NOVEMBER 2009 NEWSLETTER: Marías, T. Williams, and more...

Don't settle for the stripped-down plain-text version! Read our newsletter on our website: http://www.ndpublishing.com/newsletter.html

(Yes, we know, in principle you can use full-featured html on a myspace blog, but have you ever tried it?)

Better yet, visit our website to sign up for our email newsletter, and be the first to learn about new books, contests, and more! This month, you can win a copy of the new hardcover edition of Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell, by Javier Marías.




NEWS & EVENTS:

- Javier Marías in New York

- Tennessee Williams To Be Inducted into Poets' Corner; A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM with Cate Blanchett

- ND Celebrations and More

- On the Horizon: Ah Cheng and Abdelfattah Kilito

- Natasha Wimmer and Jeffrey Yang to Edit Next Issue of Two Lines

- Readings: Will Alexander in New York

- Round Table and Readings: Marjorie Perloff and Rosmarie Waldrop

- Forrest Gander’s Tour de France

- Susan Bernofsky in Switzerland

- International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong

- Nathaniel Tarn Reading in Massachusetts

- Rodrigo Corral Interview

- Halloween Reading Guide

- Poll

- Quiz

- New Directions Seeking Spring Interns

NEW TITLES:

Javier Marías
Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

Rainer Maria Rilke
Poems from the Book of Hours

Christmas Poems
A Holiday Gift Book

Dylan Thomas
A Child’s Christmas in Wales

The Intern as Artist, Part II

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:

www.ndpublishing.com

New Directions Seeking Spring Interns

Are you a student? Looking to earn academic credit through an internship? New Directions is looking for bright, young students to help out in our office. The internship broadly covers all aspects of publishing:

* Editorial
* Publicity
* Marketing
* Production
* Design

Please contact editorial@ndbooks.com.

READING GUIDES

We now offer free reading guides to accompany some of our new and classic titles, including the following:

César Aira, Ghosts

Roberto Bolaño, The Skating Rink

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Hermann Hesse / The Buddha, Siddhartha / The Dhammapada

Yoel Hoffmann, Curriculum Vitae

Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

Guillermo Rosales, The Halfway House

Evelio Rosero, The Armies

W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn

Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust

Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana

All reading guides can be viewed and downloaded from ND's page at scribd.com.

For other resources for educators, see our Professors page.
 
   
NEWS & EVENTS

Javier Marías in New York

This month, the acclaimed Spanish writer Javier Marías will be in New York to celebrate and promote the New Directions publication of his newest work, Your Face Tomorrow, Volume III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell. New Directions has been anticipating his arrival with great excitement, and we have a four-day stretch of events lined up from the last day of November through the first few days of December. At this time, $19 tickets are still available to his appearance at the 92nd St. Y with Paul Auster ($10 dollar tickets are sold out). Tickets to the New York Public Library event are still available; both Princeton and Yale events are open to the public:

11/30: The 92nd St Y, reading with Paul Auster. Marías will be introduced by Wyatt Mason.

12/1: Princeton, reading and an interview by Professor Michael Wood

12/2: Yale, reading at the Whitney Humanities Center

12/3: New York Public Library, Live In Conversation with Paul Holdengräber

Poison, Shadow and Farewell concludes the unfolding three-part serial novel Marías began in 2002 (Margaret Jull Costa’s English translation of the first volume appeared in 2005). Your Face Tomorrow tells the story of Jaime Deza, a man who possesses considerable and sophisticated powers of perception. He is hired by a shady branch of MI6, and, in the course of his employment, discovers the dark side of his new bosses. When his family is threatened by unknown forces, Deza must both spy on and try to protect them.

The praise for Your Face Tomorrow has been unending:

“This brilliant trilogy must be one of the greatest novels of our age.”
—Antony Beevor, The Sunday London Telegraph (Books of the Year)

“Your Face Tomorrow is already being compared to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, and rightly so. It is a novel of extraordinary subtlety and pathos. The next thing Marías deserves is the Nobel Prize.”
— The Observer

“By one of the most original writers at work today, Your Face Tomorrow [is] as accomplished and sui generis as all his mature work [and the] most affecting narrative feat in Marías’s work to date.”
—Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Book Review

“Sexy, contemplative, elusive, and addictive.”
—San Francisco Bay Guardian

“One of the writers who should get the Nobel Prize is Javier Marías.”
—Orhan Pamuk

“There is nothing quite like it in fiction today.”
—Lawrence Venuti, The New York Times Book Review

“The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature.”
—The Boston Sunday Globe

For more on Poison, Shadow and Farewell, please see the New Titles section below, or read a preview on our website — and don't miss your chance to win a copy in this month's quiz.

Marías' story “While the Women Are Sleeping” is in the November 2 issue of The New Yorker. While we strongly encourage you to go out and purchase this issue, you can read the entire story online here.

Photo copyright El Pais

Tennessee Williams To Be Inducted into Poets' Corner; A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM with Cate Blanchett

Theater Legends Participate in Celebration as The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine Honors its First Poet/Playwright

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in association with the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, is pleased to invite you to an evening of poetry, theater and reminiscences in honor of the induction of Tennessee Williams into the Cathedral’s Poets’ Corner. On Thursday, November 5th at 7:00pm, theater luminaries, friends of Mr. Williams, poets, and people who were inspired by his life's work, will take part in the historic celebration. Participants include Eli Wallach & Anne Jackson, Vanessa Redgrave, John Guare, Olympia Dukakis, Gregory Mosher, Sylvia Miles, Marian Seldes, John Patrick Shanley, William Jay Smith, Lenya Rideout, Jeremy Lawrence, Wyatt Prunty, David Kaplan, Thomas Keith, Mitch Douglas, David Landon, Ruby Dee, and current Cathedral Poet-in-Residence Charles F. Martin. Additional friends and colleagues of Mr. Williams are also expected.
 
The Poets' Corner was created in 1984 to memorialize American writers and is modeled after a similar alcove at Westminster Abbey in London.  A board of electors, working with the Cathedral’s Poet-in-Residence, annually elects a literary giant who died at least 25 years ago. Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, e. e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Emma Lazarus, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Phylis Wheatley, and William Carlos Williams are among those who have been inducted. Tennessee Williams is the first poet/playwright to be inducted. 
 
In addition to the celebration on Thursday evening, there will be a special Evensong Service on Sunday, November 8th at 4pm to complete the tribute and unveil the stone inscribed with Mr. Williams’ line, “For time is the longest distance between two places,” from The Glass Menagerie. Poets associated with the Poets’ Corner, including Mr. Martin, and current electors and previous Poets-in-Residence will read from their works and offer tribute to Mr. Williams.
 
Both events will be held at The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.

November 5: Tribute Evening & Celebration, 7pm

November 8: Evensong Service and Induction, 4pm

For more information, please visit www.stjohndivine.org or www.twptown.org, or call the Cathedral’s General Information Line: 212-316-7540.

In other Tennessee Williams news, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will be hosting performances of A Street Car Named Desire starring Cate Blanchett as Blanche DuBois, running from November 27 - December 20. Please see the BAM website for details.

"...how often do you get to watch an actress of such virtuosity pulling out every stop of her instrument and then some?"
—The New York Times on Cate Blanchett

ND Celebrations and More

We'd like to wish a slightly belated "Happy Birthday" to both ND founder James Laughlin (born in 1914) and Ezra Pound (born in 1885), who coincidentally (or by a stroke of fate?) share the birthday of October 30. Watch out for more birthday festivities next year, when ND will be celebrating the 125th anniversary of Pound's birth with a new edition of his Selected Poems.

Two other classic ND poets received a little extra attention last month as well, as poets.org honored Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" and William Carlos Williams' "This Is Just To Say" as two of the most popular poems of 2009, based on traffic to the poets.org website. Thomas took the #1 spot, but Williams was not far behind, at #5. See the whole list here.

Not to be outdone, William Carlos Williams also claimed a spot on the poets.org "Easy Poet Costume Ideas" list, with the recommended accessories shown here.

On the Horizon: Ah Cheng and Abdelfattah Kilito

Two authors will be making their debut appearances with New Directions in the next year: Chinese author Ah Cheng and Moroccan author Abdelfattah Kilito.

Ah Cheng’s upcoming The King of Trees is a collection of three novellas published in China during the 1980s: “The King of Trees,” “The King of Chess,” and “The King of Children.” Never before had a fiction writer dealt with the Cultural Revolution in such Daoist-Confucian terms, discarding Maospeak, and mixing both traditional and vernacular elements with an aesthetic that emphasized not the hardships and miseries of those years, but the joys of close, meaningful friendships. In “The King of Chess,” a student’s obsession with finding worthy chess opponents symbolizes his pursuit of the dao; in “The King of the Children” – made into an award-winning film by Chen Kaige, the director of Farewell My Concubine – an educated youth is sent to teach at an impoverished village school where one boy’s devotion to learning is so great that he is prepared to spend 500 days copying his teacher’s dictionary; and in the title novella, a peasant’s innate connection to a giant primeval tree takes a tragic turn when a group of educated youths arrive to clear the mountain forest. As moving and enduring as the best of Jack London or Knut Hamsun, The King of Trees is as relevant to Chinese society today as it will be tomorrow. The King of Trees will be published in May.

Ah Cheng is the pen name of Zhong Acheng, born in Beijing in 1949. An accomplished fiction writer, painter, and screenwriter, Ah Cheng spent the Cultural Revolution years in a small village in Shanxi, then Inner Mongolia, where he painted landscapes, finally transferring to a State Farm on the border of Yunnan province and Laos. During the 1980s he came to prominence as a member of the “primitive” or “seeking roots” literary movement. In 1992 he received the Italian Nonino International Prize for his writings, and in 1995 his Venetian Diary received an award in Taiwan. He has lived in several countries including the US, often not writing for long periods and working various odd jobs such as bicycle repair and house painting. In recent years he has lived on the outskirts of Beijing and continues to write, though he refuses to publish. An interview (in English) with Ah Cheng can be found here.

Novelist and philosopher Abdelfattah Kilito’s upcoming novel The Clash of Images will appear in the Fall of 2010. Written in the form of a lucid, faceted memoir reminiscent of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, The Clash of Images gathers Kilito’s recollections of people he knew growing up in Rabat and his school days in Medina, as well as objects and abstract ideas (such as the image of the Prophet Mohammed), into an incredibly moving work.

Kilito will be speaking at NYU to promote his book of literary criticism Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, out now with Syracuse University Press:

November 16: Comparative Approaches to Middle Eastern Literatures Lecture Series: “Thou Shalt Not Translate Me,” 1st Floor Great Room, 19 University Place, NYC, 4-6pm

From Wikipedia: “Abdelfattah Kilito was born in Rabat in 1945. He is the author of several books in Arabic and in French. He has also written articles for magazines like Poétique and Studia Islamica. Some of the awards Kilito has won are the Great Moroccan Award (1989), the Atlas Award (1996), the French Academy Award (le prix du Rayonnement de la langue française) (1996) and Sultan Al Owais Prize for Criticism and Literature Studies (2006).”

Natasha Wimmer and Jeffrey Yang to Edit Next Issue of Two Lines

From the Three Percent blog:

“Two Lines (and the Center for the Art of Translation as a whole) is one of the most impressive annual anthologies of literature in translation being published today. (Actually, most of those qualifiers can be eliminated: it’s one of the best annual publications in the world.) One of the reasons for the organization’s success (in addition to a staff that includes Olivia Sears, Annie Janusch, and now Scott Esposito), are the amazing guest editors they get to work on the anthologies. The next volume (the seventeenth) will be edited by translator Natasha Wimmer (one of the absolute best, most well known for 2666 and The Savage Detectives) and poet and translator Jeffrey Yang. I’m convinced that they will put together one of the best Two Lines yet.”

Jeffrey Yang is the poetry editor at New Directions. Natasha Wimmer is currently working on translations of Bolaño’s Antwerp (Bolaño’s earliest novel, dating from his 20s; available in April 2010) and Entre Parentheses (a volume of Bolaño’s essays), both forthcoming from New Directions.

If you are a publisher or translator interested in submitting to Two Lines, or if you're interested in seeing the 2009 issue (available November 9, and pictured here), please visit the Two Lines website. Also of note: the November 9 release party in San Francisco will include a reading by translator Breon Mitchell from his new translation of The Tin Drum, and a special tribute to Inger Christensen, the brilliant Danish poet who died this past January. New Directions publishes Christensen's novel Azorno, as well as three volumes of poetry: it, Butterfly Valley, and Alphabet.

Readings: Will Alexander in New York

November 4: Saint Mark's Poetry Project

November 8: Bowery Poetry Project, with saxophonist Ghasem Badamuntu and guitarist Timucin Shanin

Read “A Nexus of Phantoms” and “Water as Dysphoric Medium,” from The Sri Lankan Loxodrome

"Alexander's verbal flights strike me as more shamanistic than free-associational or automatic. His evocation of upper and lower worlds, and his vocabulary which bridges poetry, philosophy, myth, and science, give his verbal fulgurations a sense of linguistic seed that suddenly sprouts, then resprouts . . . . He may be the first major ‘outsider artist' in American poetry. Whatever he is, he is a force to reckon with, whose self-propelled soarings evoke Simon Rodia's ‘Watts Towers' as well as Siberian ecstasies."
—Clayton Eshleman, American Poet

"Alexander's poems are unpunctuated, their expanding structures suggest that each might be read as a single, very long, very complex sentence . . . a complex sentence machine turning out elaborate grammatical parallelisms, extensive series of epic catalogues, and open-ended syntax of discordant clauses and appended prepositional phrases."
—Harryette Mullen, Callaloo

Round Table and Readings: Marjorie Perloff and Rosmarie Waldrop

ND authors Marjorie Perloff and Rosmarie Waldrop, along with novelist Sissy Tax, will be speaking at the Wittgenstein round table at the Austrian Cultural Forum on November 12. Perloff will also be giving the keynote address at the Yale Symposium on Futurism and the annual Wallace Stevens lecture at the Hartford Public Library, and she and Richard Sieburth are speaking at a sound poetry event at the Bronx Museum on November 15.

