With the elliptical looping of a butterfly alighting on one’s sleeve, the poems of Ana Lui´sa Amaral arrive as small hypnotic miracles. Spare and beautiful in a way reminiscent both of Szymborska and
New Directions is proud to present one of the most spellbinding novels you will read this year, and certainly the weirdest.First published in 1931, Unclay glows with an unworldly light—Death has come
The Desert and Its Seed opens with a taxi ride to the hospital: Eligia’s face is disintegrating from acid thrown by her ex-husband while they signed divorce papers. Mario, her son, tries to wipe the a
John and Paul were also visitors to the town. They were twins, as identical as can be. They wore the same clothes, chino trousers and open-neck sweaters, in John’s case adorned with a faded maroon nec
On the shortlist for the 2017 Man Booker International PrizeAs night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless
Across the ages, cats have provided their adopted humans with companionship, affection, mystery, and innumerable metaphors; cats cast a mirror on their beholders; cats endlessly captivate and hypnotiz
Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling an
All eyes are upon Rikio. And he likes it, mostly. His fans cheer from a roped-off section, screaming and yelling to attract his attention—they would kill for a moment alone with him. Finally the direc
In this day of mindless distraction, we’re desperate for reasons to put down our phones and reconnect with our spiritual selves. In time for the bicentennial of Thomas Merton's death in 1968, Silence,
Like those of Kafka or Poe, Amparo Dávila’s stories are masterful, terrifying, and mesmerizing—you’ll finish reading each story gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her ch
Originating in 1916 with the avant-garde Dada movement at the famous Café Voltaire in Zurich, surrealism aimed to unleash the powers of the creative act without thinking. Max Ernst, André Breton, Tris
T Singer begins with thirty-four-year-old Singer graduating from library school and traveling by train from Oslo to the small town of Notodden, located in the mountainous Telemark region of Norway. Th
Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with
Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei l
Fresh from the enormous success of her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, Hurricane Clarice let loose something stormier with The Chandelier. In a body of work renowned for its potent idiosyncratic g
The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada—one of the most powerfully strange young voices in JapanIn an unnamed Japanese city, three seemingly normal and unrelated characters find work at a sprawli
In this poetic handbook, the world-famous high-wire artist Philippe Petit offersa window into the world of tightrope walking. Petit masterfully explains howpreparation and self-control contributed to
Who has not suffered grief? In Mourning Songs, the brilliant poet and editor Grace Schulman has gathered together the most moving poems about sorrow by the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Wi
The Fox and Dr. Shimamura toothsomely encompasses Japan and Europe, memory and actuality, fox-possession myths and psychiatric mythmaking. The novel begins near the story’s end, in Dr. Shimamura’s ret
Mac is currently unemployed and lives on his wife’s earnings from her furniture restoration business. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Mac’s wife, Carmen, a dyslexic bor
The most important novel of twentieth-century Urdu fiction, Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire encompasses the fates of four recurring characters over two and a half millennia. These characters become
Highly acclaimed for The End of Eddy, E´douard Louis in Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French—at
The extraordinary artist, the spider woman, the intellectual, the rebel, the sly enchantress, and the “good girl” sing together in this exuberant, lithe text beautifully translated by Cole Swensen.
In this masterful final work, Das?a Drndic’s combative, probing voice reachesnew heights. In her relentless search for truth she delves into the darkestcorners of our lives. And as she chastises, she
Soon enough you realize that you are no longer twenty years old, because right away you are no longer young ... and by the way, while you were thinking about other things, the world was also changing.
After getting a haircut in London and a few new outfits (“she bought two pairs of shoes and began to enjoy herself”), Millie, the neglected American wife of an academic pill, is transformed—and, upon
The American poet Robert Lax belongs to the generation of Thomas Merton, Beat poetry, Abstract Expressionism, and the compositions of John Cage. Yet he stands out as this era’s most intriguing minimal
Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories introduces a startlingly original voice. Winner of Japan’s top literary prizes for fiction (among them the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri), Taeko
The Doctor Stories collects thirteen of Williams’s stories (direct accounts of his experiences as a doctor), six related poems, and a chapter from his autobiography that connects the world of medicine
The Blue Flowers follows two unlikely characters: Cidrolin, who alternates between drinking and napping on a barge parked along the Seine in the 1960s, and the Duke d’Auge as he rages through history—
The Galloping Hour: French Poems—never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime—gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Rober
“Is me—Bob. Bob Marley.” Reincarnated as homeless Fall-down man, Bob Marley sleeps in a clock tower built on the site of a lynching in Half Way Tree, Kingston. The ghosts of Marcus Garvey and King Edw
Armand is a diplomat rising through the ranks of the Norwegian foreign office, but he’s caught between his public duty to support foreign wars in the Middle East and his private disdain for Western in
Gathered here are the gems of William Carlos Williams’s astonishing achievements in poetry. Dramatic, energetic, beautiful, and true, this slim selection will delight any reader—The Red Wheelbarrow &
Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women.The Beekeeper, by th
Poor, poor, hard-luck Herbert Sarkar: born into a fancy Calcutta family but cursed from birth (his philandering movie director father is killed in a car crash and his mother dies soon after, when he’s
Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Bela Wenckheim, who decides to return at the end of his life to the provincial Hungarian
The Chandelier, written when Lispector was only twenty-three, reveals a very different author from the college student whose debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, announced the landfall of “Hurricane C
Clarice Lispector wrote The Besieged City in Switzerland (“a cemetery of sensations”), where her diplomat husband was posted, in 1948. “What saved me from the monotony of Bern,” Clarice stated, “was l
Written while Adonis was on a scholarship in Paris from 1960 to 1961, Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is widely considered to be the apex of the modernist poetry movement in the Arab world. Drawing not
