Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Just before the AIGA's "The Lustigs: A Cover Story" exhibition closed in February, the entire New Directions staff made the short walk to Broadway and spent some time marveling in the collected, properly displayed beauty of his work. There were, of course, lots of New Directions books on the...
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Friday evening, BTBA fiction judge Michael Orthofer — during a ceremony at the Washington Mews — announced that Satantango, by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai and translated by George Szirtes, won the 2013 Best Translated Book Award for fiction. Congratulations to...
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Our last excerpt from the new Poetry Pamphlets series comes from Bernadette Mayer's The Helens of Troy, NY. To create the collection, Mayer visited, talked to, and photographed (see below) every woman named Helen living in the city of Troy, in Upstate New York. * * *...
Read More »Not to jump onto the bandwagon of hype that is surrounding The Great Gatsby movie, but here's a bit of Gatsby trivia: New Directions published an edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's magnum opus in 1945. From what I understand, Scribner's had let the book lapse...
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Another week in April, another chance to celebrate National Poetry Month, and another excerpt from one of our new Poetry Pamphlets. This one is from Canadian poet Sylvia Legris and her first US publication, a collection entitled Pneumatic Antiphonal. When I asked editor Jeffrey Yang to give a...
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This week's Poetry Pamphlet excerpt(s) comes from Two American Scenes, a collaborative work by Eliot Weinberger and Lydia Davis. The pamhplet, in the words of editor Jeffrey Yang, consists of "two different scenes of nineteenth-century Americana, lyrically recounted by Lydia Davis in 'Our...
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Though my memory is foggy, especially many years out of college, I'm fairly certain that the first ND book I read was Ezra Pound's Guide to Kulchur. It's an odd book, to say the least, and memorable for its pithy "advice" as much as for its patent brilliance. I also remember,...
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Happy Poetry Month! We're a day late starting the festivities, but to make up for the delay we've got an excerpt from Susan Howe's Sorting Facts, or 19 Ways of Looking at Marker, part of the (new) New Directions Poetry Pamphlets series, the first four of which we published in...
Read More »Beginning on April 5 — when an exhibition entitled Back Tomorrow: Federico García Lorca / Poet in New York opens at the New York Public Library — our fair city is hosting a celebration of the famed poet, who spent nine months here in 1929, time that changed his...
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Everyday is Poetry Day at New Directions, but today is UNESCO's official World Poetry Day. Whether your community is hosting readings, or a parade, or erecting a statue of the local poet laureate in your town square, today is the day to unabashedly celebrate the verse. Never written a poem?...
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Fans of our books know that we're very proud of our association with the great modernist designer Alvin Lustig, who created over seventy covers for New Directions between 1941-1952. Several prints of his iconic designs decorate our office walls, and lately we've been rejacketing backlist...
Read More »Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a legendary figure in American literature. He opened City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. He published Ginsberg's "Howl". And his collection A Coney Island of the Mind has sold millions — yes, millions — of copies around the world. Now...
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Today is the official publication day of our new, expanded, anniversary edition of Raymond Queneau's groundbreaking experimental "novel" Exercises in Style. This new edition has a few special features. First, the beautiful new (old) cover. Second, pieces written by Queneau that, for...
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It's not often that we announce future publications prior to publicly sharing a forthcoming season's list, but this is a special case, prompted by a gathering curiosity among American readers that has resulted in queries in the form of emails, tweets, and questions over cocktails at...
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Welcome back to our third and final installment of discussion between Exercises in Style translator Chris Clarke and Believer editor and Oulipo member Daniel Levin Becker, where they discuss the recently published The End of Oulipo?, Choose Your Own Adventures novels,...
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Picking up where we left off last week, translator Chris Clarke and Oulipo member and Believer editor Daniel Levin Becker discuss Exercises in Style and the inner workings of the Oulipo group. (Pt. 1) +++ DLB: What's your sense of how Queneau thought of Exercises in Style as belonging...
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To mark the publication of our new edition of Raymond Queneau's magnificent, Exercises in Style, we invited Daniel Levin Becker and Chris Clarke to discuss the book, Queneau, and the OuLiPo group for this blog. Daniel is an editor at the Believer and a member of OuLiPo, one of only...
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New Kamau Brathwaite Poem: “Human Nature”Barbardian poet Kamau Brathwaite sent us this new poem, "Human Nature," in homage to a 1990 Miles Davis performance (video below). In Kamau's own words: "Human Nature" (Hamburg Germany 30 July 1990. Miles Davis (May 1926-Sept 1991) just a year before he dead . from a 1982...
Read More and Watch the Video»While going through the photos, paintings, and memorabilia in our storage room last week, deciding what to hang where after repainting the office, we found the photograph you see below, unframed and with a curious Post-it Note attached to the upper left corner. For a bit of context, Bobby...
Read More »"Day in day out, when the inarticulate patient struggles to lay himself bare for you, or with nothing more than a boil on his back, is so caught off balance that he reveals some secret twist of a whole community's pathetic way of thought, a man is suddenly seized again with a...
Read More »Head over to Slate to read the entirety of Patti Smith's wonderful introduction to Albertine Sarrazin's Asrtagal.
ND editor Michael Barron interviewed Elaine Lustig for Bomb's blog. Read it here.
May 2013 News from New Directions
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In this week's issue of The New Yorker, you can read an excerpt from The Unknown University entitled "Mexican Manifesto". Enjoy.
Lina Meruane interviews Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas in the current issue of BOMB. Read it here.
Congratulations to Enrique Vila-Matas, whose novel Dublinesque is on the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Shortlist.
While in Denmark last August for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's Literature Festival, César Aira sat down to discuss his "ideal fairy tale." Watch it here.
Rebecca Ariel Porte, in a beautiful essay written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, dicusses Susan Howe's Sorting Facts: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, addressing Chris Marker's films, as well. Definitely worth a read — here.
In one of the most creative reviews we've seen in a while, Bookslut's Lightsey Darst discusses all four collections in the first set of New Directions Poetry Pamphlets. Enjoy it here.
Calling it "breathatkingly subversive" in a review for the New York Review of Books, Yasmine El Rashidi discusses That Smell's English debut. Read it here.
Saying that the reading experience comes with a "sad sweetness," Vol. 1 Brooklyn dives into The Bridge Over the Neroch & Other Works, a newly translated collection by Leonid Tsypkin. Read it here.
Writing for Bookslut, Christopher Merkel reviews the 65th anniversary edition of the classic modernist text. Read it here.
Writing for The Washington Post, Scott Esposito reviewed our new edition of Queneau's Exercises in Style. Read it here.
In recent episode of Marfa Public Radio's "Talk at Ten", DeWitt read from and discussed Lightning Rods. You can listen to the entire program here.
The finalist shortlist for the annual Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction was recently announced, and Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods is among them. Congratulations!
In an essay entitled "Walking with Walser", The Quarterly Conversation tackles A Little Ramble and a book by Elfriede Jelinek that was inspired by Walser.
Poet Luljeta Lleshanaku recently contributed to The Paris Review Daily's "Windows on the World", a series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. Read it here.
Music & Literature's spring 2013 issue is devoted to László Krasznahorkai, the director Bela Tarr, and the artist Max Neumann. Needless to say, we're fans. Check it out here.
Poetry editor Jeffrey Yang recently spoke to The Atlantic's "By Heart" about George Oppen, grief, and the new collection Time of Greif: Mourning Poems.