Rosmarie Waldrop will also be reading, along with her husband poet Keith Waldrop, at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania on November 4 (please note the new date) at 6pm. Please follow the links provided for details on all of these readings.

Forrest Gander’s Tour de France

Forrest Gander will be making the following French connections:

Nov 9: 7pm, Bibliothèque National, Paris
Nov 10: 7pm, with Bénédicte Vilgrain at Point Ephémère, Paris
Nov 12: 7:30pm, Cafe Pannonica, 9 Rue Basse Port, Nantes
Nov 13: 5:30pm, Collège International des Traducteures Littéraire, Espace Van Gogh, Arles
Nov 15: 5pm, Fondation Boris Vian, 92 Blvd de Clichy, Paris
Nov 16: 7:30pm, Villa Gillet, 25 Rue Chazière, Lyon
Nov 17: 7pm & 9pm, CDDB-Théâtre de Lorient, Centre Dramatique, 11 Rue Claire Droneau,  Lorient
Nov 19: 5:30pm, Librairie Dialogues, Forum Roull, Brest
Nov 20: 11am, Salon Colbert, Hôtel de Ville, Brest

Susan Bernofsky in Switzerland

Susan Bernofsky will participate in the Buch- und Literaturfestival Basel, taking part in the panel “Robert Walser Intercontinental: On Translating Robert Walser” on November 15. Bernofsky is the translator of Walser’s The Assistant and The Tanners, as well as the upcoming Microscripts, a co-publication of New Directions and Christine Burgin Gallery, due out in May 2010.

If you haven’t already done so, check out the fantastic in-house interview with Susan Bernofsky on our blog!

International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong

Five New Directions authors––Gary Snyder, Eliot Weinberger, Bei Dao, Luljeta Lleshanaku, and Coral Bracho––will be attending “International Poetry Nights” held from November 26-29 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and hosted by The Center for East Asian Studies. This event is free and open to the public.

Nathaniel Tarn Reading in Massachusetts

Poet Nathaniel Tarn will be giving three readings in Massachusetts this month:

November 4, 7pm, Reading: The Grolier Bookshop, Cambridge, MA

November 5, 5pm, Reading & Recording: The Lamont Library Poetry Room, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

November 7, 3pm, Reading and Participation in a discussion on Poetry & the Environment, the "Continuities" series, the Burren Pub, Davis Square, Somerville, MA

Nathaniel Tarn is the author of over 35 books, including: Lyrics for the Bride of God and Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers. His poem "Pursuit of the Whole and Parts," from Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, can be read here.

"Tarn's work brings together mythology, Western and Eastern philosophy, political commentary, scientific investigations, naturalistic descriptions and very personal love poetry. This poetry redefines nature and art for human culture, bringing a genuine psychological and linguistic curiosity about the human mind, about what it means to be human."
—Brenda Hillman, Jacket

"In book after book, Nathaniel Tarn has traced the feelings, thoughts, and rituals that establish what and where we think we are."
—Joseph Donahue, First Intensity

"Tarn creates a syntactical matrix of great fluency and variety and expressiveness. The fact is that many of Tarn's love poems and nature poems are extraordinarily beautiful and moving."
—Hayden Carruth, Exquisite Corpse

Rodrigo Corral Interview

New Directions' celebrated designer Rodrigo Corral and Creative Director at Large was interviewed by flavorwire.com for its “Five Questions” series. From flavorwire.com:

"School of Visual Arts alum Rodrigo Corral is responsible for some of the most memorable book covers of the past few years. The red-splashed silhouette for the cover of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; that beautiful sprinkled-covered hand on the cover of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces; those fuchsia lips on Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff — his visuals stick with you as much as the stories themselves."

Note: The new edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Poems from the Book of Hours, featured in our New Titles this month, was designed by Mr. Corral, as was Gandhi on Non-Violence, shown here. See our website for a slideshow of more covers by Mr. Corral.

 

Halloween Reading Guide

In case you missed it, we posted a New Directions Halloween reading guide on our blog, Cantos: check it out here.

Poll

We are extending our poll: “Which classic ND title should we relaunch as a new edition?” Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan leads the votes so far. Please select a title from below and write to editorial@ndbooks.com.

—Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan
—Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask
—Herbert Read’s The Green Child
—Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell
—Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading

Disclaimer: Please choose only books from the list above. For all of you who asked for a relaunch of Lispector's Hour of the Star, you’ll be happy to know we have plans to do this with a new introduction by Colm Toibin.

Quiz

The winner of last month’s photo quiz was Beatrice Fassbinder of Berlin, Germany. Congratulations! As some of you correctly answered, Maude Hutchins was the femme behind the photo. Interest in her work has recently jumped from both the Andy Warhol blog post (he did cover art for one of her ND books, Love is a Pie) and the recent reissue of Victorine by New York Review Books. We will be putting all four of Maude Hutchins' books––Love is a Pie, A Diary of Love, Georgiana, and My Hero––on print-on-demand, making them available once again. For more print-on-demand titles, see "The Intern as Artist, Part II," below.

And now for this month's quiz: Of the many dukes and duchesses Javier Marias has appointed to his kingdom of Redonda, who among them have New Directions published? Please submit name and domain (i.e. so-and-so, duke of such-and-such). The winner will receive a free hardcover copy of Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell. Answers should be sent to editorial@ndbooks.com, with the word "Quiz" in the subject line.

New Directions Seeking Spring Interns

Are you a student? Looking to earn academic credit through an internship? New Directions is looking for bright, talented students to help out in our office. The internship broadly covers all aspects of publishing:

* Editorial
* Publicity
* Marketing
* Production
* Design

If interested, send a resume and cover letter to: editorial@ndbooks.com. College students only please.
NEW TITLES

Javier Marías
Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
978-0-8112-1812-2, US $24.95 / CAN $31.00

Poison, Shadow and Farewell, with its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, with its wit and ever deeper forays into the mysteries of consciousness, brings Marías’ three-part Your Face Tomorrow to a stunning finale. Already this novel has been acclaimed “exquisite“ (Publishers Weekly), “gorgeous” (Kirkus), and “outstanding: another work of urgent originality” (The Independent, London). Poison, Shadow and Farewell takes our hero Jaime Deza—hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception—back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss, with a fluency on the subject of death that could make a stone weep.

“This brilliant trilogy must be one of the greatest novels of our age.”
—Antony Beevor, The Sunday London Telegraph (Books of the Year)

“Your Face Tomorrow is already being compared to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, and rightly so. It is a novel of extraordinary subtlety and pathos. The next thing Marías deserves is the Nobel Prize.”
— The Observer

“By one of the most original writers at work today, Your Face Tomorrow [is] as accomplished and sui generis as all his mature work [and the] most affecting narrative feat in Marías’s work to date.”
—Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Book Review

The winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and an array of other literary prizes from around the world, Javier Marías, “a true genius of literary subterfuge” (Joy Press, The Village Voice), was born in Madrid in 1951. Your Face Tomorrow has been called “compulsive and enthralling” (Mark Ford, The New York Review of Books).

Margaret Jull Costa won both the 2008 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and the 2008 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Eca de Queiros’ The Maias.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Poems from the Book of Hours
Translated from the German by Babette Deutsch
NEW Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin
978-0-8112-1853-5, US $12.95 / CAN $16.00

Rilke’s Book of Hours falls into three parts: The Book of Monkish Life (1899), The Book of Pilgrimage (1901), and The Book of Poverty and Death (1903). Although these poems were the work of Rilke’s youth, they contain the germ of his mature convictions. Written as spontaneously received prayers, they celebrate a God who is not the Creator of the Universe, but seems to be rather humanity itself, and, above all, that most intensely conscious part of humanity, the artist. This exquisite gift edition contains Babette Deutsch’s classic translations, which capture the rich harmony and suggestive imagery of the originals, allowing interpretations both religious and philosophical, and transporting the reader to new heights of inspiration and musicality.

“If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.”
—Stephen Spender, The New York Review of Books

“Rilke remade the sturdy sonnet, recast the sonorous song. He quickened the German language itself.”
—Rika Lesser, The Nation

“One of the pillars of twentieth-century poetry.”
—Choice       

“Poets in English continue to line up for the inevitable failure of translating his [Rilke’s] short lyrics. The best translations I have seen are from Babette Deutsch.”  
—Clive James, Slate

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is considered one of the greatest poets who ever wrote in the German language. His most famous works are Sonnets to Orpheus, The Duino Elegies, Letters to a Young Poet, and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Ursula K. Le Guin has written over fifty books of prose and poetry. Winner of many prizes, including a National Book Award, she is perhaps best known for her six Books of Earthsea which have sold millions of copies and been translated into sixteen languages.

Christmas Poems
A Holiday Gift Book
978-0-8112-1808-5, US $11.95 / CAN $15.00

Awake the voice! Awake the string!
Dark and dull night fly hence away,
And give the honor of this day
That sees December turned to May.
—William Herrick

Sparkling and elegant, Christmas Poems is a delightful selection of holiday poems by a wide range of authors such as Chaucer, Herbert, Longfellow, Dickinson, Rilke, Yeats, Paul Dunbar, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, e. e. cummings, Kenneth Patchen, Thomas Merton, Wallace Stevens, Marie Ponsot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank O’Hara, Denise Levertov, and Bernadette Mayer.

Beautifully designed, this New Directions gem rings with the deep sentiments of the season and just the right splash of holiday cheer—Christmas Poems comes with French flaps and is the perfect size for a stocking stuffer.

Dylan Thomas
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
Woodcuts by Ellen Raskin
978-0-8112-1731-6, US $9.95 / CAN $12.50

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), one of the greatest poets and storytellers of the twentieth century, captures a child’s-eye view and an adult’s fond memories of a magical time of presents, aunts and uncles, the frozen sea, and in the best of circumstances, newly fallen snow.

“This is a story to stir one’s own emotions, with recollections perhaps untapped since childhood.”                                        
—Baltimore Evening Sun

“Try it for a break from violent robots.”
—The Providence Journal-Bulletin

The Intern as Artist, Part II

In our July newsletter, we showed you some of the covers that our interns have designed for books from our backlist. This month we bring you a few more. New Directions is committed to keeping as many of our backlist titles as possible in print, and we are pleased to have these titles available again, with a brand new look.

Old Designer (l): Gertrude Huston
New Designer (r): Phillip Witte

Old Designer (l): Unknown
New Designer (r): Georgie Devereux

Old Designer (l): Hermann Strohbach
New Designer (r): David Barnett



©2009 by New Directions Publishing Corp.

Read the html version on our website: http://www.ndpublishing.com/newsletter.html

Better yet, subscribe to our newsletter (see the About box in our profile).

NEWS & EVENTS:

- ND Blog Updates! Bernofsky and Moya on the move

- Will Alexander Reading in California and New York

- Peter Cole Reading in New York

- Susan Howe in London and Paris

- Forrest Gander and Coral Bracho Reading on Both Coasts

- Jerome Rothenberg Reading in New York and Marseille

- Elaine Lustig Cohen: "My Heroes: Portraits of the Avant-Garde"

- Alvin Lustig T-shirts Available Soon

- Tennessee Williams to be Inducted into American Poets' Corner

- Lêdo Ivo Wins Cuba's Casa de las Américas Prize

- Naked Lunch and a Movie with Michael McClure

- Quiz: Name that Author!

- Poll: Which book should we reissue?

NEW TITLES:

B.S. Johnson
The Unfortunates

Franz Kafka
Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared

Tennessee Williams
The Night of the Iguana

William Carlos Williams
In the American Grain

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:

www.ndpublishing.com



READING GUIDES

We now offer free reading guides to accompany some of our new and classic titles, including the following:

César Aira, Ghosts

Roberto Bolaño, The Skating Rink

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Yoel Hoffmann, Curriculum Vitae

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

Guillermo Rosales, The Halfway House

W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn

Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust

All reading guides can be viewed and downloaded from ND's page at scribd.com.

For other resources for educators, see our Professors page.



NEWS & EVENTS

ND Blog Updates! Bernofsky and Moya on the move

If you haven't been keeping an eye on the blogs on our website, now might be a good time to take another look. In the past few weeks we've published original, in-house interviews with author Horacio Castellanos Moya (Senselessness and The She-Devil in the Mirror) and translator Susan Bernofsky (who has translated Robert Walser's The Assistant, The Tanners, and the upcoming Microscripts, Yoko Tawada's Where Europe Begins and The Naked Eye, and Jenny Erpenbeck's The Old Child and The Book of Words, to name just a few). There's also an in-depth update on the Brooklyn Book Festival (pictured at left) from ND permissions editor Quinn Marshall, who reports “It was inspiring to see how much our books meant to people, and how excited they were about what they had yet to read.  Everyone's eyes lit up when they saw Robert Walser's Microtexts proofs and Anne Carson's Nox mock-up.”

In addition, we've added a blog dedicated to ND founder James Laughlin's book The Way It Wasn't. We've always said that the book would make perfect blog material, showcasing Laughlin's reflections on a wide array of topics, some personal, some literary, some harder to categorize, illustrated with photographs throughout. Now the book is getting its chance to live a second, virtual existence, as we post a few pages to the blog every now and then. Of course, you can still read the whole thing in classic paper-between-two-covers format. You can even win a copy in this month's quiz!

Visit our blogs to see what you've been missing – and if you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to our feeds at the bottom of each blog.

When she's not answering questions from our intrepid interns, Susan Bernofsky is busy translating and reading. She'll be participating in a reading of Robert Walser's work at Spoonbill and Sugartown in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on October 8, with Donald Breckenridge and Lewis Warsh.

