New Directions: 473 books

An inspiring gift-edition of poetry and prose from the world's favorite monk-poet In this day of mindless distraction, we’re desperate for reasons to put down our phones and reconnect with our spiritual selves. In time for the 50th anniversary of Thomas Merton's death in 1968, Silence, Joy...

“The very content of Owen’s poems was, and still is, pertinent to the feelings of young men facing death and the terrors of war.” —The New York Times Book Review Wilfred Owen was twenty-two when he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifle Corps during World War I. By the time Owen was killed...

Wonderful short stories that sharpen awareness, from a brilliantly gifted Syrian refugee Personified animals (snakes, wolves, sheep), natural things (a swamp, a lake, a rainbow, trees), mankind’s creations (trucks, swords, zeroes) are all characters in The Teeth of the Comb. They aspire,...

While her father and best friend are dying, a young American woman tries to find the limits of love and the power of art in the face of the inevitable. What is the power of art in the face of death? In The Art Lover Carole Maso has created an elegant and moving narrative about a woman experiencing...

“The German Lesson marks a double triumph––a book of rare depth and brilliance, to begin with, presented in an English version that succeeds against improbable odds in conveying the full power of the original.” —Ernst Pawel, New York Times Book Review Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as...

A collection of poems by the renowned Beat poet, Gregory Corso. Gregory Corso's collection of poems contains works of major proportions. The title poem is a tribute to Jack Kerouac, fusing a memorial to the poet's dead friend with a bitter lament for the present state of America. The second...

The 423 verses in the collection known as The Dhammapada (pada: "the way"; dhamma: "the teaching"; hence, "The Path of Truth") are attributed to the Buddha himself and form the essence of the ethics of Buddhist philosophy. There are a number of English translations...

This new translation of Clarice Lispector's sensational first book tells the story of a middle class woman's life from childhood through an unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence. Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer...

In paperback, Clarice Lispector’s explosive and surprising second novel The Chandelier, written when Lispector was only twenty-three, reveals a very different author from the college student whose debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, announced the landfall of “Hurricane Clarice.” Virginia...

At last, a noir novel from the Argentine master of suspense and surprises Maxi, a middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires’s shantytown, attracts the attention of a corrupt, trigger-happy policeman who will use anyone — including two innocent...

An exciting new collection of the essential writings of surrealism, the European avant-garde movement of the mind’s deepest powers Originating in 1916 with the avant-garde Dada movement at the famous Café Voltaire in Zurich, surrealism aimed to unleash the powers of the creative act without...

The hauntingly beautiful epistolary novel from “a glowing light of modern Italian literature” (New York Times Book Review) At the heart of Happiness, as Such is an absence—an abyss that pulls everyone to its brink—created by a family’s only son, Michele, who has fled from Italy to...

Two completely different stories by the inimitable César Aira The Little Buddhist Monk is a story of Asian invention gone wild, as a diminutive Korean Buddhist monk acts as a tour guide to an increasingly distraught French couple on a working vacation in the Far East. The Proof brings us quickly...

Castellanos Moya’s most thrilling book to date, about the senselessness of tyranny. The tyrant of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s ambitious new novel is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Herna´ndez Marti´nez — known as the Warlock — who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted...