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| BACKLIST
BESTSELLERS
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by Jorge Luis Borges Borges's stories are redolent with an intelligence, wealth of invention, and a tight, almost mathematically formal style that challenge with mysteries and paradoxes revealed only slowly after several readings. Highly recommended to anyone who wants their imagination and intellect to be aswarm with philosophical plots, compelling conundrums, and a wealth of real and imagined literary references derived from an infinitely imaginary library. | |||||||||||||||||||
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by Lawrence Ferlinghetti The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's Into the Night Life and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's - as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul. Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind has become a modern classic. It has been translated into nine languages and there are now nearly a million copies in print. | |||||||||||||||||||
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by Hermann Hesse In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life -- the beginning of suffering, rejection, peace, and, finally, wisdom. A classic of 20th-century fiction, Hesse's most celebrated work reflects his lifelong studies of Oriental myth and religion. | |||||||||||||||||||
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by B.S. Johnson Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is Johnson's most broadly humorous book, though as readers will discover, his humor has a bite. Christie is a simple man. His job in a bank puts him next to but not in possession of money. He encounters the principles of Double-Entry Bookkeeping and adapts them in his own dramatic fashion to settle his account with society. | |||||||||||||||||||
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by Denise Levertov Denise Levertov's Selected Poems delivers in a single accessible volume "one of the essential poets of our time" (Poetry Flash).Culled from two dozen poetry books, and drawing from six decades of her writing life, The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov offers a chronological overview of her great body of work. It is splendid and impressive to have at last a clear, unobstructed view of her ground-breaking poetry—the work of a poet who, as Kenneth Rexroth put it, "more than anyone, led the redirection of American poetry...to the mainstream of world literature." Described by Publishers Weekly as "at once as intimate as Creeley and as visionary as Duncan," Levertov was lauded as "one of the indispensable poets of our language, one of those few writers to whom it is necessary to pay attention" by The Malahat Review. No poet is more overdue for a single accessible volume; no career could be better to have within easy reach. | |||||||||||||||||||
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by Henry Miller In 1939, after ten years as an expatriate, Miller returned to the United States with a keen desire to see what his native land was really like—to get to the roots of the American nature and experience. He set out on journey that was to last for three years, visiting many sections of the country and making friends of all descriptions. This often unflattering portrayal of America is the result of that odyssey. | |||||||||||||||||||
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by Jean-Paul Sartre, Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature; translated by Lloyd Alexander Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, critic, novelist and dramatist, hold a position of singular eminence in the world of French letters. Among readers and critics familiar with the whole of Sartre's work, it is generally recognized that his earliest novel, Le Nausée (first published in 1938), is his finest and most significant. It is unquestionably a key novel of the Twentieth Century and a landmark in Existentialist fiction. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation about the world and people around him. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which "spread at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time—the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain." Roquentin's efforts to come to terms with his life, his philosophical and psychological struggles, give Sartre the opportunity to dramatize trhe tents of his Existentialist creed. The introduction for this edition of Nausea by Hayden Carruth gives background on Sartre's life and major works, a summary of the principal themes of Existentialist philosophy, and a critical analysis of the novel itself. | |||||||||||||||||||
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by Gary Snyder These Pulitzer Prize-winning poems and essays by the author of No Nature range from the lucid, lyrical, and mystical to the political. All, however, share a common vision: a rediscovery of North America and the ways by which we might become true natives of the land for the first time. | |||||||||||||||||||
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by Nathanael West "Somehow or
other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,'" observed
Nathanael West the year before his untimely death in 1940. "My
books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically
private and I'm lucky to be published." Yet today, West is widely
recognized as a prophetic writer whose dark and comic vision of a society
obsessed with mass-produced fantasies foretold much of what was to come
in American life. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), which West envisioned
as "a novel in the form of a comic strip," tells of an advice-to-the-lovelorn
columnist who becomes tragically embroiled in the desperate lives of
his readers. The Day of the Locust (1939) is West's great dystopian
Hollywood novel based on his experiences at the seedy fringes of the
movie industry. | |||||||||||||||||||
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by Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperback edition. An introduction by the editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Robert Bray, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Award. This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes." | |||||||||||||||||||
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by William Carlos Williams "The greatness of a poet is not to be measured by the scale but by the intensity and perfection of his works. Also by his vivacity. Williams is the author of the most vivid poems of American poetry." - Octavio Paz "Williams's best reader on either side of the Atlantic has been a Briton, Charles Tomlinson." - Hugh Kenner | |||||||||||||||||||
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by Ezra Pound The Cantos is the most important epic poem of the twentieth century. Delmore Schwartz said about The Cantos: "They are one of the touchstones of modern poetry." William Carlos Williams said: "[Pound] discloses history by its odor, by the feel of it--in the words; fuses it with the words, present and past, to MAKE his Cantos. Make them." Since the 1969 revised edition, the Italian Cantos LXXII and LXXXIII (as well as a 1966 fragment concluding the work) have been added, as well as Pound's English translation of Italian Canto LXXII. | |||||||||||||||||||
| Please see our complete catalog for a full list of backlist and recent titles. | |||||||||||||||||||
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©2009
by New Directions Publishing Corp. |
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