Horacio Castellanos Moya has recently moved from Pittsburgh, PA, where he participated in the City of Asylum program, to Tokyo, Japan, and traveled to Sweden to present the Swedish translation of Senselessness at the Göteborg Book Fair. He will be back in Pittsburgh for a reading on October 26 organized by City of Asylum; see their website for details. His newly translated novel The She-Devil in the Mirror is in bookstores now.


Will Alexander Reading in California and New York

Poet Will Alexander will be reading on both coasts to celebrate the publication of his book The Sri Lankan Loxodrome.

October 11: Book Launch Reading at Skylight Books in Los Angeles

October 21: Aquarium of the Pacific, Long Beach, CA

November 4: The Poetry Project at St. Mark's, NYC

November 8: Bowery Poetry Project with saxophonist Ghasem Badamuntu and guitarist Timucin Shanin

"Alexander's verbal flights strike me as more shamanistic than free-associational or automatic. His evocation of upper and lower worlds, and his vocabulary which bridges poetry, philosophy, myth, and science, give his verbal fulgurations a sense of linguistic seed that suddenly sprouts, then resprouts . . . . He may be the first major ‘outsider artist' in American poetry. Whatever he is, he is a force to reckon with, whose self-propelled soarings evoke Simon Rodia's ‘Watts Towers' as well as Siberian ecstasies."
—Clayton Eshleman, American Poet

"Alexander's poems are unpunctuated, their expanding structures suggest that each might be read as a single very long, very complex sentence . . . a complex sentence machine turning out elaborate grammatical parallelisms, extensive series of epic catalogues, and open-ended syntax of discordant clauses and appended prepositional phrases."
—Harryette Mullen, Callaloo

Watch a video of Alexander reading in 2006 at UC Berkeley.


Peter Cole Reading in New York

October 29: Peter Cole will talk about the poetry in the materiality of daily life, such as the objects in Margrieta's inventory or those mentioned in letters of medieval Jewish traders found in the Cairo Geniza, and how these odds and ends helped him to shape his book Things On Which I've Stumbled published in 2008 by New Directions. Bard Graduate Center, 38 W. 86th St., 6-8pm. $25 general / $17 seniors

November 3: Poems and Pints. Peter Cole and Robert Polito will read at the Fraunces Tavern, 54 Pearl St.

“Peter Cole is a true maker.”
—Edward Hirsch

“A major poet-translator.”
—Harold Bloom

“The keenness of his mind and the moral seriousness of his work astonish.”
—Forrest Gander


Susan Howe in London and Paris

Susan Howe and David Grubbs will speak about the ideas that have nourished their collaboration as poet and musician at Birkbeck College in London on October 7 (Lecture hall B35, 3-5 pm, Free). Howe and Grubbs have released two CDs, Thiefth (2005) and Souls of the Labadie Tract (2006), works that take the encounter between poetry and music into new territory. Each will speak for around 25 minutes, and the second hour will be devoted to questions and discussion.

Howe and Grubbs will also perform at the South Bank Centre in London on October 8 (Purcell Room, 7:45pm). For more information and tickets, click here. On October 9 they will perform at the University of Cambridge, in the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio (Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, 7:30pm).

Susan Howe's explorations of American history and letters place her in a line that runs from Emily Dickinson through Wallace Stevens to the frontiers of 21st-century lyric poetry. She is an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. David Grubbs is a former member of the post-rock group Gastr Del Sol whose subsequent career is notable for both his acclaimed solo releases and his collaborations with artists and writers. You can listen to an audio clip here.

Later in the month, Howe will be in Paris participating in the following events:

A Reading at the Centre George Pompidou
October 29: Museum of Modern Art collections at the Centre George Pompidou, Permanent Collections, Niveau 4, 7:30pm

Script, a one-day conference on Howe's work. Howe will deliver a closing address.
October 30: University of Paris-Diderot, 10 rue Charles V, 75004, salle A50, 9:30am – 6:30pm

A conference on Emily Dickinson's late unpublished fragments.
October 31: Auditorium of the Petit Palais, 3pm–5pm


Forrest Gander and Coral Bracho Reading on Both Coasts

Forrest Gander, whose latest book with New Directions is the novel As a Friend, and ND poet Coral Bracho, whose book Firefly Under the Tongue Gander translated from the Spanish, will be reading together on the following dates:

October 7: Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, 7pm

October 13: Busboys & Poets, Washington DC, 6pm


Jerome Rothenberg Reading in New York and Marseille

October 14: The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, NYC, 6:30pm
Reading & presentation of 14 Stations (with artist Arie Galles).

Two dates at the Festival de poésie et de performances (with Alain Arias-Misson, Julien Blaine, Jean-François Bory, Michel Giroud, Enzo Minarelli, Seiji Shimoda, others):

October 20: Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseille, 8pm

October 23: Librairie l'Odeur du temps, Marseille, 7pm
Random Fact: New Directions published Once Again, an anthology of Concrete poetry by Jean-François Bory, who is reading with Jerome Rothenberg at the Festival de poésie in Marseille. It's a staff favorite and currently available through print on demand.


Elaine Lustig Cohen: "My Heroes: Portraits of the Avant-Garde"

An exhibition of portraits in collage by Elaine Lustig Cohen entitled "My Heroes: Portraits of the Avant-Garde" will open at Adler & Conkright Fine Art on October 10 and remain through November 14. Lustig Cohen worked on Lorca's Three Tragedies and Tennessee Williams' In the Winter of Cities for New Directions. She was married to New Directions book designer Alvin Lustig until his death in 1954. Shown at left is her portrait "Alexander Rodchenko."

October 10-November 14: Adler and Conkright Fine Art Gallery, 24 East 71st St., NYC


Alvin Lustig T-shirts Available Soon

We have recently signed a contract with the clothing designer Out of Print to begin distributing t-shirts with some of our Alvin Lustig covers on them. Out of Print works with publishers and designers to create clothing derived from vintage book covers. The first in the series will be Federico García Lorca's Three Tragedies (on which Elaine Lustig Cohen also worked), Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and Henry Miller's Wisdom of the Heart. Other titles from other publishers, including Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, will also be available. The launch is slated for late October. Click here to visit the Out of Print site and sign up to be notified of the launch.


Tennessee Williams to be Inducted into American Poets' Corner

Tennessee Williams will be honored with a tribute evening as part of his induction into the American Poets' Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Speakers and readers that evening will include William Jay Smith, Vanessa Redgrave, Marian Seldes, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, Charles F. Martin, Olympia Dukakis, Wyatt Prunty, Gregory Mosher, Mitch Douglas, Sylvia Miles, John Guare, John Patrick Shanley, David Kaplan, Jeremy Lawrence, Thomas Keith, Ben Greissmeyer, and Lenya Rideout. The tribute evening is November 5; the actual induction will take place in a service on Sunday, November 8 at 4pm.

November 5: Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, NYC, 7pm


Lêdo Ivo Wins Cuba's Casa de las Américas Prize

We're happy to announce, albeit belatedly, that Brazilian writer Lêdo Ivo has won Cuba's Casa de las Américas Prize, which was awarded last February, for his poem "Reqiuem."

From WIkipedia: "The Casa de las Américas is a organization founded in Cuba in 1959 following on the heels of the Revolution. It annually awards the Casa de las Américas prize, one of Latin America's oldest and most prestigious literary awards. Some of the scholars and writers who have won this prize are [Kamau] Brathwaite, Humberto Costantini, Eduardo Galeano, Susana Rotker, Françoise Perus, Beatriz González-Stephan and Luis Britto García.”

Ivo's novel Snakes' Nest, or A Tale Badly Told is available in English translation from New Directions.


Naked Lunch and a Movie with Michael McClure

Poet Michael McClure will be participating in a city-wide 50th Anniversary celebration of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch.

October 10: School of Visual Arts Theatre, 333 W. 23rd St., NYC

McClure is also the subject of a 55-minute documentary Michael McClure: Abstract Alchemist of Flesh directed by Colin Still. The film features extensive footage of McClure himself, scenes from The Beard, and interviews with film director Dennis Hopper, actor and counter-culture activist Peter Coyote, composer Terry Riley, and the Doors' co-founder Ray Manzarek, with whom McClure regularly performs on stage. It also features rare footage of the West Coast scene in the 60's, including McClure's celebrated declaiming of his poems in ‘beast language' to the lions in the San Francisco Zoo. It will soon be available on Amazon and at festivals around the country. McClure's new book of poetry, Mysteriosos, will be published next spring by ND.


Quiz: Name that Author!

Last month we asked readers: "In W.G. Sebald's incredible preface [to The Tanners], about whom does Sebald reminisce when he speaks most personally about Robert Walser?" The answer was Sebald's grandfather, Josef Egelhofer, who, according to Sebald, resembled the writer in appearance and in bearing (“a certain way each had of holding their hat in their hands, or the way that, in the finest weather, they would always carry an umbrella or a raincoat”), and in their habit of taking long walks in the countryside. The correct answer for September's quiz came from Nathaniel Otting of Northampton, MA.

Now here's the quiz for the October newsletter: We are asking for readers to name the author in this photograph:

Here are three hints:

1. New Directions published four of her books from 1948-1953.

2. Two of her works have recently been revived by The New York Review of Books.

3. One of her book covers was designed by Andy Warhol.

Send your answers to editorial@ndbooks.com with the header “Quiz.” The winner receives a paperback copy of James Laughlin's The Way It Wasn't.


Poll: Which book should we reissue?

We're conducting a poll to find out which title our readers would be most interested in seeing relaunched in a new edition. Please select one of the following titles and send your selection to editorial@ndbooks.com with the header “Poll”.

--Kenneth Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight
--Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Death on the Installment Plan
--Yukio MIshima's Confessions of a Mask
--Herbert Read's The Green Child
--Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell
--Ezra Pound's The ABC of Reading



NEW TITLES

B.S. Johnson
The Unfortunates
Unbound folio'd pages in a box
Introduction by Jonathan Coe
US $24.95 / CAN $31.00
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1743-9

Now back in print in a limited quantity, B.S. Johnson's lost classic has been showered with praise: New York Magazine named The Unfortunates one of their Ten Best Books of 2008, listed in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2008, and The L.A. Times declared it to be “his most daring work.”

A legendary 1960s experiment in form, The Unfortunates is B. S. Johnson's famous “book in a box,” in which the chapters are presented unbound, to be read in any order the reader chooses. A sportswriter, sent to a Midlands town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from the past when he disembarks at the train station. Memories of one of his best, most trusted friends, a tragically young victim of cancer, begin to flood through his mind as he attempts to go about the routine business of reporting a soccer match.

“Far from some modernist stunt, the form of the book dovetails beautifully with Johnson's subject–the accidental yet persistent nature of memory. . . . This book, with no belief in God, no hope of heaven, makes you feel the stuff of life as sacred, and our inability to hold on to it as damnation enough for anyone to be made to bear.”
—Charles Taylor, The N.Y. Times Book Review

“You'll fall in love.”
—Sam Anderson, “Top Ten Books of 2008”, New York Magazine

“A most gifted author.”
—Samuel Beckett


Franz Kafka
Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared
Based on the Restored Text
Translated, with an Introduction, by Michael Hofmann
$12.95 US / $16.00 CAN
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1569-5

“Michael Hofmann's magnificent new translation restores its rightful place as one of Kafka's most delightful and most memorable works.”
—Charles Simic

“A stirring, singular work, now restored to its original beauty.”
—John Ashbery

“Of all the recent re-translations of Kafka into English, this volume is the most noteworthy. It achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do; it is at once ‘loyal' and ‘beautiful'—beautifully disorienting, beautifully confusing, beautifully cruel.”
—John Zilcosky, The New Republic

“Hofmann's ability to overcome the obstacles presented by this particular work from Kafka marks this as the best translation.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Karl Rossman, our youthful hero, “a poor boy of seventeen,” has been sent away to America by his parents for his part in a scandal, and his travels unfold revelations about himself and his dreams. This is a new world where the Statue of Liberty holds aloft a sword rather than a torch, swindlers abound, and a bridge connects Boston to New York City. The San Francisco Chronicle said Hofmann's “sleek translation does a wonderful job” and The New York Times concurred: “Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann.”


Tennessee Williams
The Night of the Iguana
Introduction by Doug Wright
Drama
$14.95 US / $18.50 CAN
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1852-8

Tennessee Williams wrote: "This is a play about love in its purest terms." It is also Williams's robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour group of ladies from a West Texas women's college, the self-described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather ("the world's oldest living and practicing poet"), a family of grotesque Nazi vacationers, and an iguana tied by its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and turbulent night.

This is the first trade paperback edition of The Night of the Iguana and comes with an Introduction by playwright Doug Wright, the author's original Foreword, the short story "The Night of the Iguana" which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar Kenneth Holditch.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983): New Directions publishes his letters, short stories, poems, fiction, essays and over sixty of his plays including The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Orpheus Descending.

Doug Wright is the author of I Am My Own Wife, which won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for best play of 2004, and the Obie Award-winning play Quills.

"I'm tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent—yeah, that's what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this . . . this . . . this angry, petulant old man."
—The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana


William Carlos Williams
In the American Grain
Introduction by Rick Moody
Afterword by Horace Gregory
Essays
$13.95 US / $17.50 CAN
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1849-8

Although admired by D. H. Lawrence, this modern classic went generally unnoticed during the years after its publication in 1925. Yet it is "a fundamental book, essential if one proposes to come to terms with American literature" (London Times Literary Supplement). William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but he was fascinated by the texture of American history. Beginning with Columbus's discovery of the Indies and moving on through Sir Walter Raleigh, Cotton Mather, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln, Williams found in the fabric of familiar episodes new shades of meaning and configurations of character. He brought a poetic imagination to the task of reconstructing a live tradition for Americans, and what results is one of the finest works of prose to have been penned by any writer of the twentieth century.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), author of Paterson and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his last book of poetry Pictures from Brueghel, was friends with Ezra Pound and many of the great avant-garde artists of his time. Long published by New Directions, Williams (also a doctor and author of The Doctor Stories) invented a fresh new form in American poetry. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.

