|
|
|||
|
- In Memoriam: Ben Sonnenberg - ND Exclusive: Interview with Anna Kushner - In Memoriam: José Saramago - Patti Smith ♡ ND - Norfolk ArtsWave to Feature James Laughlin and New Directions Publishing - Susan Howe at the Grenfell Press - Rodrigo Corral Captures 6 of AIGA's 50 Books/50 Covers - Gearing up for the Microscripts Exhibit - Introducing PEN Reads - Anne Carson Performances and Praise - Highlights from Reviews of Muriel Spark: The Biography, by Martin Stannard - Michael Moore and Poets House Honor Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Dunya Mikhail Wins The Arab American Book Award - László Krasznahorkai Wins Brücke Berlin Prize - "Tennessee Williams saved my life." - César Aira's The Literary Conference - Mr. Magoo's Glasses - Michael McClure Featured in When You're Strange - Celebrating Nathaniel Tarn - Blog Post Round-upAh
Cheng Linda
Lê
The Three Fates PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
|
ND authors whom Ben particularly advocated include Anne Carson, Javier Marías, Tibor Déry, Eça de Queiros, Roberto Bolaño, W.G. Sebald, Robert Walser, and Elias Canetti (though he believed no gentleman would have published Party in the Blitz, Canetti's final, bitter, blistering memoir). He was also a fervent supporter of some of our translators: Richard Howard, George Szirtes, Margaret Jull Costa, Michael Hofmann, Susan Bernofsky, and Chris Andrews. Ben pulled many strings on our behalf and always encouraged and helped us, although he noted that he himself was the first to publish Anne Carson. There is no one like him and he will be sorely missed. |
|||
 ND
Exclusive: Interview with Anna KushnerCheck out the video on our blog of an exciting New Directions interview with The Halfway House translator Anna Kushner, whose "commanding translation captures the unlikely combination of insouciance and resignation that defines Rosales' tone" (Words Without Borders). Kushner tells the story of discovering the book, and her journey of securing the rights in order to translate it. Her insight into Rosales and his work provides an original perspective that truly enhances the book's meaning and significance. |
||||
 In
Memoriam: José SaramagoJosé Saramago, Portugal's first Nobel Literary Laureate, died on June 18. His works, including Blindness and All the Names, published by Harcourt's Drenka Willen, were rendered into English by the award-winning translator Margaret Jull Costa. His forthcoming novel, The Elephant's Journey, will be published in the fall by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. |
||||
 Patti
Smith ♡
ND"We savor all Roberto Bolaño has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius." —Patti Smith It doesn't have to be Valentine's Day for love. We recently discovered that Patti Smith is a big fan of ND. At the headline opening night event of last month's PEN International Voices Festival, she recited a poem inspired by the work of Roberto Bolaño. And you can spot the cover for César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and some comments on the book on Patti Smith's Coffee Break blog. Smith's memoir Just Kids was recently published by Ecco Books and is available at your local independent bookstore. |
||||
Norfolk
ArtsWave to Feature James Laughlin and New Directions
Publishing |
||||
 Susan
Howe at the Grenfell PressThe poems in Frolic Architecture were inspired by Susan Howe’s experience of viewing various manuscripts, sermon notebooks, books, and pamphlets of the eighteenth-century American Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards. Frolic Architecture is the third section of Howe's That This, forthcoming from ND next spring. Frolic Architecture, an exquisite sixty-eight page book, comprises forty-eight collage poems printed letterpress on Somerset paper at Leslie Miller's Grenfell Press by Brad Ewing, with ten photograms printed in James Welling’s studio. The book was bound by Claudia Cohen using handmade Izumo Mitsumata-shi and Cave papers. The book, published in an edition of twenty-six, is issued with a separate, signed photogram/poem. Orders are being taken at the Grenfell Press website. |
||||
ND
Creative Director at Large Rodrigo Corral Captures
6 of AIGA's 50 Books/50 Covers Six covers designed for ND by our Creative Director at Large, Rodrigo Corral, were recognized by AIGA for outstanding book design, including Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges and Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. The covers will be exhibited at the AIGA National Design Center in New York in December 2010.
|
||||
 Gearing
up for the Microscripts ExhibitRobert Walser's Microscripts continues to be a huge hit with readers and reviewers as well as the darling of many independent bookstores. The Christine Burgin Gallery, which co-published the Microscripts with New Directions, will be exhibiting the actual scripts this autumn. There will also be some incredible surprises to accompany this fantastic show — more details to come in the near future. In the meantime, you can check out more information about the Microscripts, including a free preview, on our website, to see what the excitement is all about! Or find out more — and see more samples — on the New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog. |
||||
 Introducing
PEN ReadsPEN Reads is a new book club being launched by PEN. To our great excitement, we have the honor of having The Hour of the Star chosen as its first selection. Clarice Lispector's novel about the hard life of a young Brazilian girl will be available for purchase through the PEN site for $9.95 (or at your favorite bookstore). Colm Tóibín will lead the discussion with a short piece, and next up will be the noted Lispector biographer Ben Moser (author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, Oxford University Press). More information can be found on the PEN website. |
||||
 Anne
Carson Performances and PraiseAnne Carson will be reading on Tuesday, July 20, at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. The reading will feature a performance by Rashaun Mitchell and Marcie Munnerlyn, both leading dancers with The Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Carson's Nox, a book in a box written as an elegy for her deceased brother, has been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker, where Meghan O'Rourke writes, "Nox is a luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of an elegy, which is why it evokes so effectively the felt chaos and unreality of loss ... a questioning, unsentimental excursion into the meaning of not understanding." |
||||
Muriel
Spark: The Biography was published in April by W.W. Norton.
Here's a sampling from the rave reviews that the book received: For
a complete list of the seventeen Muriel Spark titles published
by New Directions, please see our Complete
Catalog. Forthcoming is her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. |
||||
 Michael
Moore and Poets House Honor Lawrence FerlinghettiAmong Lawrence Ferlinghetti's numerous fans, the famed documentary filmmaker Michael Moore recently sent him an incredible note of praise: Lawrence, The
fact that I even get the chance to write you this personal note
has brought tears to my eyes. May I wish you a happy 91st birthday?!
And thank you for all you have given this world. And what you
have meant to me. I began reading your poetry as a teenager.
I would read it aloud to friends. Instead of passing them a joint,
I would pass them a Ferlinghetti. We had an open minded priest
at our working class Catholic church and one Sunday he let me
read one of your poems at the "guitar mass" instead of the reading
from the old testament. As a young adult I came to your bookstore
on a visit to SF and I went to a reading of yours. I felt like
I was walking on sacred ground. —Michael Moore (© 2010) We
thank Michael Moore for this wonderful birthday note. |
||||
 Dunya
Mikhail Wins The Arab American Book AwardDunya Mikhail won the 2010 Arab American Book Award for her most recent book of poems Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, published this year by ND. The public announcement was made June 1, and there will be a ceremony in Washington D.C. this fall. Hooray Dunya!!! |
||||
 László
Krasznahorkai Wins Brücke Berlin PrizeThe Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has won the Brücke Berlin Prize for his exceptional Seiobo, published last month in German by Fischer Verlag. This is a handsome award (20,000 EUR), in more ways than one: half of it goes to the translator, Heike Flemming. A chapter of the novel appeared in The Guardian last year. |
||||
"For the 12-year-old Waters, growing
up in suburban Baltimore, Williams was more than a naughty writer whose
books carried the ominous stamp 'See Librarian' at the library. 'Yes,
Tennessee Williams was my childhood friend,' writes Waters. 'I yearned
for a bad influence, and Tennessee was one in the best sense of the word:
joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny.'" |
||||
 César
Aira's The Literary Conference"Aira writes novels as a saxophonist might produce variations on an atonal theme, beginning with a typically absurd premise and then following it wherever it leads him. Although Aira’s short novels frequently serve as metaphors for art and literature, he doesn’t usually address his working method directly—which is what makes The Literary Conference, the fifth and most recent of his novels to be translated into English, noteworthy." —Scott Esposito, editor of The Quarterly Conversation, for The National "Aira, an experimental Argentine writer, has published more than sixty books, though only a few have appeared in English. At a literary conference, César, the protagonist—author and translator by day, mad scientist by night—hatches a plan to rule the world by creating an army cloned from the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. But César accidentally clones a cell that’s not from Fuentes but from Fuentes’s silk tie, thus loosing lumbering, thousand-foot-long electric-blue silkworms upon the city of Mérida. Aira writes, 'It seems like the insertion of a different plot line, from an old B-rated science fiction movie.' It sure does. But Aira’s writerly self-reference, while hardly subtle, is disarming, and the result is amusing, self-conscious camp." —The New Yorker |
||||
 Mr.
