Bøger udgivet af New Directions Publishing Corporation

Crazy, funny and gorgeously dark, Kornél Esti sets into rollicking action a series of adventures about a man and his wicked dopplegänger, who breathes every forbidden idea of his childhood into his ear, and then reappears decades later.Part Gogol, part Chekhov, and all brilliance, Kosztolányi in his final book serves up his most magical, radical, and intoxicating work. Here is a novel which inquires: What if your id (loyally keeping your name) decides to strike out on its own, cuts a disreputable swath through the world, and then sends home to you all its unpaid bills and ruined maidens? And then: What if you and your alter ego decide to write a book together?

Like the ancient colossus that stood over the harbor of Rhodes, Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi stands as a seminal classic in travel literature.  It has preceded the footsteps of prominent travel writers such as Pico Iyer and Rolf Potts. The book Miller would later cite as his favorite began with a young woman's seductive description of Greece. Miller headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell to explore the Grecian countryside: a flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach; the Greek poet Katsmbalis, the "colossus" of Miller's book, stirs every rooster within earshot of the Acropolis with his own loud crowing; cold hard-boiled eggs are warmed in a village's single stove, and they stay in hotels that "have seen better days, but which have an aroma of the past."

Extraordinarily funny, with the fresh eye of a visitor from another world, Stevie Smith is a poet to savor. Wielding a throwaway wit and the strangest irony,Stevie Smith was deeply read in the classics and yet sprinkled her poetry with delightful doodles. Her poems are often very dark; her characters are perpetually saying "goodbye" to their friends or welcoming death. At the same time her work has an eerie levity. Countless are her witty ways. The title of her first collection says it perfectly: A Good Time Was Had by All.I longed for companionship rather,But my companions I always wished farther.And now in the desolate nightI think only of people I should like to bite.

Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination - a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that coalesce in dramatic, energetic, and beautifully cryptic statements of how language re-creates the world. Spring and All contains some of Williams's best-known poetry, including Section I, which opens, "By the road to the contagious hospital," and Section XXII, where Williams penned his most famous poem, "The Red Wheelbarrow." Now, almost 90 years since its first publiction, New Directions publishes this facsimile of the original 1923 Contact Press edition, featuring a new introduction by C. D. Wright.

"What treasures of knowledge we cluster around." That This is a collection in three pieces. "Disappearance Approach," an essay about Howe's husband's sudden death-"land of darkness or darkness itself you shadow mouth"-begins the book with paintings by Poussin, an autopsy, Sarah Edwards and her sister-in-law Hannah, phantoms, and elusive remnants. "Frolic Architecture," the second section-inspired by visits to the vast 18th-century Jonathan Edwards archives at the Beinecke and accompanied by six photograms by James Welling-presents hauntingly lovely, oblique type-collages of Hannah Edwards Wetmore's diary entries that Howe (with scissors, "invisible" Scotch Tape, and a Canon copier) has twisted, flattened, and snipped into inscapes of force. The final section, "That This," delivers beautiful short squares of verse that might look at home in a hymnal, with their orderly appearance packing startling power:     That this book is a history of     a shadow that is a shadow of     Me mystically one in another     another another to subserve.

A sequence of one hundred and one poems with recurrent themes, it includes various sections on love, art, music, history, and literature, as well as confrontations with major figures in the avant-garde before the arrival of the Beat generation. This edition now includes eighteen new poems from Ferlinghetti's "Pictures of the Gone World" which he publishes under his City Lights imprint. A self-styled "stand-up tragedian," Ferlinghetti has been called "the foremost chronicler of our times." If A Coney Island of the Mind was a generations vibrant eye-opener, A Far Rockaway of the Heart is a wake-up call for a new age.

A powerful, surreal novel, in the tradition of Gogol, about the chaotic events surrounding the arrival of a circus in a small Hungarian town. The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, "is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type." And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, "lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds."

These Pulitzer Prize-winning poems and essays by the author of No Nature range from the lucid, lyrical, and mystical to the political. All, however, share a common vision: a rediscovery of North America and the ways by which we might become true natives of the land for the first time.

"As a poet," Snyder tells us, "I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying intuition and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe." He develops, as replacement for shattered social structures. a concept of tribal tradition which could lead to "growth and enlightenment in self-disciplined freedom. Whatever it is or ever was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious through meditation...the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past."

