Articles and updates from the New Directions staff
Bernadette Mayer, beloved friend and giant of American poetry, died last week in Poetry State Forest, NY. We share here one of our favorite poems and remember Bernadette’s …
As I was reading Forough Farrokzad’s poems to an audience at the Jefferson Market Library in NYC last Saturday afternoon, it occurred to me that in this particular moment the …
The clarity of love is an unassailable thing, if a thing at all, beyond the norms of logic, immune to the proffering of doubt. Turned like an apple on a stick, the limpid mind is …
“What would American poets and critics do without the Central Europeans and the Russians to browbeat themselves with?” Maureen McLane exclaimed in the Chicago Tribune some years …
Recently, just after Christmas, I had a fairly pleasant conversation on the phone with someone I used to be in a relationship with. I told him about the daughters of two friends of …
At her reading from Subversive Sonnets at Kingston’s Bookland in 2014, Pamela Mordecai was asked by an audience member to justify her use of profanity based on her Catholic …
Lucky Breaks is a book of gorgeous short stories about women in Ukraine. Many are refugees from the fighting that took place in the east of the country in 2014 and the subsequent …
Beatriz Bracher likes to listen more than she likes to talk. Listening is how she creates the strong, evocative voices that give shape to her narratives. Her trained ear is what …
While I was working on this book, the Cassini spacecraft burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere; the Schiaparelli Mars lander crashed in the rust-colored rocky landscape of the planet it …
To get away from the dense city center, with its unhealthy and unsafe atmosphere, and in search for some calm and serenity, he moved to this distant, isolated house on the …
IT WAS JUST GONE quarter past six when I left the office. “Teedle-um-tum-tum”—there was the tune again, going round my head. Mr. Letter had been whistling it all …
.jpeg) On your left, as you enter The Room, you immediately encounter the New Directions bookshelf designed by artist Brecht …
Notes from Within a Never-Expanding Radius or, Things Seen on Walks It’s easy during non-plague times to go stir crazy in the winter in Saskatchewan, a season that can stretch from …
Throughout the current modern era the African solstice has remained condemned, modified, used for psychic flavoring, always at the behest of European forces, always at the behest …
A few weeks ago, people took to howling like wolves at 8pm each night. If I listened carefully, I could hear my neighbors from a few streets away. A couple of nights, I ventured …
When the news was about shortages of P.P.E., the figurines started to dress differently. They wore chocolate foil wrappers, string and tape. The wolf could see no evil, or was a …
The house I’m confined in is my father’s house in Auvergne, in France, in the Cantal, a mountainous region with small lakes that is often compared to Scotland for the beauty of its …
Here about the house I wander, happy place Bavaria, Second building, second story, moderately bourgeois. Wall and window, floor and ceiling, comfy cosy, scared recluse, Noodle …
We are deeply saddened by the news that the great Mexican writer Amparo Dávila has passed away at the age of 92. Called “extraordinary” by Julio Cortazár and revered by …
The first installment in our “Voyage Around My Room” series by Portuguese poet Ana Luísa Amaral and translated by Margaret Jull Costa. My daughter and I gave her the …
Pascal said that all of man’s problems come from the inability to remain in one room. The life of William Sharpe, who lived on a farm called “The World” near the village of …
“In 1790, Count Xavier de Maistre, a twenty-seven-year-old Savoyard officer stationed in Turin, fought a duel with a Piedmontese officer and was put under house arrest for …
When María Camino came down to breakfast, her mother and her sister, Clara, were already sitting in the dining room—but her mother, Señora Camino, never began eating until both her …
When I write poems, I sometimes pretend it’s not me but the language itself that’s writing. I pretend it’s possible to step back a bit from my human persona and …
To celebrate the paperback edition of Tanizaki’s masterful novel, The Maids, we’re publishing an excerpt here. CHAPTER TWELVE Suzu usually accompanied Raikichi when he …
While Yoshiro’s mornings were packed full of worry seeds, to Mumei each morning was fresh, full of fun. At the moment he was battling those mischievous sprites called …
A record player is better than a phonograph, swankier and more up-to-date, a record player doesn’t have a trumpet, the voice comes out through little slits in the side. …
Be With by Forrest Gander wins the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry New Directions is overjoyed by the news that our poet, translator, and dear friend Forrest Gander—whom we first …
[Boy With a Water Gun in His School Bag] See me here standing at the bus stop and I don’t really want to go to school because I was too hungry last night to study my seven times, …
To celebrate our great poet and friend, we dipped into the New Directions editorial files and found correspondence about A Coney Island of the Mind (first published in 1958) …
