New Directions: 473 books

A compendium of spiritual guidance in a beautiful special edition. “Every moment and every event in every man’s life on Earth plants something in his soul,” wrote Thomas Merton. A Trappist monk, Merton was both a poet and a theologian who pondered monastic life. He was praised for his...

An essential compendium for understanding Gandhi's profound legacy. "One has to speak out and stand up for one's convictions. Inaction at a time of conflagration is inexcusable."—Mahatma Gandhi The basic principles of Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence (Ahimsa) and non-violent...

An intoxicating sui generis novel by “the greatest mesmerist of modern times” (André Breton) The wealthy scientist Martial Canterel guides a group of visitors through his expansive estate, Locus Solus, where he displays his various deranged inventions, each more spectacular than the last....

A literary thriller of heroin rings and headless bodies uncovers social ills and corruption in modern day Portugal, whileas in all of Tabucchi's workblurring genre boundaries. Antonio Tabucchi, Italy's premier writer and a best-selling author throughout Europe, draws together Manolo the gypsy,...

The Wisdom of the Desert was one of Thomas Merton's favorites among his own books—surely because he had hoped to spend his last years as a hermit. The personal tones of the translations, the blend of reverence and humor so characteristic of him, show how deeply Merton identified with the...

The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in 1949. "No synopsis conveys the quality of this now famous novel about an hallucinated Germany in collapse after World War II. John Hawkes, in his search for a means to transcend outworn modes of fictional realism, has discovered...

From early as the seventh century up to the present day, no other has had so many important women poets as Japan. In this collection (originally published by The Seabury Press in 1977 as The Burning Heart, Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi have assembled representative works of seventy-seven...

Three early stories of myth, regime, and harlotry by the acclaimed author of The Flamethrowers. An explorer’s whereabouts keeps a queen in waiting; a faith healer’s illegal radio broadcasts give hope to an oppressed people; a president’s offer of ice cream surprises a prostitute expecting...

Set during the advent of perestroika, a surreal, satirical novella by a critically acclaimed young Russian writer traces the fate of the passengers on The Yellow Arrow, a long-distance Russian train headed for a ruined bridge, a train without an end or a beginning--and it makes no stops. Andrei, the...

A book—rare in our arid age—that takes root in the heart and grows there for a lifetime. Here the spirituality of the East and the West have met in a novel that enfigures deep human wisdom with a rich and colorful imagination. Written in a prose of almost biblical simplicity and...

A deluxe edition of Bolano’s complete poetry Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolano touted poetry as the superior art form, able to approach an infinity in which “you become infinitely small without disappearing.” When asked, “What makes you believe you’re...

Over the years, Denise Levertov's poetry has moved ever more deeply into the realm of meditation, while yet speaking with the familiar voice of "the poet in the world." Oblique Prayers is arranged in four thematic sections that, taken together, work toward a mature philosophy in equal...

“Poetry is braver than anyone,” Roberto Bolan~o believed, and the proof is here in Tres, his most inventive and bracing poetry collection. Roberto Bolan~o’s Tres is a showcase of the author’s willingness to freely cross genres, with poems in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing...

A short collection of essays about the Jazz Age by the writer who epitomized it, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even theAmerican Heritage Dictionary acknowledges that F. Scott Fitzgerald “epitomized the Jazz Age.” And nowhere among his writings are the gin, pith, and morning-after squint of that...