"Zen enriches no one," Thomas Merton provocatively writes in his opening statement to Zen and the Birds of Appetite-one of the last books to be published before his death in 1968. "There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while... but they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the 'nothing,' the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey." This gets at the humor, paradox, and joy that one feels in Merton's discoveries of Zen during the last years of his life, a joy very much present in this collection of essays. Exploring the relationship between Christianity and Zen, especially through his dialogue with the great Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki, the book makes an excellent introduction to a comparative study of these two traditions, as well as giving the reader a strong taste of the mature Merton. Never does one feel him losing his own faith in these pages; rather one feels that faith getting deeply clarified and affirmed. Just as the body of "Zen" cannot be found by the scavengers, so too, Merton suggests, with the eternal truth of Christ.

This radiant selection of Clarice Lispector's best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as "The Smallest Woman in the World,""Love," "Family Ties," and "The Egg and the Chicken." Lispector's luminous regard for life's small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume. Covert Joy offers the particular bliss a book can bring that she expresses in the title story: Joy would always be covert for me... Sometimes I'd sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy.I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover

Marcel Proust's genius for illuminating pain is on spectacular display in this recently discovered trove of his correspondence, Letters to His Neighbor. Already suffering from noise within his cork-lined walls, Proust's poor soul was not ready for the fresh hell of his new upstairs neighbor, Dr. Williams, a dentist with a thriving practice directly above his head.Chiefly to Mme Williams, these ever-polite letters (often accompanied by flowers, books, or compliments) are frequently hilarious--Proust couches his pained frustration in gracious eloquence. In Lydia Davis's hands, the digressive brilliance of his sentences shines: "Don't speak of annoying neighbors, but of neighbors so charming (an association of words contradictory in principle since Montesquiou claims that most horrible of all are 1: neighbors and 2: the smell of post offices) that they leave the constant tantalizing regret that one cannot take advantage of their neighborliness." Richly illustrated with facsimile letters and photographs, Letters to His Neighbor is catnip for lovers of Proust.

"To disrupt the relationship of predator and prey, to reshape one's relation to power, is to renovate the lived and living world," Elizabeth Willis writes in her visionary work that delves deep into the ancient enchantments and disciplinary displays of the circus. Liontaming in America investigates the utopian aspirations fleetingly enacted in the polyamorous life of a nineteenth-century Mormon community, interweaving archival and personal threads with the histories of domestic labor, extraction economies, and the performance of family in theater, film, and everyday life.Lines reverberate between worldliness and devotion, between Peter Pan and Close Encounters, between Paul Robeson and Maude Adams, between leaps of faith and passionate alliances, between everyday tragedy and imaginative social possibility. As Willis writes in her afterword to the book, "The repeated unmaking and remaking of America, as a concept and as an ongoing textual project, is not impossible. It is happening all the time."

A fictional thirty-something writer named Osamu Dazai has just mailed his publisher a terrible manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Shortly afterward, while moping around a park in suburban Tokyo, he spots a figure drowning in a nearby aqueduct.He doesn't want to become a witness to a suicide and eventually decides to flee the park. But as he is leaving, he trips over the boy who had been drowning, and the two begin an unlikely conversation that turns into an intellectual spat. Hoping to ingratiate himself with the boy--a high-school dropout--Dazai finds himself agreeing to perform that very night as the live narrator of a film screening in the boy's stead...So begins the madcap adventure of The Beggar Student, where there is glamor in destitution and glimmerings of truth in intellectual one-upmanship. Replete with settings straight out of the popular anime Bungo Stray Dogs and echoes of the themes in No Longer Human, this biting novella captures the infamous Japanese writer at his mordant best.

At the end of the 1980s, a writer on a book tour, who very much resembles Grass, passes through East Germany and visits the Cathedral of Naumburg with its famous twelve donor statues. He invites the sculptor's models to dinner--and they come, not as ghosts, but as they were when alive in the thirteenth century. Toward the end of dinner, after drinking an icy Coca-Cola, the model for the famed beauty Uta von Naumburg declares she has to go to work: a living statue.As he continues touring around Europe, the writer looks for Uta and her donation basket outside every cathedral he passes. At last, in Frankfurt, he sees her in front of Deutsche Bank and the two have a meeting with staggering consequences. As Grass said, "on paper everything is possible," and in this tale he gleefully erases the line between life and death, present and past.