Rick Moody is the award-winning author of Black Veil, Demonology, The Diviners, Garden State, The Ice Storm, Purple America, and Right Livelihoods. The Ice Storm was made into a movie directed by Ang Lee in 1997.

"His treatment is free and episodic, beginning with the Vikings and ending with Abraham Lincoln."
—Daniel J. Boorstein, author of The Discovers

"It is ever more apparent that Williams is this century's major American poet."
—The Chicago Tribune

©2009 by New Directions Publishing Corp.

SEPTEMBER 2009 NEWSLETTER

Read the html version on our website: http://www.ndpublishing.com/newsletter.html

NEWS & EVENTS:

- New Directions at the Brooklyn Book Festival

- New Directions Wins Gold Ink Award

- Tennessee Williams World Premieres

- ND Authors at the Berlin International Literature Festival

- New Directions on TV, Barbara Epler Interviewed by Powell's, Susan Bernofsky on the radio, and Tennessee Williams with Elle MacPherson

- Nathaniel Tarn in Santa Fe

- Alvin Lustig on Moda Vivendi

- Susan Howe Elected Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow

- The Sound of Poetry, The Poetry of Sound; Perloff and Waldrop Round Table and Readings

- Bolaño Cover Photographer at the Gitterman Gallery

- Housing Works Seeking Volunteers

NEW TITLES:

Horacio Castellanos Moya
The She-Devil in the Mirror

Will Alexander
The Sri Lankan Loxodrome

Hermann Hesse / The Buddha
Siddhartha / The Dhammapada

Evelio Rosero
The Armies

Tennessee Williams
The Night of the Iguana

William Carlos Williams
In the American Grain

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:

www.ndpublishing.com

New Directions Seeking Fall Interns

Are you a student? Looking to earn academic credit through an internship? New Directions is looking for bright, young students to help out in our office. The internship broadly covers all aspects of publishing:

* Editorial
* Publicity
* Marketing
* Production
* Design

Please contact editorial@ndbooks.com.

   
NEWS & EVENTS

New Directions at the Brooklyn Book Festival

When: Sunday, September 13, 10:00 a.m.- 6:00 p.m.

Where: Brooklyn Borough Hall & Plaza (and nearby locations)

Summer is over, and what could be a better way to fall into fall than with a festival! Come find New Directions at this year's Brooklyn Book Festival, one of the largest public book fairs in the nation. To find us, look for the New Directions colophon banner draped behind our table. On sale – at special festival discounts – will be new and classic titles, and on display will be mock-ups of forthcoming lavishly illustrated literary art books: Nox by poet Anne Carson (an accordian-paged long poem cum scrap book in a box), and the Microscripts – stories written in tiny script on the backs of business cards, telegraph forms, newsprint ads, and other miscellany – by Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser (a co-production with the Christine Burgin Gallery).

We are excited that some of our authors will be participating – or will be the subject of discussion – at various events throughout the day. We've listed them here for your convenience:

Paul Auster: St. Francis Auditorium (180 Remsen Street). TICKETS REQUIRED. 3:00 p.m. Literary Masters: Paul Auster (The Red Notebook), Russell Banks (The Reserve) and Francine Prose (Goldengrove). Introduced by Louisa Ermelino.

Djuna Barnes (topic): St. Francis Auditorium (180 Remsen Street). TICKETS REQUIRED. 4:00 p.m. Writers on Unforgettable Friendships. Three frequent contributors to The New York Review of Books speak about an extraordinary relationship that has—somehow—made a lasting mark. Darryl Pinckney on Djuna Barnes, Oliver Sacks on Francis Crick; and Anita Desai on Ruth Jhabvala. Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, will introduce.

Anne Carson: Main Stage (Borough Hall Plaza).11:00 a.m. Poetry Society of America Presents. A reading organized by PSA, the nation's oldest poetry organization, featuring: Anne Carson, Sonia Sanchez, Philip Schultz and Arthur Sze. Introduced by Alice Quinn.

Michael Palmer: International Stage (Borough Hall Plaza). 12:00 p.m. Mahmoud Darwish: A Conversation. Michael Palmer, Russell Banks, Breyten Breytenbach, Sinan Antoon and Fady Joudah respond to the life and work of the celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). Moderated by Breyten Breytenbach.


New Directions Wins Gold Ink Award

New Directions has won the Gold Ink Award ("the print industry's most prestigious print competition") for the book jacket Written on the Sky.

The book cover for Written on the Sky – a gift book edition containing selections from Kenneth Rexroth's translations of classic Japanese poetry – was designed by Rodrigo Corral and printed by Lehigh Phoenix. The jacket's embossed floral image is printed with high-end metallic ink.

Widely regarded as the print industry's most prestigious print competition, the 2009 Gold Ink Awards received more than 1,000 entries in 45 competitive categories, including Book Covers, Book Jackets, Fine Editions, Softcover Books, Hardcover Books, Children's Books, Fine Art Lithography, Cookbooks, to name a few. In all, 132 entries were selected for Gold, Silver or Bronze honors.

 

Tennessee Williams World Premieres

The Fourth Annual Tennessee Williams Provincetown Theater Festival, September 24 - 27, will present two world premieres:

The Remarkable Rooming House of Madame LeMonde (1982) will be produced by the Beau Jest Moving Theater of Boston (see an interview with the director). It was first published in 2008 by New Directions in The Traveling Companion and Other Plays. The one-act The Enemy: Time (the germ for Williams' play Sweet Bird of Youth) will also be performed, in a co-production with Gremlin Theater of St. Paul. It was first published in 2008 in the New Directions reissue of Sweet Bird of Youth (with an Introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson). The Festival includes productions of fifteen Tennessee Williams plays, including A Streetcar Named Desire by the New Zealand company Fortune Theatre Trust, as well as Williams' experimental homage to Jackson Pollock, The Day on Which a Man Dies, produced by the National Pastime Theater. There will also be a special conversation and coffee with Lanford Wilson, hosted by New Directions Consulting Editor Thomas Keith.


ND Authors at the Berlin International Literature Festival

Berlin will be hosting its 9th International Literature Festival from September 9–19. New Directions authors Susan Howe, Eliot Weinberger, Coral Bracho, and Laszlo Krasznahorkai will all be participating.

Event: The Kaleidoscope
Participants: Susan Howe, Eliot Weinberger, and Coral Bracho

"The authors reading in the Kaleidoscope section of the programme have been directly invited by the International Literature Festival Berlin. These invitations are supported by an international network of friends and experts. The authors in this section supplement those chosen by the jury. Their choice responds to current cultural and political developments. Guests of the Artists-in-Berlin programme of the German Academic Exchange Service also read in this section."

Event: Literatures of the World
Participant: Laszlo Krasznahorkai

"The authors taking part in the Literatures of the World section of the progamme are chosen by a jury, with each member nominating two authors. The jurors, who are internationally renowned for their knowledge of literature in their respective fields, choose a representative cross-section of prose and poetry for the festival. The visitors will not only get to know many world-famous authors, but will also make exciting discoveries about far away lands."


New Directions on TV, Barbara Epler Interviewed by Powell's, Susan Bernofsky on the radio, and Tennessee Williams with Elle MacPherson

Back in March, Vice President Declan Spring, Assistant Editor Michael Barron, and ND poet and novelist Forrest Gander were invited by the Bulgarian publisher Altera press to Sofia. We reported that we were on the daytime talkshow, Night Birds with Iskra Angelova. The episode on which we appeared is now on YouTube.

We'd like to again thank Altera Press for a wonderful time, and send congratulations to our wonderful host Georgi Tenev, who has just published a new work of fiction with Altera Press, Holy Light (shown at left).

ND's publisher and editor-in-chief Barbara Epler was recently interviewed by Chris Faatz of Powell's for their website. Read the interview here to learn more about New Directions, past, present, and future.

Susan Bernofsky recently made her BBC debut when she was interviewed in a recent broadcast about Donald Duck's popularity in Germany. As we had reported before, Bernofsky wrote about Donald Duck's enduring fame in Germany for the Wall Street Journal.

And last – but certainly not least – supermodel Elle MacPherson reads a Tennessee Williams poem in her underwear for Vogue online.


Nathaniel Tarn in Santa Fe

Nathaniel Tarn will read from Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers at Nicholas Potter Bookseller, 211 E. Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, NM, at 5:00 pm on September 20. Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers is Nathaniel Tarn's latest book of poetry.

"A rich temperament, a remarkable, linguistic inventiveness, and a vision both original and universal."
—Octavio Paz

"Tarn's work brings together mythology, Western and Eastern philosophy, political commentary, scientific investigations, naturalistic descriptions and very personal love poetry. This poetry redefines nature and art for human culture, bringing a genuine psychological and linguistic curiosity about the human mind, about what it means to be human."
—Brenda Hillman, Jacket

"In book after book, Nathaniel Tarn has traced the feelings, thoughts, and rituals that establish what and where we think we are."
—Joseph Donahue, First Intensity

"Tarn creates a syntactical matrix of great fluency and variety and expressiveness. The fact is that many of Tarn's love poems and nature poems are extraordinarily beautiful and moving."
—Hayden Carruth, Exquisite Corpse


Alvin Lustig on Moda Vivendi

Claudia Dias writes about Alvin Lustig's cover designs on Moda Vivendi, a chic blog focused on design and culture:

"Early on the independent literary publisher New Directions, established in 1936 in New York . . . commissioned in 1940 Alvin Lustig to design the covers for re-editions for their 'Modern Classics' series and for their authors like Tennessee Williams. He was influenced by the European designs of bauhaus and the Dada movement, and the Russian Constructivists books by El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko, all with the intention of ‘knocking the eye off-center.'" Read the full posting with images here.


Susan Howe Elected Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow

Congratulations to Susan Howe on being elected Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall 2009.

The Anna-Maria Kellen Berlin Prize is annually funded by the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation and the descendants of Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold, who provided the American Academy with the founding gift and continue their generous support. The Hans Arnhold Center was the Arnhold home in the 1920s. The Anna-Maria Kellen Fellowship and the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize Fellowship are named after Hans H. Arnhold's two daughters.

Howe's many books with New Directions include My Emily Dickinson and Souls of the Labadie Tract.


The Sound of Poetry, The Poetry of Sound; Perloff and Waldrop Round Table and Readings

University of Chicago Press will publish The Sound of Poetry, The Poetry of Sound, edited by New Directions author Marjorie Perloff together with Craig Dworkin, in November. The Sound of Poetry, The Poetry of Sound includes essays by New Directions authors Susan Howe, Richard Sieburth, Yoko Tawada, and Rosmarie Waldrop.

In other news, Perloff and Waldrop, along with novelist Sissy Tax, will be speaking at the Wittgenstein round table at the Austrian Cultural Forum on Nov. 12. Perloff will also be giving the keynote address at the Yale Symposium on Futurism and the annual Wallace Stevens lecture at the Hartford Public Library, and she and Richard Sieburth are speaking at a sound poetry event at the Bronx Museum on Nov. 15. Rosmarie Waldrop will also be reading, along with her husband poet Keith Waldrop, at the University of California at San Diego on October 7.


Quiz: Sebald and Walser

Last month our quiz question was "In addition to her work as a novelist, Clarice Lispector was also a columnist for which Brazilian periodical?"

The answer – Jornal do Brasil – was correctly answered by Richard Black of Sydney, Australia. Congratulations!

Clarice Lispector's crônicas (chronicles), a literary genre peculiar to the Brazilian press, allowed her to address a wide readership on any theme she liked. Lispector's Saturday column from 1967 to 1973 in Jornal do Brasil, Rio's leading newspaper, included stories, conversations with taxi drivers, confessions, introspective revelations, and other works that were extraordinarily free-ranging and intimate. Clarice Lispector's Selected Crônicas is available from New Directions.

We have also made a startling discovery! In regards to the Summer 2009 quiz question – "In what publication did Jorge Luis Borges first appear with New Directions?" – a new answer has been discovered. Translator and Latin American scholar Jonathan Cohen (translator of Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal's Pluriverse, published by New Directions) discovered that in 1942 New Directions published An Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Poetry that included Jorge Luis Borges as well as Pablo Neruda (whom we were also first to publish in the US). That means that before he was published as a fiction writer, Borges was first introduced to English readers as a poet. The anthology was edited by James Laughlin's former teacher, the poet and scholar Dudley Fitts.

And now for our quiz question for September 2009:

This past month, Robert Walser's The Tanners was published by New Directions. In W.G. Sebald's incredible preface, about whom does Sebald reminisce when he speaks most personally about Robert Walser?

The winner will receive a free copy of any one of our Sebald titles OR a copy of Robert Walser's The Assistant.

Send your answers to editorial@ndbooks.com with the header "Quiz answer."


Bolaño Cover Photographer at the Gitterman Gallery

The Gitterman Gallery at 170 East 75th Street in New York will be exhibiting the work of Allen Frame, whose photographs have graced every one of our Roberto Bolaño titles since Last Evenings on Earth. The exhibition runs from September 10 - October 31, with an opening on Wednesday, September 9 from 6-8 PM

About the exhibition, the New Yorker wrote: "Frame’s big, handsome color photographs of friends and lovers are not unlike the black-and-white images he’s shown previously; they’re subtle, intimate, and often quite dark, with a painterly feel for the chiaroscuro effects of shadow and light. But color, nearly always burnished by the sun, adds warmth to the work and draws us deeper into the circumscribed spaces he uses to frame his subjects. Most of them are alone in a dimly lit room, sometimes no more than silhouettes before a window, and even when they’re outdoors they appear delineated by landscape or architecture, in a style that recalls David Hockney. Frame also shares Hockney’s sense of casual refinement, but he adds a bright spark of erotic possibility to temper the darkness."


Housing Works Seeking Volunteers

Below is a note from Housing Works Volunteer Coordinator Zoe Ward. Housing Works is a wonderful non-profit dedicated to selling used clothing and books to provide health care to low-income families and New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS. We've held events at their SoHo bookshop, and we donate books from time to time. We hope you take a moment to read this urgent letter and possibly volunteer for a few hours.

