City stiff competition for this spot on the list.) —DV
2016: Caught
NYRB keeps nine Green titles in print, including this one, released in the same year as Back and Loving. The embarrassment of riches makes for a difficult choice, but we came down to Caught for two reasons. First, Green wrote with remarkable honesty about the novel's subject matter, the London Auxiliary Fire Service—which he, like his upper-class narrator, served in during the Blitz in World War II. (He also covers the experience in his nonfiction collection, Surviving.) Second, NYRB’s edition of Caught is the first to contain passages that were censored by Green’s first publisher, Leonard Woolf (yes, that one). Not only is Caught one of Green’s best works, but NYRB’s act of literary restoration gives cause for special mention. —DV
2017: Katalin Street
When the New York Times named NYRB’s 2015 English-language edition of Szabó’s The Door one of its top 10 books of that year, the news consumed a particular subset of New York literary circles for weeks, even beyond the typical lovers of literature in translation. The press responded by putting out two further titles by the Hungarian author in as many years, with another two to follow. Of them all, this is perhaps the best, and certainly representative of what makes Szabó special: a beautiful but haunting tale of interpersonal conflict in post-war Hungary, told in seamless prose that manages to be at once deeply affecting and urgently unsentimental. —JHM
2018: Berlin Alexanderplatz
This Weimar-era masterwork is perhaps most famous in the English-speaking world for being uniquely difficult to translate, as it's filled with dialogue in a dialect and slang unique to the Berlin of its time. Döblin’s name is far from the first to come to mind for most Americans when thinking of the great German authors of his era, but in its day, his edgy, despairingly socially conscious novel was a sensation—a bestseller that was banned and burned shortly after the Nazi regime its story now seems to be warning of came into power. A 1931 translation by a writer friend of James Joyce failed to make a splash in the U.S., and Hofmann, the German-born translator, took on the daunting task of translating the dialect by rendering it in Anglicisms. It’s a choice that jars the reader in a manner very much in line with the shock of perpetual tragedies that characterize the tale the novel tells. —JHM
2019: I Used to Be Charming
The back half of the 2010s saw a breathless resurgence of interest in Babitz, the canny writer, glamorous party girl, and quintessential Los Angeleno whose life and literary output have long resisted easy categorization. From 2015 to 2019, six works by Babitz were reissued, half of them by NYRB. (Simon & Schuster and Counterpoint Press were behind the rest.) I Used to Be Charming, which followed NYRB's reissues of Slow Days, Fast Company, and Eve's Hollywood, bookended (or, perhaps, wrung the last drops from) Babitzmania, gathering dozens of her previously uncollected journalistic pieces written between 1975 and 1997. The book, aptly subtitled "The Rest of Eve Babitz," includes profiles, reportage, and personal essays, and features cameos from Francis Ford Coppola, Jim Morrison, Andy Warhol, and, of course, Marcel Duchamp. Babitz has often been unfairly compared to (or, rather, pitted against) Joan Didion on the sole basis of her subject matter, but I Used to Be Charming sees Babitz at her most Didionesque: reading the Los Angeles landscape like tea leaves and writing headlong into the city's chaos. —SMS
2020: Margery Kempe
Glück’s explicit kink writing had a niche audience when he began publishing in the 1980s and '90s, having cofounded the New Narrative movement and written poetry and raw novels akin to those of Kathy Acker. This 1994 work, an audacious blend of contemporary erotica and imagining of 15th-century mystic Margery Kempe’s sexual relationship with Jesus, was lauded in the margins but dismissed by mainstream outlets, including PW. But time has caught up to Glück, and younger queer readers continue to embrace his sensuous and strange depictions of bodies and his wild ideas. This one’s a lovely place to start. —DV
2021: The Hearing Trumpet
Carrington's subversive novel, first published in 1972, follows a nearly-deaf 92-year-old woman named Marian Leatherby who is shipped off by her family to an old-age home that turns out to be run by a cult. Part fantasy, part mystery, part psychodrama, The Hearing Trumpet feels like a portal into another realm, by turns dreamlike and nightmarish, where riddles, doppelgangers, and orgies abound. Carrington was best known as a surrealist painter, and her debut novel—published at the age of 55—leans into her eccentric impulses and wild imagination, confronting the minefield of aging while female and celebrating the power of sororal solidarity. The result is a deeply weird masterpiece. Beloved by everyone from Luis Buñuel to Bjork to Olga Tokarkczuk, critic Merve Emre declared it, in the New Yorker, "one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century"—and it's not hard to see why. —SMS
2022: Telluria
NYRB began its Sorokin program—slated to continue in 2026—with Ice (2007), the first in a trilogy, which PW enthusiastically called “Master and Margarita for the age of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” It’s hard to go wrong with Sorokin’s deeply human and deeply deranged fiction, which blends biting satire of the U.S.S.R. and post-Soviet Russia with bizarro speculative plots. This one portrays the backwards-leaning aftermath of a near-future European land war, one in which civilization is reduced to a feudal existence akin to that of the Middle Ages, with warring tribes divided over religion. It’s among the more challenging of Sorokin’s works, but also one of the more satisfying. —DV
2023: Lies and Sorcery
Natalia Ginzburg once called Morante "the greatest writer of our time," and Elena Ferrante said Morante showed her "what literature could be"—so much so that Ferrante's pseudonym is a nod to her idol. Lies and Sorcery is, in fact, the novel that made Ferrante Ferrante: "That novel multiplied my ambitions, but also weighed on me, paralyzing me,” she has said of her 16-year-old-self encountering the book for the first time. “I discovered that an entirely female story—entirely women’s desires and ideas and feelings—could be compelling and, at the same time, have great literary value." Indeed, Morante's first novel, written during World War II and originally published in 1948, is an epic saga that clocks in at nearly 800 pages and spans the lives of three generations of women in southern Italy, probing their complicated relationships and self-destructive tendencies with a depth and scope that evokes Tolstoy. NYRB's edition brought the unabridged saga to anglophone readers for the first time, in a masterful translation by Jenny McPhee, and introduced Morante—still criminally underappreciated in the U.S. and oft-overshadowed by her erstwhile husband, the author of pick #16—to a new generation of readers. —SMS
2024: Mourning a Breast
In the preface to her 2018 Lit Hub interview with Xi Xi, the journalist Megan Walsh noted that the Hong Kong writer, who died in 2022, enjoyed "an almost cult-like following in the Chinese-speaking world since publishing her first story in 1965." Yet, astonishingly, only a handful of her works are available in English. Earlier this year, NYRB did its part to bring the author, whose fiction and poetry helped put Hong Kong on the global literary map, to anglophone readers with the publication of Mourning a Breast. Originally published in 1992 and tenderly translated by Jennifer Feeley, this autobiographical novel recounts Xi Xi's experience with breast cancer, and is heralded as one of the first Chinese-language books to center on the disease. This is a candid, clever, and at times rending meditation on illness and womanhood, translation and narrative, art and the body from an author the Nobel laureate Mo Yan has called "an important and distinctive figure in last century’s Sinophone literature." —SMS
