We are excited to welcome William Gaddis to the NYRB Classics catalog in October. These two masterworks of contemporary American literature are massive in size and scope, interrogating authenticity, capitalism, and American identity.

William Gaddis, The Recognitions

As monstrously populated as the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, The Recognitions is nearly impossible to describe—but at its center are Wyatt Gwyon, a painter who can only copy the old masters, and Recktall Brown, a sinister huckster who finds and sells off his copies as originals. Gaddis’s strange cast of characters lose their minds and change their names, cementing the sense of a world where reality no longer has any meaning at all.

William Gaddis, J R

J R is another impossibly abundant deep dive into a world of fraudsters and finance—this time written almost entirely in dialogue. J R, an enterprising middle schooler, builds a corporate empire on the backs of little more than junk-mail get-rich-quick schemes and the school payphone. Soon enough everyone from Wall Street to Washington is entangled, in a biting satire of American capitalism.

The ecological crisis cannot be resolved by politics | Joy Williams

The ecological crisis cannot be resolved by politics | Joy Williams

The ecological crisis cannot be resolved by politics. It cannot be resolved by science or technology. It is a crisis caused by culture and character, and a deep change in personal consciousness is needed. Your fundamental attitudes toward the earth have become twisted. You have made only brutal contact with Nature; you cannot comprehend its grace. You must change. Have few desires and simple…

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“…I’m discovering what it means to be a woman,“ she continues. "It’s not necessarily the things I was taught. It’s the things I’m learning on my own. The good, the bad and the ugly is all in there. To be strong and to be weak, and to be scared and to be bold, and to be angry and to forgive, and to be broken and to break open, and break through, and to be hurt and to do the hard work to heal. That’s the type of woman I want to be.” Joy Williams- Marie Claire 

Pearl was tired of living in this world. Things turned out badly in this world. Even if one had no desires and made few decisions, one’s shadow fell in the paths of others and their shadows fell all over you.

- The Changeling, Joy Williams.

This was grief, she guessed. All these terrible things and thoughts rooting around in her head, trying to find a place to stay.

- The Changeling, Joy Williams.

Memory is the resurrection. The dead move among us the living in our memory and that is the resurrection.

-The Changeling, Joy Williams.

It was night. Nights were all right. Now the mornings she was more suspicious of. The way the light sneaked up on you. And that gap between dawn and sunrise! Who could make preparations for a sneaky light like that? Who could make amends?

- The Changeling, Joy Williams

It was a woman, it must have been, back in the beginning of things who decided that death should be a part of life. A man wouldn’t have thought of it. Women chose death so that they would always feel sorry.

- Joy Williams, The Changeling.

Oh to bring back the days when stars spoke at the mouths of caves.

To go back to those times when one could not know, for the darkness, in what ways they had lost their former selves…

- Joy Williams, The Changeling.

You cannot keep things the way they are. They go away. They change. There has never been an exception to this rule. No mercy has ever been shown.

- Joy Williams, The Changeling.