New Directions: 473 books

The centennial edition of William Carlos Williams’s early ground-breaking volume, containing some of his best-loved poems Published in 1917 by The Four Seas Press, Al Que Quiere! was William Carlos Williams’s breakthrough book and contains some of his best-loved poems (“Tract,” “Apology,”...

A master class from the exhilarating writer Julio Cortázar “I want you to know that I’m not a critic or theorist, which means that in my work I look for solutions as problems arise.” So begins the first of eight classes that the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar delivered at UC...

A phenomenally unusual three-way murder mystery. With a murder at its heart, Roberto Bolaño’s The Skating Rink is, among other things, a crime novel. Murder seems to have exerted a fascination for the endlessly talented Bolaño, who in his last interview, according to The Observer, “declared,...

Three friends in a small Egyptian city celebrate idleness, elegance, and joie de vivre. Summoned home to Egypt after a long European debauch (disguised as “study”), our hero Teymour—in the opening line of A Splendid Conspiracy—is feeling “as unlucky as a flea on a bald man’s head.”...

This late collection, written in the last years of H.D.'s life, is a testament to the fine ear and mythic sense of a poet who is now recognized as one of the greatest of her generation. H. D.’s (Hilda Doolittle, 1884-1961) late poems of search and longing represent the mature achievement...

***End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound *is the deeply personal journal kept by the poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle. 1886-1961) in 1958, the year Ezra Pound was released from St. Elizabeth's in Washington, D.C., and returned to Italy. H. D., hospitalized in Switzerland from a fall, was urged to put...

"Like every major artist she challenges the reader's intellect and imagination."—Boston Herald Selected Poems, the first selection to encompass the rich diversity of Hilda Doolittle's poetry, is both confirmation and celebration of her long-overdue inclusion in the modernist canon....

From the winner of the Griffin Prize, a richly lyrical collection of poems exploring the body’s minutiae In her first full-length collection published in the United States, Sylvia Legris probes and peels, carves and cleaves, amputates and dissects, to reveal the poetic potential of human...

For the first time in paperback-Levertov's recent poetry, showing her at the height of her literary powers. Sands of the Well, first published in hardcover in 1996, shows the poet at the height of her considerable powers, as she addresses the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest coastal landscape in terms of music, memory, aging, doubt, and faith.

Three mini-plays by the German wunderkind and asylum-dweller. Fairy Tales gathers the unconventional verse dramolettes of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Narrated in Walser's inimitable, playful language, these theatrical pieces overturn traditional notions of the fairy tale, transforming the...

Jacques Barzun's masterful translation proves that Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas—an acid catalogue of the clichés of 19th-century France—is as relevant today as ever. Throughout his life Flaubert made it a game to eavesdrop for the cliché, the platitude, the borrowed and unquestioned...

A small, furious masterpiece of dominance and submission. A pair of lovers—a young female journalist and an older man who owns an isolated farm in Brazil—spend the night together. The next day they proceed to destroy each other. Amid vitriolic insults and scorching cruelty, their sexual...

A gripping and hilarious 1960s Mexico City noir Only a couple of days before the state visit of the President of the United States, Filiberto García — an impeccably groomed "gun for hire," ex-Mexican revolutionary, and classic anti-hero — is recruited by the Mexican police to...

An exceptionally brilliant novel from “our most interesting writer” (Flannery O’Connor) Travesty is John Hawkes’s most extreme vision of eroticism and comic terror. In the south of France, an elegant sports car is speeding through the night, bearing a man, his daughter, and his best...