This September, join us for the annual fall preview sales at Housing Works Thrift Shops! Each of our nine locations will be stuffed to the gills with amazing designer clothing, furniture and accessories. We need a lot of extra help to really make these events great, so please consider contributing a few hours of your time to this wonderful cause!

The following locations need volunteers to greet customers, manage fitting rooms, bag up purchases, bring out new merchandise and help out with opening night festivities:

Tribeca (119 Chambers St.) - Sept. 8 - 11
Chelsea (143 W. 17th St.) - Sept. 9 - 12
Yorkville (90th St. & 2nd Ave.) - Sept. 11 - 14
SoHo (130 Crosby St.) - 11 - Sept. 11 - 14
Gramercy (157 E. 23rd St.) - Sept. 14 - 17
Upper West Side (306 Columbus Ave.) - Sept. 16 - 19
West Village (245 W. 10th St.) - Sept. 18 - 21
Brooklyn (122 Montague St.) - Sept. 21 - 24
Upper Eastside (202 E. 77th St.) - Sept. 23 - 26

All proceeds from these stellar events go toward the programs of Housing Works Inc. Since our founding in 1990, we have provided lifesaving services, such as housing, medical and mental health care, meals, job training, drug treatment, HIV prevention education, and social support to more than 20,000 homeless and low-income New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS. Please visit our website to learn more.

Please get in touch with Zoe Ward, Director of Volunteer Programs, at volunteer@housingworks.org for more details. Thank you!!


NEW TITLES

Listed here are all of our September 2009 titles. For a preview of our Fall 2009 - Winter 2010 season, please see the seasonal catalog on our website. Please note that books are not available until the month of publication listed, and all prices and dates of publication are subject to change.

Horacio Castellanos Moya
The She-Devil in the Mirror
Translated by Katherine Silver
El Salvadoran Fiction
$14.95 US / 18.50 CAN; Buy It Now
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1846-7

Laura Rivera can't believe what has happened. Her best friend has been killed in cold blood in the living room of her home, in front of her two young daughters! Nobody knows who pulled the trigger, but Laura will not rest easy until she finds out. Her dizzying, delirious, hilarious, and blood-curdling one-sided dialogue carries the reader on a rough and tumble ride through the social, political, economic, and sexual chaos of post-civil war San Salvador. A detective story of pulse-quickening suspense, The She-Devil in the Mirror is also a sober reminder that justice and truth are more often than not illusive. Castellanos Moya's relentless, obsessive narrator—female, rich, paranoid, wonderfully perceptive, and, in the end, fabulously unreliable—paints with frivolous profundity a society in a state of collapse.

Castellanos Moya's Senselessness was acclaimed "an innovative and invigoratingly twisted piece of art" (Village Voice) and "a brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials" (Russell Banks).

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in 1957 in Honduras, but grew up in El Salvador. He has published nine novels and is now living in exile as part of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Translator Katherine Silver has won a PEN Translation Fund Award, an NEA grant, and a Black Mountain Institute/Rainmakers Grant.

"I recommend Horacio Castellanos Moya's fantastic Senselessness, in which a writer takes on the dangerous job of editing a report on military atrocities in an unnamed country. Both a descent into hell and a book about how one becomes human."
—Junot Diaz, Best Books of the Year, New York Magazine

"The only writer of my generation who knows how to narrate the horror, the secret Vietnam that Latin America was for a long time."
—Roberto Bolaño


Will Alexander
The Sri Lankan Loxodrome
American Poetry
$14.95 US / $18.50 CAN; Buy It Now
ISBN: 978-0-8112–1829-0

In navigation a loxodrome, or rhumb-line, is a line that crosses all meridians at the same angle, maintaining one compass direction, a path of constant bearing. In his breakthrough poetry collection, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, Will Alexander connects this theme to a lone Sri Lankan sailor who beheads sea snakes as an ongoing meditation while sailing the expanse of the Indian Ocean. Along the way he meets various African communities as he journeys eastward, from Madagascar to Sri Lanka. In lush, perfumed language filled with the spirit of Aimé Césaire and Sun Ra, Alexander maps an epic voyage unlike any other in contemporary poetry.

Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and visual artist who lives in Los Angeles, the city where he was born in 1948. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. Over the years he has worked several jobs (including the LA Lakers box office), has taught at various institutions, and has been associated with the non-profit organization Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, working with underserved, at-risk youth.

"Alexander's verbal flights strike me as more shamanistic than free-associational or automatic. His evocation of upper and lower worlds, and his vocabulary which bridges poetry, philosophy, myth, and science, give his verbal fulgurations a sense of linguistic seed that suddenly sprouts, then resprouts . . . . He may be the first major ‘outsider artist' in American poetry. Whatever he is, he is a force to reckon with, whose self-propelled soarings evoke Simon Rodia's ‘Watt's Tower' as well as Siberian ecstasies."
—Clayton Eshleman, American Poet

"Alexander's poems are unpunctuated, their expanding structures suggest that each might be read as a single very long, very complex sentence . . . a complex sentence machine turning out elaborate grammatical parallelisms, extensive series of epic catalogues, and open-ended syntax of discordant clauses and appended prepositional phrases."
—Harryette Mullen, Callaloo


Hermann Hesse / The Buddha
Siddhartha / The Dhammapada
Translated from the German by Hilda Rosner
Translated from the Pali by Irving Babbitt
Fiction/Religion
$9.95 US / $12.50 CAN; Buy It Now
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1850-4

Written in a prose of almost biblical simplicity and beauty, Siddhartha is the story of a soul's long quest for the answer to the enigma of man's role on earth. As a youth, the young Indian Siddhartha meets the Buddha but isn't content with the disciple's role. He must work out his own destiny—a torturous road on which he experiences a love affair with the beautiful courtesan Kamala, the temptation of success and riches, the heartache of struggling with his own son, and finally, renunciation and self-knowledge.

The name "Siddhartha" is often given to the Buddha himself—perhaps a clue to Hesse's aims contrasting the traditional legendary figure with his own conception.

This new edition of the classic Siddhartha includes The Dhammapada ("Path of Virtue"), the 423 verses attributed to the Buddha himself, which forms the essence of the ethics of Buddhist philosophy.

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and Magister Ludi.

The Buddha, a title given to the founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563-460 B.C.). Born an Indian prince, he renounced wealth and family, became an ascetic, and after achieving enlightenment through meditation, taught all who came to learn from him.

"Delight in Hesse signifies a new delight in human mysteries, in life's possibilities, in the power of the will and the pleasures of the imagination."
—The Nation

"In Siddhartha the setting is Indian and we encounter the Buddha, but the author's ethos is still closer to Goethe...."
—The Washington Post Book World

"One could even hope that Hesse's readers are hungrily imbibing Siddhartha, and that they will be so wisely foolish as to live by it."
—Chicago Tribune

"Hermann Hesse is the greatest writer of the century."
—San Francisco Chronicle


Evelio Rosero
The Armies
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Colombian Fiction
$14.95 US / $18.50 CAN; Buy It Now
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1864-1

Ismail, the profesor, is a retired teacher in a small Colombian town where he passes the days pretending to pick oranges while spying on his neighbor Geraldina as she lies naked in the shade of a ceiba tree on a red floral quilt. The garden burns with sunlight; the macaws laugh sweetly. Otilia, Ismail's wife, is ashamed of his peeping and suggests that he pay a visit to Father Albornoz. Instead, Ismail wanders the town visiting old friends, plagued by a tangle of secret memories: Where have I existed these years? I answer myself: up on the wall, peering over. When the armies slowly arrive, the profesor's reveries are gradually taken over by a living hell. His wife disappears and he must find her. We learn that not only gentle, grassy hillsides surround San José but landmines and coca fields. The reader is soon engulfed by the violence of Rosero's narrative that is touched not only with a deep sadness, but an extraordinary tenderness.

Evelio Rosero, born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1958, is the author of several books of fiction—novels and short stories—plays, and poetry. For his body of work he was awarded Colombia's National Literature Prize by the Ministry of Culture. The Armies won the prestigious Tusquets International Prize and The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for the best translated book of the year from any language.

"The Armies is a disturbing allegory of life during wartime, in which little appears to happen while at the same time entire lives and worlds collapse. This is an important and powerful book."       
—The (London) Times

"Evelio Rosero has dipped his pen in blood and written an epic in 215 pages. If anyone has wondered if there is life in the Colombian novel after magical realism, this is the evidence of the extraordinary power of that country's literature."
—Linda Grant, The Independent

"The Armies is written in a compressed, lean style, which addresses the difficulty of the material with uncompromising clarity. It is a fragile tone, but Anne McLean's translation does full justice to it."
—Times Literary Supplement


Tennessee Williams
The Night of the Iguana
Introduction by Doug Wright
Drama
$14.95 US / $18.50 CAN; Buy It Now
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1852-8

Tennessee Williams wrote: "This is a play about love in its purest terms." It is also Williams's robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour group of ladies from a West Texas women's college, the self-described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather ("the world's oldest living and practicing poet"), a family of grotesque Nazi vacationers, and an iguana tied by its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and turbulent night.

This is the first trade paperback edition of The Night of the Iguana and comes with an Introduction by playwright Doug Wright, the author's original Foreword, the short story "The Night of the Iguana" which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar Kenneth Holditch.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983): New Directions publishes his letters, short stories, poems, fiction, essays and over sixty of his plays including The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Orpheus Descending.

Doug Wright is the author of I Am My Own Wife, which won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for best play of 2004, and the Obie Award-winning play Quills.

"I'm tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent—yeah, that's what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this . . . this . . . this angry, petulant old man."
—The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana


William Carlos Williams
In the American Grain
Introduction by Rick Moody
Afterword by Horace Gregory
Essays
$13.95 US / $17.50 CAN; Buy It Now
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1849-8

Although admired by D. H. Lawrence, this modern classic went generally unnoticed during the years after its publication in 1925. Yet it is "a fundamental book, essential if one proposes to come to terms with American literature" (London Times Literary Supplement). William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but he was fascinated by the texture of American history. Beginning with Columbus's discovery of the Indies and moving on through Sir Walter Raleigh, Cotton Mather, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln, Williams found in the fabric of familiar episodes new shades of meaning and configurations of character. He brought a poetic imagination to the task of reconstructing a live tradition for Americans, and what results is one of the finest works of prose to have been penned by any writer of the twentieth century.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), author of Paterson and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his last book of poetry Pictures from Brueghel, was friends with Ezra Pound and many of the great avant-garde artists of his time. Long published by New Directions, Williams (also a doctor and author of The Doctor Stories) invented a fresh new form in American poetry. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.

Rick Moody is the award-winning author of Black Veil, Demonology, The Diviners, Garden State, The Ice Storm, Purple America, and Right Livelihoods. The Ice Storm was made into a movie directed by Ang Lee in 1997.

"His treatment is free and episodic, beginning with the Vikings and ending with Abraham Lincoln."
—Daniel J. Boorstein, author of The Discovers
"It is ever more apparent that Williams is this century's major American poet."
—The Chicago Tribune

©2009 by New Directions Publishing Corp.

AUGUST 2009 NEWSLETTER

View it in its full glory on our website: http://www.ndpublishing.com/newsletter.html

NEWS & EVENTS :

- Clarice Lispector’s New Moment in the Sun

- Osamu Dazai Centennial

- Reading Guides

- Tennessee Williams, “The Day on Which a Man Dies”

- "The Line Has Shattered": Michael Palmer

- Essential Postmodern Reads

- Declan Spring on Alvin Levin

- Eliot Weinberger, LRB blogger

- Out in the Wilds with Forrest Gander

- In Other News: Allen Frame, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Susan Bernofsky, Susan Howe, Anne Carson

- Quiz: Win a Copy of Lispector's The Hour of the Star

- Correction: Borges and Bolaño

NEW TITLES:

JUNE BOOKS:

Eliot Weinberger
Oranges & Peanuts for Sale

Nathanael West
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of The Locust

JULY BOOKS:

Inger Christensen
Azorno

Jorge Luis Borges
Seven Nights

Nina Berberova
Billancourt Tales

Yoel Hoffman
Curriculum Vitae

AUGUST BOOKS:

Roberto Bolaño
The Skating Rink

Robert Walser
The Tanners

Alvin Levin
Love Is Like Park Avenue

Jimmy Santiago Baca
Selected Poems/Poemas Selectos

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:

www.ndpublishing.com

New Directions Seeking Fall Interns

Are you a student? Looking to earn academic credit through an internship? New Directions is looking for bright, young students to help out in our office. The internship broadly covers all aspects of publishing:

* Editorial
* Publicity
* Marketing
* Production
* Design

Please contact editorial@ndbooks.com.

 
NEWS & EVENTS

Clarice Lispector’s New Moment in the Sun

New Directions congratulates Benjamin Moser on his excellent biography of the legendary Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector is now out with Oxford University Press and has been lavished with praise by several prominent authors:

“A biography worthy of its great subject. . . . One of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers is finally revealed in all her vibrant colors.” –Orhan Pamuk

“A smart, passionate portrait of a truly remarkable writer.” –Jonathan Franzen

“Clarice Lispector is one of the hidden geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing. . . Benjamin Moser’s biography is a great book about a Jewish heroine, filled with sympathy for what must remain hidden and what must be understood.” –Colm Tóibin

“Everything about Lispector was unlikely: her great beauty, her early fame, her unique voice, her status as an icon to Brazilians. In Moser, she has found a gifted young biographer, social historian, and prose stylist who is able to take her elusive measure. This book is enthralling.” –Judith Thurman

“Glamorous, cultured, moody. Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce. Benjamin Moser has recreated all the psychological and cultural context needed to understand this great writer, and brought to life her essential tragic nature in all its complexity.” –Edmund White

If you are curious to read Lispector, New Directions is the proud publisher of much of her work in English translation, including her most famous book, The Hour of the Star ($9.95 ISBN 978-0-8112-1190-1). Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be.

