In this episode of Private Life, the writer, translator, and editor Gini Alhadeff reads excerpts from Mark Polizzotti’s recent translation, for NYRB Classics, of André Breton’s 1928 surrealist novel, Nadja. Blending autobiography and fiction, this abidingly strange book recounts, analyzes, and remembers Breton’s brief love affair with the eponymous young woman in 1920s Paris.

Alhadeff is the author of a memoir, The Sun at Midday (1997), and a novel, Diary of a Dijinn (2003), and the translator of a number of Italian novels, including I Am the Brother of XX, by Fleur Jaeggy, and The Road to the City, by Natalia Ginzburg.

To find Mark Polizzotti’s translation of Nadja by André Breton and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

In this episode of Private Life, Jarrett Earnest is joined by Mark Polizzotti to discuss André Breton’s surrealist novel, Nadja, originally published in 1928 and translated into English by Polizzotti for NYRB Classics in 2025. Polizzotti gives insight into the process of translation, the facts of the real Nadja’s life, and the quotations and photography that Breton employed to evoke the woman behind the “ethereal phantom.”

André Breton was a French poet, writer, and theorist, best known as a pioneering Surrealist and Dadaist. He published Claire de Terre, a collection of poems, in 1923 and the Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme)in 1924. Breton also cofounded the literary magazine Littérature in 1919.

Mark Polizzotti is a writer based in New York. He has translated over seventy books from the French, including Command Performance (NYRB Classics, 2025) by Jean Echenoz and The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings (NYRB Poets, 2022) by Arthur Rimbaud. Polizzotti is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (1995), Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (2018), and Why Surrealism Matters (2024). He is currently the publisher and editor-in-chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To find Nadja and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

In this episode of Private Life, Richard Hell reads from his novel Godlike (2005), which was reissued last month by NYRB Classics with a new afterword by Raymond Faye. Godlike tells the story of a poet perambulating downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and pining for a young poet who probably won’t love him back, closely mirroring the doomed romance between the nineteenth-century French poètes maudits Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.

Richard Hell is a writer and former musician best known as a pioneer of the punk rock scene in 1970s New York. Some of his books include The Voidoid (1996), Artifact (1990), Hot and Cold (2001), Go Now (1996), I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (2013), and What Just Happened (2023).

This reading accompanies the Private Life episode featuring Hell discussing his novels, poetry, and creative process. To find Richard Hell’s Godlike and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books; in addition to twenty print issues a year, a subscription provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.