New Directions: 473 books

A new edition of one of the best books ever written about being a doctor: writing as aware and memorable as Chekhov’s. The Doctor Stories collects thirteen of Williams’s stories (direct accounts of his experiences as a doctor), six related poems, and a chapter from his autobiography that...

Prince Friedrich of Homburg is the indisputable dramatic masterpiece of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), a leading figure, along with Goethe and Schiller, among early German Romantics. Available until now only in verse translation, it has been newly rendered for the American stage by Diana...

The Quarry presents new and pivotal Susan Howe prose pieces. A powerful selection of Susan Howe's previously uncollected essays, The Quarry moves backward chronologically, from her brand-new "Vagrancy in the Park" (about Wallace Stevens) through such essential texts as "The Disappearance...

A magnificent new collection of stories by “the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse” (Susan Sontag) In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then tells eleven unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell (“for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because...

NPR Best Book of the Year New York Public Library's Best Books for Adults At last a new book: a baker’s dozen of stories all with Helen DeWitt’s razor-sharp genius For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as...

Vivid, bawdy, comic, and arresting, the exciting new novel by the Indonesian phenomenon, Eka Kurniawan Told in short, cinematic bursts, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is gloriously pulpy. Ajo Kawir, a lower-class Javanese teenage boy excited about sex, likes to spy on fellow villagers...

A daring masterwork by Javier Marias: "Spain's most subtle and gifted writer." (The Boston Globe) Part spy novel, part romance, part Henry James, Your Face Tomorrow is a wholly remarkable display of the immense gifts of Javier Marias. With Fever and Spear, Volume One of his unfolding...

A dozen unforgettable stories by “one of the most original writers at work today” (Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Book Review). Slippery figures in anomalous situations — ghosts, spies, bodyguards, criminals — haunt these stories by Javier Marías: the characters come bearing their...

"An inventive comedy as black as outer space itself. Makes The Right Stuff looks like a NASA handout."—Tibor Fischer. Victor Pelevin's novel Omon Ra has been widely praised for its poetry and its wickedness, a novel in line with the great works of Gogol and Bulgakov: "full...

This volume brings together all of Kenneth Rexroth’s shorter poems from 1920 to the present, including a group of new poems written since the publication of Natural Numbers, drawn from seven earlier books. This volume brings together all of Kenneth Rexroth’s shorter poems from 1920 to the...

**A new volume of the singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel ** Nathaniel Mackey’s Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.’s jazz sextet, Molimo m’Atet, has just rehearsed a new tune:...

In It's Getting Later All the Time, an epistolary novel with a twist, Antonio Tabucchi—"internationally acclaimed as the most original voice in the new generation of Italian writers" (The Harvard Book Review)—revitalizes an illustrious tradition, only to break all its rules. From...

Another glorious tale of female empowerment from the author of Mrs. Caliban After getting a haircut in London and a few new outfits (“she bought two pairs of shoes and began to enjoy herself”), Millie, the neglected American wife of an academic pill, is transformed—and, upon arrival in...

A new collection by America’s internationalist poet—“a vision both original and universal” (Octavio Paz) Gondwana: an ancient supercontinent long-dispersed into fragments in the Southern Hemisphere. Contemplating this once-massive landmass at the the end of the world while looking out...