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Monsieur Bolaño Is a Top Ten Pick

Flavorwire.com selected Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain as a top pick for your early 2010 reading lists. You can read Flavorwire’s other selections here.

Monsieur Pain was originally published in Spanish in 1999, and New Directions just released Chris Andrews’ excellent English translation in January. Set in 1938 Paris, the story centers on Peruvian poet César Vallejo, afflicted with an undiagnosed illness and unable to stop hiccupping, and the mesmerist Pierre Pain, a timid bachelor.

“Never less than mesmerizing.”
—The Los Angeles Times

“Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own.”
—Francisco Goldman, The New York Times Magazine

Allen Frame in Art in America

Allen Frame, whose gritty black-and-white photographs are featured on ND’s Roberto Bolaño covers, was reviewed in the January issue of Art in America. The article discusses his September/October exhibition at the Gitterman Gallery, located at 170 East 75th Street in Manhattan, which displayed eleven color photographs produced between 2006 and 2008. Frame captured these rich, evocative portraits in his travels through Uruguay, Mexico, and Brazil. “The images are simultaneously assertive and romantic, offering relief... from the crowded, portentous field of post-chemical photography” (Tim Maul, from Art in America).

Though the exhibition has already closed, the gallery maintains an inventory of his work, which you can view here.

Allen Frame lives in New York, where he teaches photography at the School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, and the International Center of Photography. He co-founded the contemporary art center Delta Axis in Memphis in 1992 and has been a Contributing Editor of artwurl and BOMB. He was born in Mississippi in 1951 and graduated from Harvard University in 1974.

Evelio Rosero’s The Armies in The Nation

Evelio Rosero’s The Armies, winner of the prestigious Tusquets International Prize as well as The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, was reviewed in the Literature and Books section of The Nation. Taking place in Columbia during a nameless, brutal war, the novel follows Ismael Pasos, a retired school teacher with a lecherous eye, who finds his world turned upside-down as armies invade his town and those around him begin disappearing under strange and terrible circumstances. The Armies is an allegory for the madness and chaotic nature of war where no one is found innocent: “He implicates the reader, renders you complicit without your knowing it, then tears everything out from under you” (Ben Ehrenreich from The Nation).

Evelio Rosero, born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1958, is the author of several books of fiction—novels and short stories—plays, and poetry. For his body of work, he was awarded Colombia's National Literature Prize by the Ministry of Culture.

Javier Marías Receives High Praise in The New York Times Book Review

Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell received high praise in Times Book Review. The third installment of the three-part novel, Poison, Shadow and Farewell follows the main character Jacques Deza as he is recruited as a character analyst by a shady British intelligence agency. As Deza is made to witness acts of increasing horror and violence, he becomes entrenched in his own internal battles with corruption and power. “The genius of the larger work is its unresolvable ambivalence, its queasy dwelling in a netherzone that begins ‘One should never tell anyone anything,’ then goes on for more than a thousand pages to tell and not tell, over and over, in matters that seem merely philosophical but actually concern life and death.” Of this novel, Stacey D’Erasmo concludes, “It’s as terrifying as it is beautiful.” You can read the full review here.

Javier Marías was born into a very literary family in Madrid, Spain, in 1951. His work has been translated into thirty-six languages, and six million copies of his books have sold worldwide. His many prizes include the prestigious Dublin IMPAC International Literary award.

Tennessee Williams’ The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond Is a Feature Motion Picture

Written in 1957, the original screenplay of The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond was intended for production with Elia Kazan, who had previously directed Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Baby Doll. However, due to Kazan’s schedule, the film was never made. New Directions published the screenplay in 1984, and now it is a feature motion picture directed by Jodie Markell. Set in 1920s Memphis, Diamond tells the story of a high society Southern debutante, Fisher Willow, as she strains against the confines of her social niche. “As in so many of Williams’s plays, Fisher and Addie are the poignant manifestations of the restless dreamers and poets with whom he passionately identified: wayward moths fluttering unsteadily toward a light glimpsed through the windows of the prisons in which they find themselves alone and misunderstood” (Stephen Holden, The New York Times).

For more information, you can read the New York Times review, or visit: http://www.teardropdiamond.com/.

Mackey Inspires Festival Film

UCF Film Professor Christopher Harris’ experimental film,“28.IV.81 (Bedouin Spark),” has been selected to screen at the 39th International Film Festival Rotterdam, which runs in January and February.

“28.IV.81 (Bedouin Spark)” is the first installment of an ongoing series of films collectively titled “The Angle of Dust.” The series is dedicated to the poet Nathaniel Mackey and inspired by a volume of his prose composition, “Bedouin Hornbook.” Each film in the series is a single 100-foot roll of film that is edited in-camera and improvised as it’s shot. Two of Mackey's books—Splay Anthem and Bass Cathedral—are published by New Directions. Mackey received the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006.

Allen Ginsberg Movie Howl

Howl makes its premiere this week in select theaters.  Based on the charges of obscenity against Allen Ginsberg’s famous book of poetry, and on the legal trial that set the precedent for the publication of controversial literary works, Howl is also a biopic of Allen Ginsberg, who is portrayed by James Franco.  Our own Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg’s publisher at City Lights, is played in the film by Andrew Rogers. 

Editor-in-Chief Barbara Epler to Speak on Publishing Literature in Translation

PUBLISHING IN THE AGE OF BLAH BLAH BLAH
What does the future hold for translated books?
February 3, 7pm
Melville House Bookstore, 145 Plymouth St. at Pearl St., DUMBO, Brooklyn

Rumour has it that Americans are reading fewer and fewer books in translation. Certainly the big publishers are publishing less of it. Will new technology change that? Or will the recession make publishers less inclined to publish translated work? What tactics will publishers adopt to keep publishing translated work in the face of a radically changing market?

Usually, talks about translation focus on obscure works of literature being published by small, specialty non-profit or academic presses that survive off funding, not sales. For the second event in our "Publishing in the Age of Blah Blah Blah," we look at something other than the usual suspects -- publishers who are trying to sell translated nonfiction as well as fiction to a mainstream audience.

To wit, three of America's leading independent publishers speak with Melville House co-publisher Dennis Loy Johnson about their vision for translated books: Barbara Epler of New Directions, Dan Simon of Seven Stories, and Edwin Frank of New York Review of Books Classics. Epler also edited the anthology Terrestrial Intelligence, which includes selections of some of the most brilliant international writing in translation published by New Directions.

$5.00 at the door. Wine, beer and snacks will be available.

Susan Bernofsky Lectures on Robert Walser and Yoko Tawada

Susan Bernofksy, translator of Robert Walser’s The Tanners, The Assistant, and the forthcoming Microscripts, and of Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye and Where Europe Begins, will be giving a series of readings, lectures, and workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Feb. 9: Center for the Art of Translation, San Francisco. Reading: Robert Walser’s The Tanners, 12:30 p.m.

Feb. 10: Department of German Studies, Stanford University. Lecture: "Robert Walser's Micrography," 5:15 p.m.

Feb. 11: Department of German, UC Berkeley. Translation Workshop: Yoko Tawada, 5:00 p.m.

Feb. 23: Deutsches Haus, New York University. Reading/Book Launch: Robert Walser's The Tanners, 7:00 p.m.

Writer, translator and scholar Susan Bernofsky, currently based in New York, considers Berlin her second home. Her lifelong fascination with German literature began when she first read the Grimms' fairy tales in the original as a high school student. She takes particular interest in the lines of influence linking eighteenth- and nineteenth- century German thought to modern and contemporary literature and theater in the German-speaking world and beyond.

For more information about Susan Bernofsky, you can visit her webpage.

For more on Robert Walser, you can read J.M. Coetzee’s article “The Genius of Robert Walser” in the New York Review of Books. And just for fun, check out some Robert Walser graffiti art.

Bernadette Mayer Reading in Boston

Bernadette Mayer will read from her work-in-progress The Faces That Launched A Thousand Ships (known in the New Directions office as “All the Helens of Troy, New York”), with Dan Chiasson, whose new poetry collection is Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon.

Feb. 8: Blacksmith House Poetry Series, 56 Brattle Street, Boston, 8:00 pm

Bernadette Mayer has published more than twenty collections of poetry, including A Bernadette Mayer Reader, Midwinter Day, The Scarlet Tanager, and Poetry State Forest with New Directions. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Poll Results: “Which classic ND title should we relaunch as a new edition?”

Our poll “Which classic ND title should we relaunch as a new edition?” was completed on January 3, 2010. The winner is Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading. A new edition is planned for the fall with the original Alvin Lustig cover (shown here) and an introduction by Michael Dirda.