SEPTEMBER 2009 NEWSLETTER

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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.