In Bartleby & Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melvill
The narrator of Montano's Malady is a writer who is so obsessed with literature that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimat
A selection of harsh, sometimes violent, and often surreal stories by the premier young avant-garde Chinese woman writer.A couple moves with their young daughter to the seaside, only to be terrorized
A revolutionary comic masterpiece, an icon of literature as American pop art, and a book unlike any other, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March breaks all frames.Frederic Tuten's subversive, witty
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Pablo Neruda's birth, New Directions is pleased to announce the reissue ofa classic work in a timeless translation by Donald D. Walsh and fully bil
In 1999 Robert Creeley received the prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Both honors made specific notes of his experimental style, his
Now available for the first time as a paperbook, Quetzalcoatl is D.H. Lawrence's last "unpublished manuscript" and the early version of his great Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent. Kate Burns is the
The poet presents a selection of thirty-four of her own poems culled from previously published volumes, tracing her movement from agnosticism to Christian faith and her oscillation from doubt to affir
“This is a fine, bilingual edition of the works of one of the great French Surrealists. . . . The translations, by several hands, serve Char well—full of insinuating rhythms and unusual verbal couplin
Italian passion––”the passion that seeks its own satisfaction, and not to give one’s neighbor an enhanced idea of oneself”––is the life-blood of Stendhal’s Three Italian Chronicles. Gathered here are
The arresting beauty of Shusaku Endo's fiction is best known in the West through his highly acclaimed novels The Samurai and Silence. His consummately wrought short stories, with their worlds of deep
The eleven short stories in this prize-winning collection pivot on life's ambiguities and the central question they pose in Tabucchi's fiction: is it choice, fate, accident, or even, occasionally, a k
In this quiet and devastating novel about the rise of fascism, Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is assigned to write a routine German lesson on the “The Joys of Duty.” Overfamiliar
One man’s obsession with Artforum magazine takes us on a hilarious journey to the ultimate meaning of the very creation of artArtforum is certainly one of César Aira’s most charming, quirky, and funny
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,
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
"A unique and personal portrait of the beloved, legendary Swiss writer, finally in English. After a nervous breakdown in 1929, Robert Walser spent the remaining twenty-seven years of his life in menta
Yoshimasu Gozo is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Japanese literature and art. His creative endeavors have spanned over half a century since the publication of his first book of poet
Resembling a musical sextet where no two instruments are the same, but all instruments blend to form a single sound, Henry Miller's Sextet combines six jive-talkin', fresh, and impromptu pieces of wr
Much expanded, this selection of essays by Tennessee Williams includes such famous pieces as the debilitating effect that success had on Williams (when he had to escape from New York and success), es
Roberto BolaAno (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this liter
A tale set against a backdrop of 1937's massacre of thousands of Haitians under the orders of power-mad generalissimo Trujillo finds the loving interracial marriage of Dominican Pedro and Haitian AdaA
Amo, an African kidnapped to Europe as a boy, and Tamao, a Japanese exchange student in Germany, live in different centuries but are being followed by the same shadow ... Kazuko, a young professional
In DS (2)--Dreamstories 2--Kamau Brathwaite continues his ongoing collection of prose poems, comprised of the broken images, flow, and half-told stories of dreams. The poetic stories in DS (2) us
Never before published, the first full-length play by novice playwright Thomas Lanier Williams, Candles to the Sun opened on Thursday, March 18, 1937 and received rave reviews in the local press. The
Denise Levertov's Selected Poems delivers in a single accessible volume "one of the essential poets of our time" (Poetry Flash). Culled from two dozen poetry books, and drawing from six decades of he
When Tennessee Williams read Spring Storm aloud to his playwriting class at the University of Iowa in 1938, he was met with silence and embarrassment. His professor, the renowned E. C. Mabie, remarke
Set in nineteenth-century India between two revolutionary moments of change, Twilight in Delhi brings history alive, depicting most movingly the loss of an entire culture and way of life. As Bonamy Do
Published in 1950, his first novel was acclaimed by Gore Vidal as "Splendidly written, precise, short, complete and fine."It is the story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow, recently a famous stag
If the invention of literary modernism is usually attributed to James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, it was Pound alone who provided (in Hugh Kenner's words) "the synergetic presence") to convert
"Wild nature as the ultimate ground of human affairs"––the beautiful, precarious balance among forces and species forms a unifying theme for the new poems in this collection. The title, Rega
The peerless young Kôvalan leaves his loyal wife Kannaki for the courtesan Mâdhavi, and though he returns to her, he still meets his death because of her ill-omened ankle bracelet. The Shilappadikaram
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
Inspired by one of the finest lyrics in the English language, the anonymous, pre-Shakespearean “Tom o’Bedlam” (“By a knight of ghosts and shadows / I summoned am to tourney / Ten leagues beyond the wi
The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty—from a tr
An expatriate professor, Vega, returns from exile in Canada to El Salvador for his mother’s funeral. A sensitive idealist and an aggrieved motor mouth, he sits at a bar with the author, Castellanos Mo
Michael Palmer’s new book—a collection in two parts, “The Laughter of the Sphinx” and “Still (a cantata—or nada—for Sister Satan)”—contains 52 poems.The title poem begins “The laughter of the Sphinx /
Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book—a key inspiration for Rivka Galchen’s new book—contains a list of “Things That Make One Nervous.” And wouldn’t the blessed event top almost anyone’s list?Little Labors is a
This important work, first published in 1934, is a concise statement of Pound’saesthetic theory. It is a primer for the reader who wants to maintain an active,critical mind and become increasin
The Tanners captures the lives of five siblings as they wander somewhat at a loss through life, and is Robert Walser's last major novel to be brought into English. The Tanner family's meetings, separ