"A bullet / then a siren / then ruins / then a bird song telling the truth"--Dunya Mikhail In her marvelous new poetry collection Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, Dunya Mikhail transforms the world's first symbols--Sumerian glyphs that were carved onto clay tablets--into the matter of our everyday contemporary life. Each of the ten sections in her book is composed of twenty-four short poems, and each poem combines both text and drawing. In her note to the collection, Mikhail writes, "I practiced at least two layers of translation in these tablets: the first from words in one language, Arabic, to another, English; and the second from words to images. What I received from my ancestors are offerings of the future rather than of the past. Now it's my turn to offer them to you."

Mojave Ghost initiates an unusually tender bond with the reader as it chronicles an intimate relationship with arresting honesty and vividness. Moving through grief and loss towards a renewal that never sidesteps the wholeness of experience, Gander's new collection discovers an articulate language for the merging of exterior and interior landscapes. Gander, trained as a geologist, walked along much of the 800-mile San Andreas fault toward the desolate town of his birth, and found himself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating his emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions: the fractures and folds underlying not only our country, but any self in its relationship with others. The result is this moving new collection that unforgettably describes a spiritual and physical journey. With its confidential tones and candid self-examination, Mojave Ghost is Gander's most inviting and poignant book yet.

It's hard to believe there could be a more enjoyable novel than Scattered All Over the Earth--Yoko Tawada's rollicking, touching, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship and climate change--but surprising her readers is what Tawada does best: its sequel, Suggested in the Stars, delivers exploits even more poignant and shambolic.As Hiruko--whose Land of Sushi has vanished into the sea and who is still searching for someone who speaks her mother tongue--and her new friends travel onward, they begin opening up to one another in new and extraordinary ways. They try to help their friend Susanoo regain his voice, both for his own good and so he can speak with Hiruko--and amid many often hilarious misunderstandings (some linguistic in nature)--they empower each other against despair. Coping with carbon footprint worries but looping singly and in pairs, they hitchhike, take late-night motorcycle rides, and hop on the train (learning about railway strikes but also packed-train-yoga) to convene in Copenhagen. There they find Susanoo in a strange hospital working with a scary speech-loss doctor. In the half-basement of this weird medical center (with strong echoes of Lars von Trier's 1990s TV series The Kingdom), they also find two special kids washing dishes. They discover magic radios, personality swaps, ship tickets delivered by a robot, and other gifts. But friendship--loaning one another the nerve and heart to keep going--sets them all (and the reader) to dreaming of something more... Suggested in the Stars delivers new delights, and Yoko Tawada's famed new trilogy will conclude in 2025 with Archipelago of the Sun, even if nobody will ever want this "strange, exquisite" (The New Yorker) trip to end.

The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth.Book II of Solvej Balle's astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language.And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara's own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? "It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea." She begins to think of herself as a relic of the past, as something or someone leftover, similar to the little Roman coin she carries around in her pocket, without a purpose or a place.Desperate to recover a sense of herself within time, Tara decides to head north by train in search of winter, but soon she turns south in pursuit of spring, as she tries to grasp on to durational time through seasonal variations. Amazingly, On the Calculation of Volume Book II is all movement and motion--taking us through the European countries of the North and the South, through seasons, and languages--a beautiful travelogue that is also a love letter to our vanishing world. To be continued.

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: "That's how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.")Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.The first volume's gravitational pull--a force inverse to its constriction--has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.Solvej Balle's seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle's fiction consists of writing that listens. "Reading her is like being caressed by language itself."

The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler's adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so, he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Otherwise, he works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner and also a one-room apartment in the small eastern German town of Kana. The Boss is enraged by a graffiti artist who, with wolf emblems, is defacing all the various monuments to Johann Sebastian Bach in Thuringia. A Bach fanatic and director of an amateur orchestra, he is determined to catch the culprit with the help of his gang, and Florian has no choice but to join the chase. The situation becomes even more frightening, and havoc ensues, when real wolves are sighted in the area...Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai's novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a devastating encapsulation of our helplessness when confronted with the moral and environmental dilemmas we face.