Other Clarice Lispector titles published by New Directions include*:

The Foreign Legion. Stories and Chronicles. $14.95 ISBN 978-0-8112-1189-5
Near to the Wild Heart. Novel. $10.95 ISBN: 978-0-8112-1140-6
Selected Crônicas. Essays. $12.95 ISBN 978-0-8112-1340-0
Soulstorm. Stories. $11.95 ISBN 978-0-8112-1091-1

If your interest is piqued, perhaps you’d like to read on to our Quiz section: The prize this month is a copy of The Hour of the Star.

*The links above will redirect you to Google Books, which offers (for most titles) limited previews, as well as the option to buy the book directly from New Directions or from other online booksellers. ND is not responsible for any errors on external sites.


Osamu Dazai Centennial

Osamu Dazai was one of early twentieth century Japan’s foremost novelists. He is known for his dark autobiographical style, famously exemplified in No Longer Human and The Setting Sun.

Tokyo is currently celebrating with a campaign to raise awareness of his work that includes street banners and flags, readings at bookstores and museums, and a film of The Setting Sun that was released in May. A film adaptation of No Longer Human is also in the works.

To help with the celebrations, we’ve given the cover to No Longer Human an out-of-this-world makeover. As mentioned below, a reading guide is also available.

No Longer Human chronicles the harrowing life of Yozo, who feels alienated from his fellow humans and covers it up by being a clown. Though he is outwardly successful, even “lucky” as the popular son of a rich man, he becomes increasingly depressed and vulnerable as he strains to uphold his jocular demeanor. When he begins university, he meets a young art student who becomes his tour guide to drinking and prostitutes, leading him down a vertiginous cycle of drunken nights which climax in an affair and a tragic death. The guilt-ridden Yozo attempts to pull himself together until something triggers an avalanche of self-destruction and No Longer Human’s devastating resolution.


Reading Guides

Reading group guides are now available for some of our new and popular titles. These excellent guides can help to break the ice in fun, thoughtful, and engaging ways, and they can be used by reading groups, individual readers, and teachers looking to dig a bit deeper into the heart of a book. Guides that are now available for download include:

César Aira, Ghosts
Roberto Bolaño, The Skating Rink
Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
Yoel Hoffmann, Curriculum Vitae
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
Guillermo Rosales, The Halfway House
W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn
Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust

All of the files can be viewed or downloaded for free from ND's page at scribd.com. More guides will be added periodically, listed on our "Professors" page. If you are in a reading group and have a particular title for which you would like to have a reading guide, we are currently taking requests. Please e-mail: editorial@ndbooks.com.


Tennessee Williams, “The Day on Which a Man Dies”

The experimental Tennessee Williams play “The Day on Which a Man Dies,” from our recent volume The Traveling Companion and Other Plays, is having a weekend run on Long Island in August, directed by David Kaplan, in conjunction with the Krasner-Pollock Museum.

Jackson Pollock befriended Williams in 1940 when they met in Provincetown. In 1960, Williams wrote a fierce fantasia on the great painter’s death — and kept the text to himself. Williams’ “secret script” is dedicated to Japanese visionary writer Yukio Mishima. As in Japanese Gutai performance art, paintings are created and destroyed in the course of the performance of “The Day on Which a Man Dies.” The painter’s faithless lover rages at his unraveling, while a wry Mishima stand-in marvels at the messiness of Western self-destruction.

Performances: August 7-9, 2009, 8:00 pm Fri-Sat / 2:30 Sun, The Ross School Lecture Hall, East Hampton, NY. For more information or to buy tickets, visit the website of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival.

"David Kaplan's staging for National Pastime Theater ...boast(s) strong performances from Jeff Christian and Jennie Moreau... and the production's stylized edginess brings their psychic traumas out in garish and explosive moments of excess that lap at the feet of the audience." —Kerry Reid, The Chicago Tribune

Photo montage by Michael McGowan, courtesy of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival.


The Line Has Shattered: Revisiting Vancouver's Landmark 1963 Poetry Conference

Michael Palmer will be participating in "The Line Has Shattered," a celebration of the acclaimed 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, held from August 12-14. Events will take place at both Simon Frasier University and The University of British Columbia.

The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference was a three-week summer course offered by the University of British Columbia and organized by UBC English professor Warren Tallman and poet Robert Creeley. It featured lectures, readings, panel discussions, and writing workshops by Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov and Margaret Avison—in Roy Miki’s words, some of “the most influential voices of the generation described as the ‘new American poets.’” The Conference marks the beginning of a truly transnational “North American” poetic avant garde: many of the “student” participants have gone on to have far-reaching impact on Canadian and American poetry, including figures such as George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, and Phyllis Webb. Consistently referred to as “landmark,” “monumental,” and a “defining moment in the history of North American poetry,” the Conference will be celebrated this year by "The Line Has Shattered," which brings together 12 original participants 46 years later for a day of discussion and readings.


Essential Postmodern Reads

Borges, Bolaño, Sebald, and John Hawkes have all been included in Carolyn Kellogg's annotated list of “61 Essential Postmodern Reads” in The LA Times. (Seen at left are a few of the characteristics Kellogg looks for in the books.) ND books mentioned on the list include:

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
The Lime Twig by John Hawkes

(2666 by Roberto Bolaño, published by FSG, also appears on the list. New Directions publishes many Bolaño titles including The Skating Rink, our most recent Bolaño book, which is now available.) Six more of his books are forthcoming from New Directions.


Declan Spring on Alvin Levin

For The Chicago Seminary Co-op site, a web magazine dedicated to co-op bookstores, ND Senior Editor and Vice President Declan Spring was asked to contribute a piece on Alvin Levin, a long-lost writer whose work is undergoing a revival. Instigated by John Ashbery, who contributed a preface, and edited by James Reidel, a collection of Levin's writings, Love Is Like Park Avenue, will be published by New Directions this month.

John Ashbery’s preface to Love Is Like Park Avenue is in the current issue of The New York Review of Books (subscription required).

From the Preface:

“I first read Alvin Levin's Love Is Like Park Avenue when I was about fifteen, shortly after it was published in the New Directions 1942 annual. At the time I was beginning to explore contemporary experimental writing, thanks in part to the excellent collection at the Rochester Public Library, an art deco gem still extant on the edge of the city's faded downtown. In fact I was searching not just for modernist writing but sexy writing as well, having already looked into Henry Miller and ignored critical warnings against combing Ulysses for the 'naughty bits.' Levin's narrative provided plenty of those, in graphic accounts of steamy sexual encounters that used such hitherto unprintable words as hard-on, cocksucker, frenching, and come (where were the censors?) in breathless run-on sentences that suggested its author too had read Molly Bloom's soliloquy. The biographical note on Levin mentioned that the text represented about one third of a novel. I waited impatiently for New Directions to publish the complete work.”


Eliot Weinberger, LRB blogger

ND essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger has posted the following contributions to the London Review of Books blog since May:

Agog Bush's 'Common Faith'
Muslim Shark Alert! Islamophobia
Unquestionable Political Correctness on the 'New York Times Book Review'
Tales of Poetry Unusual Phrases
Relics from the Crusades

Weinberger’s fantastic new collection of essays Oranges and Peanuts for Sale is now . . . well . . . for sale! Excerpts can be read on our site.

You can also join the burgeoning Eliot Weinberger Facebook fan page, which is at almost 800 members and growing fast.


Out in the Wilds with Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander writes: "[I’m] writing from the wilds of Arkansas where I'm lucky to find a place with internet.  I'm a participant in the Vilenica International Literary Festival in Slovenia September 1-6.  I get to read in a cave, evidently.  Of course, here in Arkansas, it's always easy to read in a cave.” Forrest Gander’s most recent book with ND is his novel As a Friend.

Forrest Gander on Facebook. More on Forrest Gander. More on Arkansas caves.


In Other News

The Gitterman Gallery will be exhibiting the work of Allen Frame, whose photographs have graced every one of our Roberto Bolaño titles since Last Evenings on Earth. The exhibition runs from September 10 - October 31, with an opening on Wednesday, September 9 from 6-8 PM

An amazing new story by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, “Something Outside is Burning,” is available in an English translation by Ottilie Mulzet on the website of the Guardian (UK). Laszlo Krasznahorkai is the author of War and War as well as of The Melancholy of Resistance, which was made into the independent cult-classic film The Werckmeister Harmonies by director Bela Tarr. Both books are currently available from ND. Forthcoming from ND in English translation is Satan Tango, also made into a critically acclaimed film by Bela Tarr. Krasznahorkai’s Facebook fan page.

Susan Bernofsky received the 2009 Looren Translation Grant – she will spend November at the Looren Translation House in Wernetshausen, Switzerland.  She is hard at work on our next Robert Walser project, The Microtexts, a lavishly illustrated, joint publication with the Christine Burgin Gallery.

The new issue of The Chicago Review includes an essay by Susan Howe and poetry by Anne Carson (links are to their Facebook fan pages). Carson’s gorgeous art and poetry book, NOX, with hi-resolution colored pages folded into a box, will be available this spring.


Quiz: Win a Copy of Lispector's The Hour of the Star

Last month our quiz question – “In what New Directions publication did Jorge Luis Borges first appear?” – was correctly answered by Ben Burrows of Chicago. Congratulations!

Many readers believed Labyrinths to be the correct answer. The two accepted answers (yep, there are two) were The Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry (1942, published by Greenwood Press and distributed by ND, who later acquired its rights), and New Directions 11 (published in 1949), which contained two stories: “Investigations on the Death of Herbert Quian” and “The Circular Ruins.” More about the publishing history of Borges with ND can be read on our blog.

But don’t worry, there is a chance to win yet another book. Due to the popularity of the contest we have decided to try one quiz question each newsletter.

The quiz question for August 2009: In addition to her work as a novelist, Clarice Lispector was also a columnist for which Brazilian periodical? The first reader to answer correctly will receive a copy of her novel The Hour of the Star.

Send your answers to editorial@ndbooks.com, with the word "Lispector" in the subject line.


Correction: Borges and Bolaño

Our website incorrectly stated that the new edition of Borges's Seven Nights features a preface by Roberto Bolaño. Although we had originally planned to include Bolaño's preface, contractual obstacles prevented us from doing so. We apologize for the inaccurate information. However, it is still true that Bolaño said "I could live under a table reading Borges."


NEW TITLES

In case you were on vacation when our last newsletter came out, check out our new summer titles below!

JUNE BOOKS

Eliot Weinberger
Oranges & Peanuts for Sale
Essays
Paperbook w/ French Flaps
978-0-8112-1834-1, $16.95

Many of the twenty-eight essays in Oranges & Peanuts for Sale have appeared in translation in seventeen countries; some have never been published in English before. They include introductions for books of avant-garde poets; collaborations with visual artists; and articles for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and October.

“In this brave new literature, a chaos of images, characters and stories swirls like electrons around a nucleus. They bond with other images and fall apart again, down through the ages.” —Los Angeles Times


Nathanael West
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of The Locust
Two Novels
New Introduction by Jonathan Lethem
978-0-8112-1822-1, $11.95

“West, a parodist with rancid genius, achieved his masterwork in Miss Lonelyhearts.” —Harold Bloom

“The Day of the Locust has scenes of extraordinary power.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The Day of the Locust is brilliant, savage and arresting—a truly great novel.” —Dorothy Parker


JULY BOOKS

Inger Christensen
Azorno
Novel
Translated by Denise Newman
978-0-8112-1657-9, $13.95

“[Christensen] manages to make wit, passion and questioning and astonishing design serve each other’s ends as one, and she does it in a way that is utterly her own.” —W. S. Merwin

“Inger Christensen inspires awe in supple figures of bodily experience, and of social and sexual interaction.” —The Believer
Jorge Luis Borges
Seven Nights
Essays
Translated by Eliot Weinberger
978-0811218382, $12.95
 
“I could live under a table reading Borges.” –Roberto Bolaño

“This wonderful little book serves to remind us again that Jorge Luis Borges is one of the greatest literary miracles of all time.” —Publishers Weekly

“Listening, via the printed word, to these relaxed and yet highly explicit discourses, one realizes that never again will there be a mind and memory stocked just this way.” —John Updike, The New Yorker


Nina Berberova
Billancourt Tales
Stories
Translated by Marian Schwartz
978-0-8112-1833-7, $13.95

“The thirteen stories of Billancourt Tales are closely observed, potently phrased and dapperly shaped . . . . Marian Schwartz’s English translation deftly captures the fanciful twists and turns of Berberova’s imagination . . . . Indispensable.” —New York Times Book Review
 
“We have these stories, and for the lives they commemorate and the particular time and place they so keenly preserve, we cherish them.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Berberova is, quite simply, an imaginative writer of the highest distinction.” —(The London) Independent


Yoel Hoffmann
Curriculum Vitae
Novel/Memoir
Translated by Peter Cole
978-0-8112-1832-0, $14.95
 
Yoel Hoffmann’s Curriculum Vitae is the remarkable summation of the writer’s life: his arrival in Palestine; childhood and youth; two marriages; fatherhood; his studies of Japanese Buddhism; his travels; his ever-busy inner life. Curriculum Vitae begins quietly but becomes more and more hypnotic and amazing. 
 
