My summer reading

Does anyone, now that the publishing industry seems to have become another platform for sleb publicity, still read books? If you do, you'll know that some of the best of them are being published on the other side of the Atlantic. The New York Review of Books , a left-liberal fortnightly current affairs digest and book review which is read not just by the cultured but (as its ad claims) the powerful, is also an imprint: its lower-case initials now decorate the monochrome spines of several hundred trade paperbacks. The Classics list offers fiction and non-fiction from all ages and around the world, such as Robert Burton's great remedial study The Anatomy of Melancholy (1632), one of the great works of ‘sick lit’, Daniel Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903), classic collections of stories by Chekhov, Maupassant, and Cesare Pavese, Simenon's darker ‘psychological’ novels, as well as Elizabeth David's cookbooks, one or two poetry collections, and unclassifiable but brilliant memoirs such as JR Ackerley's My Dog Tulip . The NYRB also publish Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time to Keep Silence , a series of observations on what it takes to hold a monkish …