20th-Century World Architecture 

portrays, for the first time, an overview of the finest built architecture from around the world completed between 1900 and 1999. The unprecedented global scope of this collection of over 750 key buildings juxtaposes architectural icons with regional masterpieces. 

Specially designed and commissioned graphics at the start of the atlas explore the changing economic and political contexts of architectural production throughout this fascinating century, and highlight the flow of architectural ideas and architects around the globe. The selection of projects brilliantly illustrates the built outcomes of these formal and cultural influences in every corner of the world, with some surprising revelations. 

Divided into six world regions and 29 sub-regions, over 80 countries are represented. The collection is the result of a rigorous selection process and the input of more than 150 specialists from around the world, ensuring that each region has benefited from expert advice. 

Every building is located on maps that are defined by contemporary political geography, with detailed information accompanying each project, which is fully illustrated and described by a short text. In addition, a mass of useful information is provided in extensive indexes. 

Like all Phaidon books, the package is as impressive as the stunning material between the covers. This generously sized volume (almost 18 inches x 12 inches), come in this Dutch designed carry bag, engineered from one single sheet of paper.

Take a stroll through the real Paris with this beautifully photographed and gorgeously packaged book.

We are thrilled that NYRB Classics is bringing back two out-of-print books each season.

The first two are Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (unavailable for over a year), and The Old Devils, which has been out-of-print for about a decade.

"... Lucky Jim is as fresh and surprising today as it was in 1954. It is part of the landscape, and it defines academia in the eyes of much of the world as does no other book, yet if you are coming to it for the first time you will feel, as you glide happily through its pages, that you are traveling in a place where no one else has ever been." 

--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post  

Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that "there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones." Kingsley Amis's scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.

More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy postwar manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh.

The Old Devils written by Kingsley Amis, 

introduction by  John Banville

Winner of the 1986 Booker Prize.

"... brings the characters to life as only pungent dialogue can. His prose is as tart as ever, ... but the softening effect of his feelings for his old devils is even more welcome. More than in any of his previous novels, Kingsley Amis has allowed himself to show a bit of heart; it becomes him." 

--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post 

Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years - when "all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast" - nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably.