Spotlight on NYRB Classics

I'm going to be taking part in the upcoming Spotlight Series Tour of the New York Review of Books Classics series.

The Spotlight Series focusses upon a small publisher for each of its 'tours', and asks bloggers to review books from each publishing house. I'm going to review a book from this thoroughbred stable, and the volume I've selected is Letters: Summer 1926 (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001).

Letters: Summer 1926 is a collection of the four-month correspondence between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke. The three writers were spread throughout Europe: Pasternak was in Moscow, Tsvetayeva in exile in France, and Rilke in a sanatorium in Switzerland.

The book - in its second edition and edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky - also contains two essays about Rilke by Tsvetayeva, and has a preface by Susan Sontag and an epilogue by Jamey Gambrell.

My review will appear here on 20 May. In the meantime, have a look at the Spotlight Series blog for more details about the tour, or at the NYRB page for more information about the book.