St augustine

The NYRB logo is now something my eye leaps to when browsing, and the publisher’s eclectic range has proved consistently rewarding. The Argentine writer Antonio di Benedetto was praised by Borges, Bolaño, Cortázar and Coetzee. He was born in 1922, on 2 November, the Day of the Dead – which he made much of – and was imprisoned and tortured in 1976-77, during Argentina’s Dirty War. His eerie fables of paranoia, impending threat and incomprehension pre-empted his experience of them. Esther Allen deserves great credit for introducing the author to an Anglophone readership. Having read her translation of Benedetto’s Zama, followed by The Silentiary, I foundthe wait for The Suicides

In 2020, an American pilot and daredevil named ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes launched himself in a homemade steam-powered rocket, hoping to achieve enough altitude to prove to himself that the Earth was flat. Unfortunately, the rocket crashed and Mad Mike was no more. ‘I’m not going to take anyone else’s word for it, or Nasa, or especially Elon Musk with SpaceX,’ he had once explained in an interview. ‘I’m going to build my own rocket right here and I’m going to see it with my own eyes what shape this world we live on is.’ In this way he became a martyr to the modern conspiracy theorist’s mantra: ‘Do your own

Here’s a treat for Christmas: a bona fide literary treasure for under a tenner. And a handsome little hardback, too, which you could certainly squeeze into a stocking. On Travel and the Journey Through Life is an anthology of one-liners and observations on travel, from the high-spirited and romantic to the moody and downright cynical. When it comes to travel writing, all roads lead one way or another to Eland, that elegant publisher and gritty survivor. All sorts of brilliant people say nice things about Eland. Colin Thubron, the doyen of travel writers, to cite just one, admires its ‘nearly extinct integrity’ and ‘eccentric passion for quality’. And this is