Will Heinrich

THE POST-OFFICE GIRL
By Stefan Zweig
NYRB Classics, 257 pages, $14

Christine Hoflehner, beautiful and carefree before the First World War, loses her brother, is impoverished by the collapse of her father’s business and is condemned, finally, to endless monotony as a postal clerk in a forgotten little town, earning only enough to keep herself and her ailing, widowed mother. “One village post office in Austria is much like another,” begins The Post-Office Girl, Stefan Zweig’s 1930s novel, which has just been published for the first time in English, in a beautiful translation by Joel Rotenberg.

Christine is so thoroughly broken to her lot that she can imagine nothing else; an invitation to a Swiss resort, from a distant aunt, only frightens and upsets her. But once at the resort, dressed in her aunt’s hand-me-down clothes, she learns that she’s still young, that she’s beautiful, that she’s alive. And then, just as suddenly, she’s returned to her poverty—but it’s a poverty, now, that she can recognize.  read more »

America’s oldest rescue mission, founded in 1872, stands across White Street from a 16-story building that is now mostly N.Y.U. dorms. Sometimes in the evening you can see a pack of young girls, tarted up for a night on the town, walking right past a line of shiftless men waiting patiently for a meal and a bed.

If you start at this intersection and walk east, under the bridge of sighs that connects the Tombs to the criminal courthouse, past the fortunetellers of Columbus Park and toward the curving red face of Confucius Plaza, you will come to a Sino-Vietnamese noodle house called Bo Ky.  read more »

On a weekday morning in Sunnyside, Queens, men and women emerge from brick houses and stolid apartment buildings to stream uphill toward the elevated No. 7 train, accompanied by bird song and with Dunkin Donuts coffee cups in their hands. But if they have a few extra minutes, they may turn aside into a Colombian panaderia, or bakery, like El Buen Sabor on Queens Boulevard.

Under a faded red-and-white awning, El Buen Sabor’s windows are framed by green neon, but you can clearly make out a revolving glass case of garish cakes: set upon marble-white icing, glazed strawberries leap out the color of fresh blood. Inside the restaurant, beyond the cakes, before the steam trays of roast chicken and beef stew, under the long-distance phone cards, there are pastries and breakfast specials.  read more »

OUR STORY BEGINS: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES
By Tobias Wolff
Alfred A. Knopf, 379 pages, $26.95

Reading Our Story Begins, Tobias Wolff’s new collection of stories, is like being buttonholed by a drunk with a glass jaw. At first he’ll strike you as charming, and the fluency of his anecdotes may mislead you into finding him entertaining. But very soon you’ll realize that he only talks—never listens—and that the lone subject of all his talking is his own inadequacy. The answer he’s seeking—that he’s in pain precisely because he’s self-involved, and that all his suffering would end as soon as he stopped talking about it—seems self-evident, but he never quite puts his finger on it. As the evening wears on, and your discomfort becomes visible—as your eyes wander to the door, and you begin checking your watch and rattling the ice in your empty highball glass—the drunk will begin daring you to hit him. “Come on, tough guy!” he’ll bellow. “You think you know pain?” And if, finally, you give in and deck him, he’ll lie on the floor, bleeding triumphantly, and crow that he’s been victimized yet again.  read more »

A JOURNEY ROUND MY SKULL
By Frigyes Karinthy
New York Review Books, 288 pages, $17.95

Frigyes Karinthy, in his day a well-known Hungarian humorist and writer, was in his favorite cafe in Budapest when he heard the roaring of a train that no one else heard. On subsequent evenings his hallucination repeated itself at precisely the same time. He developed blinding headaches, and he also began to go blind—very slowly.

His memoir A Journey Round My Skull, reissued this month by New York Review Books, covers his experience of mysterious symptoms; the diagnosis of a brain tumor; his travel to Stockholm to see a preeminent neurosurgeon; and the successful surgery to remove it. But the greater part of the book concerns his strange avoidance of the gravity of his problem. As if an inverted Kafka, Karinthy wanders from doctor to doctor, looking for one who doesn’t annoy him, receiving no firm diagnosis, making light of his symptoms, delivering himself occasionally of profound but disconnected observations and drifting slowly toward blindness and death without ever losing the breezy tone of a Viennese society reporter.  read more »

The director of a Norwegian museum claimed yesterday to have discovered cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.

William Hakvaag, the director of a war museum in northern Norway, said he found the drawings hidden in a painting signed “A. Hitler” that he bought at an auction in Germany.  read more »

Marvin Franklin, an M.T.A. track worker, was killed by a train last April, after 22 years of working the night shift. For the last ten of those years, he had boarded the F train in Jamaica every morning, after getting off work at 7 a.m., and sketched other passengers all the way to the Art Students League on 57th Street, where he produced watercolors, oils and etchings based on his sketches.  read more »

Great N.Y. Noodletown is a long-established restaurant on Bayard and the Bowery that seats about forty and has brown glazed ducks in the windows.

Sunday, which began bright and cold after a long and rainy Saturday, seemed perfectly suited to a bowl of Seaweed Noodle Soup, so I put on my shoes and began walking east. I had forgotten it was Chinese New Year: the sidewalks of central Chinatown were packed from storefront to street as people gathered to celebrate the Year of the Earth Rat.  read more »

Last weekend, 34 galleries from around the world set up booths in the Puck Building for Sanford Smith's 16th Annual Outsider Art Fair.

Most of the art shown was not very good, but it is instructive to see so much of it together. The viewer learns that naivete and obsession are not magic bullets: for every Bill Traylor, whose simple drawings of animals are as elegant and beautiful as the greatest cave paintings, there are dozens of artists whose work is not apparently but actually naive.  read more »

If you have fifteen dollars and are not afraid of heights, you can always go see an opera at the Met.

The performance will be excellent; but if it isn’t, it hardly matters—the walls are covered in velvet, the ceilings are painted gold, and there are more strange people to watch during intermission than at a medieval Silk Road bazaar.  read more »