Here, in English at last, is a collection of Ágota Kristóf's short-sometimes very short-stories, which she selected herself, translated by the peerless Chris Andrews. Written immediately before her masterful trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), Kristof's short fictions oscillate between parable, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone, often returning to the theme of exile: the twin impossibilities of returning home and of reconstructing home elsewhere.The world of the book has very hard edges: cruelty is almost omnipresent, peace and consolation are scarce. Austere and minimalist, but with a poetic force that shifts the walls in the reader's mind, Kristof's penetrating short fictions make for extraordinary and essential reading.

How splendid and impressive to have a complete, clear, and unobstructed view of Denise Levertov. Covering more than six decades and including, chronologically, every poem she ever published, Levertov's Collected Poems presents her marvelous, groundbreaking work in full.Born in England, Denise Levertov emigrated in 1948 to the United States, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times as "the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving." A staunch anti-war activist and environmentalist, and the winner of the Robert Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lannan Prize, Denise Levertov inspired generations of writers. New Directions is proud to publish this landmark collected poems of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets.

A major discovery: Tanizaki's wonderful final novel--now in English

In this fiercely original and audacious work, George Steiner tells of seven books which he did not write. Because intimacies and indiscretions were too threatening. Because the topic brought too much pain. Because its emotional or intellectual challenge proved beyond his capacities. The actual themes range widely and defy conventional taboos: the torment of the gifted when they live among-when they confront-the very great; the experience of sex in different languages; a love for animals greater than for human beings; the costly privilege of exile; a theology of emptiness. Yet a unifying perception underlies this diversity. The best we have or can produce is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind every good book, as in a lit shadow, lies the book which remained unwritten, the one that would have failed better.

In Cape of Storms, Nina Berberova portrays a very specific generation--one born in Russia, displaced by the Revolution, and trying to adapt to a new home, Paris. Three sisters--Dasha, Sonia, and Zai--share the same father, Tiagen, an attractive, weak-willed, womanizing White Russian, but each thinks differently about her inner world of beliefs and aspirations, and consequently each follows a different path. Dasha marries and leaves for a bourgeois expatriate life in colonial Africa. Zai, the youngest, and an appealing adolescent, flirts with becoming an actress or a poet. Sonia, the middle daughter, completes a university degree but falls victim to a shocking tragedy. Cape of Storms is a shattering book that opens with a hair-raising scene in which Dasha witnesses her mother's murder at the hands of Bolshevik thugs, and ends with the Blitzkrieg sweeping toward Paris. It is unparalleled in Berberova's work for its many shifts of mood and viewpoint and secures the author's place as "Chekhov's most vital inheritor" (Boston Review).

In the carefully controlled, homogenized future society evoked in innovative German writer Martin Grzimek's new novel, Shadowlife, the patterned lives of the characters turn out to be anything but orderly and serene. Ostensibly the perfect bureaucrat, Felix Seyner, top interviewer for the Central Institute for Biographics, writes a long letter to his old love, Felicitas, explaining himself and his choice of the CIB over their relationship. Her reply calls into question the truth of almost everything Felix has revealed. An appended report from the "reliable" government security forces puts yet another spin on the events. In a world where national distinctions have been washed away by an undefined ecological cataclysm, the characters struggle to find identity by both exploiting the system and simultaneously subverting it. As a guide to our collective future, Shadowlife is intriguing, disquieting, and blackly amusing.

"The menace of surrealism was so frequently advertised that any reader of this book should be allowed the impudence of demanding my credentials." So opens Wayne Andrews's The Surrealist Parade, a portrait of the movement in literature and art by a man who, at the age of nineteen, began to correspond with its major figures and afterward came to know them well. Under the name of Montagu O'Reilly, Andrews wrote the surrealist fiction Pianos of Sympathy (1936), the very first New Directions book. In later years, Andrews became a social historian, art archivist, and scholar of architectural history, publishing no less than sixteen books, among them his well-known study of the cultural roots of Nazism, Siegfried's Curse, and a pungent biography of Voltaire (meanwhile, Montagu O'Reilly had made a reappearance on the ND list in 1948 with Who Has Been Tampering with These Pianos?). When Andrews died in 1987, he had completed all but the last chapter of The Surrealist Parade, his portrait of a movement in art and literature that took in such disparate temperaments as André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Salvador Dalí. The book is, in the words of his lifelong friend and publisher, James Laughlin, a "little insider's history... Montagu is very much behind Wayne in these caustic yet admiring sketches."