“The most interesting and experimental novelist in Israel.” —Review Of Contemporary Fiction
 
“Hoffmann writes in a language of miracles.” —American Book Review
 
“A reason to celebrate . . . Hoffmann shows himself to be an artist of the profoundly fantastic.” —Hadassah Magazine
 
“A writer of international importance . . . Hoffmann refracts Jewish popular lore and folk wisdom through a postmodernist prism, brightening his prose with snatches of verse, songs, diary excerpts, letters, ominous dreams, lush erotic passages and Yiddish sayings.” —Publishers Weekly


AUGUST BOOKS

Roberto Bolaño
The Skating Rink
Novel
Translated by Chris Andrews
978-0-8112-1713-2, $21.95
 
“He is by far the most exciting writer to come from South of the Rio Grande in a long time.” —Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times
 
“When I read Bolaño, I think: everything is possible again . . . . How he makes one laugh! The laughter of someone who just escaped being buried live, and suddenly remembers how badly she wants to live.” —Nicole Krauss
 
“Lucid fury . . . is a pretty good description of Bolaño’s aesthetic. He is a novelist of voraciousness without sentiment, hardness to a fever pitch.” —Todd Shy, San Francisco Chronicle


Robert Walser
The Tanners
Novel
Translated by Susan Bernofsky
Introduction by W.G. Sebald
978-0-8112-1589-3, $24.95
 
TIME OUT NEW YORK’S READ FOR SUMMER 2009
 
The Tanners, Robert Walser’s amazing 1907 novel of twenty chapters, is now presented in English for the very first time, by the award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. “A clairvoyant of the small,” W. G. Sebald calls Robert Walser in his acutely beautiful, personal, and long introduction, studded with his signature use of photographs.
 
“The incredible shrinking writer is a major twentieth-century prose artist who . . . can be placed in that comic tradition [that] runs from Gogol through Kafka and down to José Saramago . . . . When Walser met Lenin in Zurich during the war, all he had to say was ‘So you, too, like fruitcake?’ . . . It is remarkable to see what variety and richness what easiness and charm, what winsome inanities and philosophical depths he could pack into half a page.” —Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker


Alvin Levin
Love Is Like Park Avenue
Collected Writings
Preface by John Ashbery
978-0-8112-1799-6, $13.95
 
In Love Is Like Park Avenue, Alvin Levin reveals that part of New York society that lived in the Bronx but longed to be in the shadow of skyscrapers — with the dance bands, celebrities, and socialites; his characters create a mirror world of love and sex. This fascinating compendium of Levin’s writings offers a look at the career of an “outsider artist” who was never able to finish a long novel, yet whose finished stories and fragments are of heartbreaking intensity and amazing social scope.

“Scabrous scenes of family feuding in the Bronx and crowded Coney Island Beaches come at you with the leering verve of Reginald Marsh’s drawings and Paul Cadmus’ quasi-pornographic paintings.” —John Ashbery, from the Preface
 
“Brilliant.” —Tennessee Williams


Jimmy Santiago Baca
Selected Poems/Poemas Selectos
Translated from the English to the Spanish by
Tomás H. Lucero and Liz Werner
Introduction by Ilan Stavans
Bilingual Edition
978-0-8112-1816-0, $ 16.95
 
“Baca writes with unconcealed passion . . . and manifests both an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythical and archetypal significance of life events.”
—Denise Levertov
 
“Martin & Meditations on the South Valley is a first-rate literary tour de force.”
—Andrei Codrescu
 
“In Spring Poems Baca writes with a green honesty—expanding and integrating the physical world with concerns of the soul. I love this book.” —Li-Young Lee


©2009 by New Directions Publishing Corp.

For the real deal, read it on our website: http://www.ndpublishing.com/newsletter.html


NEWS & EVENTS :

- New Directions Party! (The aftermath)

- Awards: Evilio Rosero, Jeffrey Yang, William Carlos Williams

- Miscellany: Twitter, Susan Bernofsky, Jerome Rothenberg

NEW TITLES:

JUNE BOOKS:

Eliot Weinberger
Oranges & Peanuts for Sale

Nathanael West
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of The Locust

JULY BOOKS:

Inger Christensen
Azorno

Jorge Luis Borges
Seven Nights

Nina Berberova
Billancourt Tales

Yoel Hoffman
Curriculum Vitae

AUGUST BOOKS:

Roberto Bolaño
The Skating Rink

Robert Walser
The Tanners

Alvin Levin
Love Is Like Park Avenue

Jimmy Santiago Baca
Selected Poems/Poemas Selectos

- The Intern as Artist: New Cover Designs

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:

www.ndpublishing.com


   
NEWS & EVENTS

Ahhh, summer! We don’t know what your plans are, but we hope they involve taking a book of ours along! Might we recommend Guillermo Rosales’ The Halfway House for an emotionally intense read or Eliot Weinberger’s Oranges and Peanuts for Sale for the eclectically curious reader, or perhaps one of our other books below? We have plenty of excerpts to help readers who are deliberating which books to pack in their bags. And don’t forget to periodically check out our New Directions blogs, Facebook page, and Twitter feed for updated postings throughout the summer.

We're also hoping that readers will participate in our second annual summer quiz. The first to answer correctly will win a free copy of our new edition of Borges’ Seven Nights with a gorgeous cover by Rodrigo Corral. Please submit your answer to editorial@ndbooks.com. Subject line should be “New Directions’ summer quiz answer.” The winner will be announced in our next newsletter.

The question: What is the first New Directions publication in which Jorge Luis Borges appeared?


New Directions Party! (The aftermath)

Our party for the release of The Halfway House was a great success. Copies of The Halfway House sold briskly, while people sipped on mojitos concocted with marathon gusto – 50 mojitos in 45 minutes – and served by New Directions staff Quinn Marshall, Jeff Clapper, and Michael Barron. The only regret being that no pictures were taken!

The day before the party, Quinn, Soo Jin Oh, and Michael met with Quinn’s Cuban landlord for a lesson on how to make a quick mojito using a homemade yet premade mix. Eighty limes were juiced, a sizable quantity of mint from Michael’s garden was stripped from stem, and these ingredients, combined with sugar, were blended to make the mix. Our recipe:

The New Directions Mojito

What you need:

1 lime
3 sprigs of mint
1 teaspoon of brown sugar
¾ cup of club soda
1 shot of rum
3 cubes of ice

Pluck the mint leaves from the stems, add a teaspoon of sugar, and grind the leaves and sugar into a pulp with a mortar and pestle. Juice the lime, pour the juice into the mortar, and mix with the sugar mint pulp. Mix well. Once this is done, pour the mix into a drinking glass. Add ice, ¾ cup of club soda and a shot of rum. Stir. Garnish with mint leaves and/or lime wedge. Serve.

Our Halfway House party was a wonderful way to kick off the summer. And for those who weren’t able to make it, The Halfway House is an incredible and powerful summer book — one you might be thinking about well into the fall. To back up that statement, we’ve posted an excerpt on our site.


Awards

Evilio Rosero, author of the upcoming New Directions book The Armies, won the U.K.’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Each year, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize honors an outstanding work of fiction by a living author that has been translated into English from another language and published in the U.K. Half of the award goes to the translator. The judges praised Rosero for what the release called “a compelling and poignant portrait of a country and its people devastated by the violence of civil war.” The Armies will appear here in September.

Our poetry editor Jeffrey Yang won the 2009 PEN/Osterweil Award for Poetry for his debut collection, An Aquarium. The PEN/Osterweil Award for Poetry is a $5,000 award that recognizes the high literary character of a first published work and the promise of further literary achievement of a new and emerging American poet of any age. Poets are nominated by PEN members and may not have published more than one book of poetry. The award is made possible through a grant from The Kaplen Foundation. This year’s jurors were Chris Abani, Linda Gregg, and Matthew Zapruder.

William Carlos Williams was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. His award was presented to Daphne Fox Williams (his granddaughter) by Deborah Harry of Blondie. Other inductees included Jon Bon Jovi, Carl Sagan, and Abbott & Costello.


Miscellany

A selection from Dunya Mikhail's Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea was featured as "Poem of the Day" by poets. org.

Recently twittered from @NewDirections: "load the Oppen CD into your iPod - somewhere between Ol'Dirty Bastard & Otis Redding, and allow it to shuffle: http://...com/csgq4h

Light Reading: New Directions translator Susan Bernofsky (translator of Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck) wrote a fun article on the reception of Donald Duck translations in Germany for the Wall Street Journal.

The ND blogosphere; ND author Jerome Rothenberg continues to regularly update his online blog/magazine/anthology Poems and Poetics. Visit it here to see the latest updates.

 

NEW TITLES

Last summer, ND broke from tradition and brought out new titles all summer long. We just may have started another tradition, because this summer we're at it again, with new titles from authors including Roberto Bolaño, Robert Walser, Inger Christensen, and more. Click on the links below for more information, including an excerpt from each book that can be read online or downloaded as a pdf. Happy summer reading!

JUNE BOOKS

Eliot Weinberger
Oranges & Peanuts for Sale
Essays
Paperbook w/ French Flaps
978-0-8112-1834-1, $16.95

Many of the twenty-eight essays in Oranges & Peanuts for Sale have appeared in translation in seventeen countries; some have never been published in English before. They include introductions for books of avant-garde poets; collaborations with visual artists; and articles for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and October.

“In this brave new literature, a chaos of images, characters and stories swirls like electrons around a nucleus. They bond with other images and fall apart again, down through the ages.” —Los Angeles Times


Nathanael West
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of The Locust
Novel
New Introduction by Jonathan Lethem
978-0811218221, $11.95

“West, a parodist with rancid genius, achieved his masterwork in Miss Lonelyhearts.” —Harold Bloom

“The Day of the Locust has scenes of extraordinary power.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The Day of the Locust is brilliant, savage and arresting—a truly great novel.” —Dorothy Parker


JULY BOOKS

Inger Christensen
Azorno
Novel
Translated by Denise Newman
978-0-8112-1657-9, $13.95

“[Christensen] manages to make wit, passion and questioning and astonishing design serve each other’s ends as one, and she does it in a way that is utterly her own.” —W. S. Merwin

“Inger Christensen inspires awe in supple figures of bodily experience, and of social and sexual interaction.” —The Believer


Jorge Luis Borges
Seven Nights
Essays
Translated by Eliot Weinberger
978-0811218382, $12.95
 
“I could live under a table reading Borges.” –Roberto Bolaño

“This wonderful little book serves to remind us again that Jorge Luis Borges is one of the greatest literary miracles of all time.” —Publishers Weekly

“Listening, via the printed word, to these relaxed and yet highly explicit discourses, one realizes that never again will there be a mind and memory stocked just this way.” —John Updike, The New Yorker


Nina Berberova
Billancourt Tales
Stories
Translated by Mirian Schwartz
978-0-8112-1833-7, $13.95

“The thirteen stories of Billancourt Tales are closely observed, potently phrased and dapperly shaped . . . . Marian Schwartz’s English translation defly captures the fanciful twists and turns of Berberova’s imagination . . . . Indispensable.” —New York Times Book Review
 
“We have these stories, and for the lives they commemorate and the particular time and place they so keenly preserve, we cherish them.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Berberova is, quite simply, an imaginative writer of the highest distinction.” —(The London) Independent


Yoel Hoffman
Curriculum Vitae
Novel/Memoir
Translated by Peter Cole
978-0-8112-1832-0, $14.95
 
Yoel Hoffmann’s Curriculum Vitae is the remarkable summation of the writer’s life: his arrival in Palestine; childhood and youth; two marriages; fatherhood; his studies of Japanese Buddhism; his travels; his ever-busy inner life. Curriculum Vitae begins quietly but becomes more and more hypnotic and amazing. 
 
“The most interesting and experimental novelist in Israel.” —Review Of Contemporary Fiction
 
“Hoffmann writes in a language of miracles.” —American Book Review
 
“A reason to celebrate . . . Hoffmann shows himself to be an artist of the profoundly fantastic.” —Hadassah Magazine
 
“A writer of international importance . . . Hoffmann refracts Jewish popular lore and folk wisdom through a postmodernist prism, brightening his prose with snatches of verse, songs, diary excerpts, letters, ominous dreams, lush erotic passages and Yiddish sayings.” —Publishers Weekly



AUGUST BOOKS

Roberto Bolaño
The Skating Rink
Novel
Translated by Chris Andrews
978-0-8112-1713-2, $21.95
 
“He is by far the most exciting writer to come from South of the Rio Grande in a long time.” —Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times
 
“When I read Bolaño, I think: everything is possible again . . . . How he makes one laugh! The laughter of someone who just escaped being buried live, and suddenly remembers how badly she wants to live.” —Nicole Krauss
 
“Lucid fury . . . is a pretty good description of Bolaño’s aesthetic. He is a novelist of voraciousness without sentiment, hardness to a fever pitch.” —Todd Shy, San Francisco Chronicle


Robert Walser
The Tanners
Novel
Translated by Susan Bernofsky
Introduction by W.G. Sebald
978-0-8112-1589-3, $24.95
 
TIME OUT NEW YORK’S READ FOR SUMMER 2009
 
The Tanners, Robert Walser’s amazing 1907 novel of twenty chapters, is now presented in English for the very first time, by the award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. “A clairvoyant of the small,” W. G. Sebald calls Robert Walser, one of his favorite writers, in his acutely beautiful, personal, and long introduction, studded with his signature use of photographs.
 
“The incredible shrinking writer is a major twentieth-century prose artist who...can be placed in that comic tradition [that] runs from Gogol through Kafka and down to José Saramago . . . . When Walser met Lenin in Zurich during the war, all he had to say was ‘So you, too, like fruitcake?’ . . . It is remarkable to see what variety and richness what easiness and charm, what winsome inanities and philosophical depths he could pack into half a page.” —Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker


Alvin Levin
Love Is Like Park Avenue
Collected Writings
Preface by John Ashbery
978-0-8112-1799-6, $13.95
 
In Love Is Like Park Avenue, Alvin Levin reveals that part of New York society that lived in the Bronx but longed to be in the shadow of skyscrapers — with the dance bands, celebrities, and socialites; his characters create a mirror world of love and sex. This fascinating compendium of Levin’s writings offers a look at the career of an “outsider artist” who was never able to finish a long novel, yet whose fragments are of heartbreaking intensity and amazing social scope.

