The Company They Kept
  • Published: 15 November 2009
  • ISBN: 9781590173343
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 316
  • RRP: $39.99

The Company They Kept

Writers on Unforgettable Friendships

Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Your Bookstore Abbeys Boomerang Find local retailers Find local retailers Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Mighty Ape

Now in paperback

Many of the illustrious contributors to The New York Review of Books have had deep and abiding relationships–both personal and intellectual–with other poets, writers, artists, composers, and scientists of equal stature. The Company They Kept is a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these varied friendships–most of them undeniably fraught with “idiosyncratic complexities.” From Anna Akhmatova’s dreamlike description of wandering through Paris with the impoverished Modigliani to Joseph Brodsky’s account of his first meeting with Isaiah Berlin (from which he returned to report, around the kitchen table, to Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden), these pieces are tantalizing glimpses into the lives of those who have made The New York Review of Books into what Esquire magazine calls “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.”
  • Published: 15 November 2009
  • ISBN: 9781590173343
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 316
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Also by Robert B. Silvers

The Company They Kept, Volume Two
See all

Praise for The Company They Kept

  • "Whether fond or surprisingly frank, these essays are soothing in their intimacy, their acceptance of fallible fellow humans. 'As always,' writes Robert Oppenheimer of Albert Einstein, 'the myth has its charms; but the truth is far more beautiful.'" --O Magazine
  • "Silvers and Epstein have assembled a remarkable set of essays by friends of prominent musicians, scientists, poets, and novelists...These wonderful reminiscences will renew readers' appreciation for those unpredictable joys shared between all close friends." --Booklist
  • "A touch of sadness clings to The Company They Kept, an otherwise joyous collection of essays by some of the world's best writers, in which they recount "unforgettable friendships" they've been blessed with. The sadness stems from the fact that this would appear to be the last book project that Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein worked on...the volume hums with the thrill of friendship, which clearly imbued their work relations with a special quality." --Jewish Exponent
  • "Silvers and Epstein, editors of The New York Review of Books, pull together 27 essays in this smart and eclectic collection. Published over the past four decades in the NYRB, pieces here deal with professional relationships and personal friendships among such writers as Robert Lowell and Jerome London, Susan Sontag and Paul Goodman, and Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein." --Publishers Weekly

    • penguin pop image
    penguin pop image