Magoo's GlassesAlvin Lustig was involved in a lot of different projects in his heyday—among them, Mr. Magoo's walking into his name and using the oo's for glasses in the opening sequence of the cartoon. Check out the video here. |
||||
 Michael
McClure Featured in When You're Strange, a New Documentary
about The DoorsMichael McClure was a close friend of the band and currently reads his poetry to live music by Doors member Ray Manzarek. Read more about the film and see a preview here. McClure's newest book of poems, Mysteriosos, is currently available at your local fine bookstore. |
||||
 Celebrating
Nathaniel Tarn"A Multitude of One: Celebrating Nathaniel Tarn" was featured in the most recent issue of Jacket Magazine. It includes poems and essays by and about Nathaniel Tarn. New Directions published Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, Tarn's latest collection of poems, in 2008. |
||||
| Blog
Post Round-up In case you missed out, read more worthwhile posts on our blog: The World Cup and B. S. Johnson's soccer novel The Unfortunates Literary Advice from ND writers Albert Cossery's A Splendid Conspiracy Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark Books now back in print and the return of Maude Hutchins |
||||
|
Although
a few have been serialized in The New Yorker and Playboy,
most of the stories of The Return have never before appeared in English
and to Bolaño's many readers will be like catnip to cats. "Bolaño
has joined the immortals." | ||||
 Ah
ChengThe King of Trees Translated from the Chinese by Bonnie S. MacDougall $15.95 US / $20.00 CAN ISBN 978-0-8112-1866-5 When the three novellas in The King of Trees were published separately in China in the 1980s, "Ah Cheng fever" spread across the country. Never before had a fiction writer dealt with the Cultural Revolution in such Daoist-Confucian terms, discarding Mao-speak, and mixing both traditional and vernacular elements with an aesthetic that emphasized not the hardships and miseries of those years, but the joys of close, meaningful friendships. In The King of Chess, a student's obsession with finding worthy chess opponents symbolizes his pursuit of the dao; in The King of Children—made into an award-winning film by Chen Kaige, the director of Farewell My Concubine—an educated youth is sent to teach at an impoverished village school where one boy's devotion to learning is so great he is ready to spend 500 days copying his teacher's dictionary; and in the title novella, a peasant's innate connection to a giant primeval tree takes a tragic turn when a group of Educated Youth arrive to clear the mountain forest. A masterpiece of new world literature, full of passion and noble emotion that stir the inner chambers of the heart. "Nearly all the Chinese critics who discuss Ah Cheng's work go to great lengths to praise the spare, concentrated expressiveness of his prose style.... But they see in Ah Cheng's powerful language an indicator of something else, too—they see in his style an extraordinary evocation of the Chinese national spirit, something that years of class struggle under Mao's aegis had sought simply to efface." —Theodore Huters, Modern China "Beginning in 1984 with the publication of Ah Cheng's novella The King of Chess, the last half of the 1980s represented a major turning point in contemporary Chinese fiction. From that time on, contemporary Chinese fiction has been 'walking toward the world' (zuoxiang shijie), a phrase that may be taken to mean approaching the quality of the finest in world fiction." —Michael Duke, World Literature Today | ||||
 Linda
LêThe Three Fates Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti $15.95 US / $20.00 CAN ISBN 978-0-8112-1610-4 An intensely lively and piquant novel about a Vietnamese family, The Three Fates concerns rivalries and jealousies, strange motives and destructive passions. The three fates—now Vietnamese "princesses" in France—were spirited away as little children by their powerful grandmother when Saigon fell to the communists. Now the two sisters and their cousin await the arrival of their father and uncle, still marooned in his little blue house in the old country. "Leave King Lear alone, I'd told my cousins," our principal narrator (an intellectual who has lost a hand) informs us: "They had neglected him for twenty years and now they were conspiring like a pair of Cordelias to bestow one last joy on the old monarch: he hadn't asked for it." From a luxurious home in the French countryside, his two daughters (the elder, very pregnant and restlessly cooking and eating, kept company by her long-legged and icy younger sister) plot to drag their father halfway around the world—away from his poverty and his old friend and the grilled eels they happily devour together—to flaunt their success. Scathingly unsentimental, The Three Fates transposes Shakespearean tragedy into a contemporary idiom and a decidedly different culture. A sharply vivacious book about "the bitch of fate," The Three Fates—like a witches' pot on the boil—brews up from displaced lives a darkly funny and agitated concoction. A recent rave review is up now at the LA Times website. "The Three Fates is one of the most moving novels I have ever read." —Thomas McGonigle, The LA Times "Lê's intensity is the real thing." —Publishers Weekly "Lê offers proof that alienation, in the right hands, can be exquisite." —The New York Times Book Review "The Three Fates is a shimmering, twilit, fabulous crossing with a spectacular talent for caustic and cruel, sadistic and infinitely exact portraits. Properly amazing, colorful, bewitching, and irresistibly funny." —Le Monde | ||||
In
Memoriam: Ben Sonnenberg
Highlights
from Reviews of Muriel Spark: The Biography, by
Martin Stannard
"Tennessee
Williams saved my life."
Roberto
Bolaño