New Directions: 473 books

“This is a fine, bilingual edition of the works of one of the great French Surrealists. . . . The translations, by several hands, serve Char well—full of insinuating rhythms and unusual verbal couplings, they come close to the piercing beauty of the originals.” —Pat Monaghan, Booklist The...

The ancestors have awakened. Somebody has called them. The long-dead are stirring. Jah ways are mysterious ways. “Is me—Bob. Bob Marley.” Reincarnated as homeless Fall-down man, Bob Marley sleeps in a clock tower built on the site of a lynching in Half Way Tree, Kingston. The ghosts of...

Nature writings by one of America’s greatest poets, written out of a deep experience of the Sierras. Over the course of his life, Kenneth Rexroth wrote about the Sierra Nevada better than anyone. Progressive in terms of environmental ethics and comparable to the writings of Emerson, Thoreau,...

Cocteau's novel Les Enfants Terribles, which was first published in 1929, holds an undisputed place among the classics of modern fiction. Written in a French style that long defied successful translation—Cocteau was always a poet no matter what we was writing—the book came into its own...

Ema The Captive, César Aira’s second novel, is perhaps closest in style to his popular An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and The Hare In nineteenth-century Argentina, Ema, a delicate woman of indeterminate origins, is captured by soldiers and taken, along with with her newborn...

A private meeting, chance encounters, and a mysterious tour of Lisbon, in this brilliant homage to Fernando Pessoa. In this enchanting and evocative novel, Antonio Tabucchi takes the reader on a dream-like trip to Portugal, a country he is deeply attached to. He spent many years there as director...

A cerebral and wildly funny story revolving around the incongruity of a gold Rolex watch spotted on a lowly goatherd’s wrist Daily conversations in outdoor cafés with cultured friends can help make reality a little more real. Unfortunately, however, during one such conversation, one man...

A great introduction to the religions of the East by a monk from the West. Merton’s biographer, George Woodcock, once wrote that “almost from the beginning of his monastic career, Thomas Merton tentatively began to discover the great Asian religions of Buddhism and Taoism.” Merton, a...

This collection of his prose writings reveals the extent to which Thomas Merton moved from the other-worldly devotion of his earlier work to a direct, deeply engaged, often militant concern with the critical situation of man in the world. Here this concern finds expression in poetic irony and...

A mystical dialogue between a male author and his creation, this posthumous work has never before been translated, and is a book of particular beauty and strangeness. A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela,...

"A radiant beauty of a writer."—The Los Angeles Times The Foreign Legion is a collection in two parts, gathering both stories and chronicles, and it offers wonderful evidence of Clarice Lispector's unique sensibility and range as an exponent of experimental prose. It opens with...

Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector’s third novel—the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals—is in English at last Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector’s third novel—the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals—is...

An unflinching portrait of a priest who seduces his landlady's daughter, made into an acclaimed and controversial motion picture. Eça de Queirós's novel The Crime of Father Amaro is a lurid satire of clerical corruption in a town in Portugal (Leira) during the period before and after the...

This macabre but beautiful work, Les Chants de Maldoror, has achieved a considerable reputation as one of the earliest and most extraordinary examples of Surrealist writing. The macabre but beautiful work, Les Chants de Maldoror, has achieved a considerable reputation as one of the earliest...