“Scabrous scenes of family feuding in the Bronx and crowded Coney Island Beaches come at you with the leering verve of Reginald Marsh’s drawings and Paul Cadmus’ quasi-pornographic paintings.” —John Ashbery, from the Preface
 
“Brilliant.” —Tennessee Williams


Jimmy Santiago Baca
Selected Poems/Poemas Selectos
Translated from the English to the Spanish by
Tomás H. Lucero and Liz Werner
Introduction by Ilan Stavans
Bilingual Edition
978-0-8112-1816-0, $ 16.95
 
“Baca writes with unconcealed passion . . . and manifests both an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythical and archetypal significance of life events.”
—Denise Levertov
 
“Martin & Meditations on the South Valley is a first-rate literary tour de force.”
—Andrei Codrescu
 
“In Spring Poems Baca writes with a green honesty—expanding and integrating the physical world with concerns of the soul. I love this book.” —Li-Young Lee



The Intern as Artist

This past May we decided to give some of our interns cover design work for books available via print-on-demand. The results have been pretty fresh and spectacular — good job guys! See the covers on our website.

MAY 2009 NEWSLETTER

Myspace has been doing funny things to our html, so if you want the real version (with pictures & links) please visit our website:
http://www.ndpublishing.com/newsletter.html

NEWS & EVENTS :

- New Directions Party!

- Awards and Updates: Rabassa, Silver, Bolaño, Bernofsky

- New Directions Blogs

- Photographs of poems

- Readings: Michael McClure in Berkeley; Bernadette Mayer in NYC

FEATURE:

- A discussion with bookseller Michael Fox of Joseph Fox Bookshop

NEW TITLES:

Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas

Yoko Tawada, The Naked Eye

Guillermo Rosales, The Halfway House

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:

www.ndpublishing.com

POSTERS FOR SALE!
Posters originally made for colleges and universities can now be ordered from us directly by mail, while supplies last. The posters are free, but please send $3 per poster (check or money order only) to cover postage and handling to: New Directions, 80 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10011. Please indicate clearly which poster you wish to purchase.

James Laughlin w/American Poets (JLA)

International Literature on Airmail Envelope (ILAE)

Tennessee Williams Playbill (TWP)

Roberto Bolaño Broadside (RBB)

 

 

   
NEWS & EVENTS

New Directions Party!

On Thursday, May 21st, New Directions will have a Cuban-themed party to celebrate the publication of The Halfway House, by Cuban-American author Guillermo Rosales. A starred review in Publishers Weekly called the novel a "frightening, nihilistic cousin of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." The party will take place in Idlewild Bookstore at 7:00 pm. There will be a Cuban band performing, mojitos will be served, and copies of the book will be sold.

Idlewild Books is located at 12 W. 19th Street.


Awards and Updates

Gregory Rabassa has received the first ever Thorton Wilder Prize for Translation ($20,000) from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. The Thorton Wilder Prize is awarded to “a practitioner, scholar, or patron who has made a significant contribution to the art of literary translation.” Rabassa’s translations include Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. New Directions publishes his memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents.

"If translators are the anonymous heroes of contemporary literature, its anonymous superhero is Gregory Rabassa.” –The New York Times Book Review

Katherine Silver won the Northern California Book Award for her translation of El Salvadoran author Horacio Castellanos Moya's novel Senselessness, which is published by New Directions. Castellanos Moya's new book, The She-Devil in the Mirror, will be out in September.

Castellanos Moya will be participating in the PEN World Voices Festival; the schedule can be found on our website.

Guernica magazine interviewed Castellanos Moya on his work, his life as a writer-in-exile and El Salvadoran politics.

Roberto Bolaño’s The Romantic Dogs was number three on the Indie Next poetry bestseller list in April.

“Roberto Bolaño’s star is so ascendant right now that there is no need for me to point out anything but his name on the cover of this book. Let me simply say that Bolaño was a poet before he was ever a novelist, and it shows here. The work is insouciant, literary, and historically nihilistic. It’s been one of my favorite books of the past year.” –Dustin Kurtz, McNally Jackson Books, New York, NY

Susan Bernofsky (now online here!) will be on the faculty at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre from June 8 - 27. An excerpt from her translation of Robert Walser's The Tanners (due out in August from ND) will be published in The Brooklyn Rail in May. In addition, an essay by Yoko Tawada in Bernofsky's translation, "The Translator’s Gate, or Celan Reads Japanese" will come out in Mantis Journal, a publication of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University. Tawada's article is a brilliant reading of the Japanese translations of Celan.


New Directions Blogs

We are happy to announce that New Directions has not one, but two blogs.

“Cantos” is a blog that focuses on New Directions publishing activities. The first post previews future publications of James Laughlin’s work.

The second, "New Directions Poetry," is a blog that focuses on New Directions and poetry in a wider context. The latest post is a transcript of Amy Goodman's interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Please visit us online and check out both blogs. Comments are highly encouraged.


Photographs of poems

Poets.org hosted a contest for the best photographed first line of a poem. William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow was among the sixteen winners. A witty visual rendering of a dirty red wheelbarrow with “so much depends on a red wheelbarrow” fingered through the dirt can be found here:

The full feature is definitely worth checking out.

 

Readings: Michael McClure in Berkeley; Bernadette Mayer in NYC

Poet Michael McClure will be performing along with Saxophonist George Brooks, Drummer Scott Amendola, Contra Bassist Chris Lopes

Sunday, May 3, at Jazzschool, 2087 Addison St., Berkeley CA @ 4:30 pm. $15.00.

Bernadette Mayer will be reading at No Idea Bar (30 E. 20th St., NYC) as part of the Ladder Poetry Reading Series, on Sunday, May 10 at 6pm. Her latest book Poetry State Forest was published last fall by ND.
FEATURE


A discussion with bookseller Michael Fox

So many readers begin a passionate love of books in the aisles of good bookstores. In recognition of that intimate relationship, this occasional column will feature bookstores around the nation whose shelves are filled with the books that spark a lifelong devotion to great reads.

Joseph Fox Bookshop is a beautiful independent bookstore in downtown Philadelphia that first opened in 1951 and is still owned by the family. It has a wonderful selection of literature, children's books, music, art, poetry, and a particularly noteworthy architecture section suitable for a city that was home to Frank Furness. Along with the intimate feel of the small bookstore, one of the great joys of browsing at Joseph Fox is the knowledgeable and friendly staff there that is always ready to discuss books and to make thoughtful recommendations. Michael Fox, the current owner, discussed with New Directions’ Soo Jin Oh Joseph Fox’s longstanding relationship to New Directions, his favorite books, and reminisced about his father, Joseph Fox.

SJO: I recall from our conversations several years back and recently that James Laughlin himself used to stop by and sell books to the store half a century ago. Could you regale us with some anecdotes about Laughlin, New Directions and Joseph Fox back then?

MF: In June, 1951, my father visited James Laughlin and arranged for a backlist consignment plan. I have both the cover letter and the first page of the order. [See below.] I also have a copy of the explanatory page and the inscription page of a limited edition of a small book of poems (3” X 4”) signed by James Laughlin to my father. New Directions was important to him because of the quality of the list and they were displayed together for quite a while. ND is still important to the store!

SJO: Having grown up in a bookselling family, what are your fondest memories of books? Do you have a particularly favorite New Directions book? And what is your favorite book in general?

MF: My fondest memory of books is my father’s love and passion for them. He struggled through the depression, served in World War II, never even finished High School but his passion for good books caused him to open the store and not a night would go by that he didn’t find time to read into the late hours. I don’t have that luxury.

My favorite “book” of all time is Plato’s Gorgias – it taught me the difference between rhetoric or what is persuasive and what is right or good. I like reading a wide range of books. I have recently read and enjoyed Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day – a whopping good epic story about race and baseball and politics earlier in the century that resounds today and Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.

SJO: What is your proudest accomplishment as a bookseller?

MF: My proudest accomplishment as a bookseller is staying in business under the onslaught of the chains and online competition while maintaining the integrity of the bookshop. The shop is at the center, but I have made the bookstore into the center of just about all the good author events in Philadelphia and developed a nice spinoff from this by selling signed books.

 

Corrections and Updates

* The publication date for Robert Walser’s The Tanners with introduction by W.G. Sebald has been moved from May to August.

** The publication of William Carlos Williams: An American Dad has been delayed; it should be out sometime in the summer.

*** Last month we posted a feature on New Directions’ trip to Bulgaria. We incorrectly reported that the Big Read was hosted by the Bulgarian BBC. The Big Read was in fact produced by the BNT (Bulgarian National Television a.k.a Channel One) not the BBC (which someone at the office thought stood for Bulgarian Broadcasting Channel). The Big Read was responsible for filiming New Directions’ office as well as interviewing Declan Spring and Michael Barron for its program. Georgi Tenev is not actively employed by Channel One despite being the guest host for the Big Read. Separate but related was the Altera Forum 2009, sponsored by Channel One and hosted by Altera Publishing House. Georgi was responsible for the bringing New Directions to Bulgaria to participate in Atlera Forum 2009.
NEW TITLES


Roberto Bolaño
Nazi Literature in the Americas
New in paper
978-0-8112-1794-1, $13.95

“A key cosmology to Bolaño’s literary universe” (Francisco Goldman), Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as an encyclopedia of extremely right-wing Pan-American writers (the nations with the most representatives are Argentina, with eight, and the USA, with seven). Nazi Literature describes, in fourteen thematic sections, the writers’ lives, politics, and literary works. It includes bibliographies, cross-references, and an epilogue (“For Monsters”). Although the writers are invented, they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds: his characters encounter Allen Ginsberg, Octavio Paz, and Lezama Lima.

Remarkably inventive, chilling, and witty, Nazi Literature in the Americas offers keen insights into the workings of an extraordinarily fecund literary imagination and has been acclaimed “exceptionally entertaining” (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World). “At once funny, furious, and frightening, Nazi Literature in the Americas,” is, as Michael Saler expressed it in the London TLS, “brilliantly conceived.”

“Nazi Literature in the Americas, a wicked invented encyclopedia of imaginary facist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges’s wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right litterateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth, and the great lost hope.”
—Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review

“Those who want to revel in picaresque writing charged with hilarity and irony . . . will find this book enjoyable, if that’s the right word for watching a parade of monsters go by.”
—Carmen Boullosa, The Nation


Yoko Tawada
The Naked Eye
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
978-0-8112-1739-2, $13.95

A precocious Vietnamese high school student — known as the pupil with “the iron blouse” — in Ho Chi Minh City is invited to an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. But, in East Berlin, as she is preparing to present her paper in Russian on “Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism,” she is abruptly kidnapped and taken to a small town in West Germany. After a strange spell of domestic-sexual boredom with her lover-abductor — and though “the Berlin Wall was said to be more difficult to break through than the Great Wall of China” — she escapes on a train to Moscow . . . but mistakenly arrives in Paris. Alone, broke, and in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) loses herself in the films of Catherine Deneuve as her real adventures begin.

Dreamy, meditative, and filled with the gritty everyday perils of a person living somewhere without papers (at one point Anh is subjected to some vampire-like skin experiments), The Naked Eye is a novel that is as surprising as it is delightful — each of the thirteen chapters titled after and framed by one of Deneuve’s films. “As far as I was concerned,” the narrator says while watching Deneuve on the screen, “the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist.” By the time 1989 comes along and the Iron Curtain falls, story and viewer have morphed into the dislocating beauty of both dancer and dance.

“Tawada’s slender accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency.”
—Michael Porter, The New York Times

“Her finest stories dramatize the fate of the individual in a mobilized world.”
—Benjamin Lytal, The New York Sun

“Tawada’s chilling evocations of disorientation are the peers of Paul Bowles’ most chilling stories.”
—Booklist


Guillermo Rosales
The Halfway House
Preface by José Manuel Prieto
Translated by Anna Kushner
978-0-8112-1802-3, $14.95

Never before available in English, The Halfway House is a trip to the darkest corners of the human condition. Humiliations, filth, stench, and physical abuse comprise the asphyxiating atmosphere of a halfway house for indigents in Miami where, in a shaken mental state, the writer William Figueras lives after his exile from Cuba. He claims to have gone crazy after the Cuban government judged his first novel “morose, pornographic, and also irreverent, because it dealt harshly with the Communist Party,” and prohibited its publication. By the time he arrives in Miami twenty years later, he is a “toothless, skinny, frightened guy who had to be admitted to a psychiatric ward that very day” instead of the ready-for-success exile his relatives expected to welcome and receive among them. Placed in a halfway house, with its trapped bestial inhabitants and abusive overseers, he enters a hell. Romance appears in the form of Frances, a mentally fragile woman and an angel, with whom he tries to escape in this apocalyptic classic of Cuban literature.

“Behind the hardly one hundred pages,” Canarias Diario stated, “is the work of a tireless fabulist, a writer who delights in language, extracting verbs and adjectives which are powerful enough to stop the reader in his tracks.”

“This posthumous translation of Rosales, a Cuban-American writer who committed suicide in 1993, delivers a raw, powerful story set in a Miami home for the mentally ill... It’s a frightening, nihilistic cousin of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred review)

“Confronting an impassive world, Guillermo Rosales has left us this painful, violent, and lyrical testament.”
—Le Figaro

“It seems almost impossible to find so much cruelty in barely one hundred pages; but it’s just that behind these terrible and moving one hundred pages there are thousands of pages, millions of sentences, that reveal an entirely destroyed universe. Indispensable.”
—Revista Leer


Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poetry as Insurgent Art
Rerelease
978-0-8112-1719-4, $12.95

Since publishing Coney Island of the Mind (1958), Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been the poetic conscience of America. Now in Poetry as Insurgent Art, he offers a primer, in prose, of what poetry is, could be, and should be. If you read poetry, find out what is missing from the usual fare you are served; if you are a poet, read at your own risk—you will never again look at your role in the same way.

A fanbook page for Poetry As Insurgent Art that is almost 250 members strong can be found on Facebook.

©2009 by New Directions Publishing Corp.

..NEW DIRECTIONS PUBLISHING CORP...........