#writing politics

Next up is our new season of NYRB Classics, starting from August 2020 and spanning all the way to January 2021. In August, you can get the best of both worlds with these two collections: one of the political essay through the ages and the other of dark, whimsical Soviet-era short stories.

Writing Politics: An Anthology, edited by David Bromwich

David Bromwich, one of the greatest political writers on the left today, presents twenty-seven essays that grapple with issues that continue to shape history—revolution, racism, women’s rights, citizenship, and the status of the worker among them—and are prime examples of the power of the essay to reshape our thoughts and the world. Selections include Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, George Eliot, Harriet Taylor, W.E.B Du Bois, Mohandas Gandhi, George Orwell, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Unwitting Street: Stories

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is one of NYRB Classics’s greatest discoveries—a gifted storyteller censored for decades by the Soviet regime. The stories of Unwitting Street are brief and playful, making it a perfect introduction. But it’s not all fun and games: even the zaniest of his stories are alive with an undercurrent of darkness. (Take the one where a cursed gray fedora drives its wearers to suicide.)