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IN THIS ISSUE: - Kluge Wins Lifetime Achievement Award - Snyder Wins 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize - Bracho and Gander to Read at NYPL - Howe Reading in Darien, CT; Panel in Tuscon, AZ - Eva Aridjis's The Favor Debuts in New York - Smart People Read William Carlos Williams - Pound Opera to be Published by Second Evening Art - Ferlinghetti's Art to be Exhibited in Rome - McClure and Manzarek Perform in SF - B.S. Johnson, The Unfortunates - Horacio Castellanos Moya, Senselessness - Roberto Bolano, Amulet - Javier Marias, Your Face Tomorrow, Volume II: Dance and Dream - Rene Philoctete, Massacre River COMING UP IN JUNE: - See below for a previewPLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE: www.ndpublishing.com | |
The highly acclaimed German film director and New Directions author Alexander Kluge has won a honorary Lola award for Lifetime Achievement. The Lolas (the German equivalent to the Oscars) are awarded by the German Film Academy. Kluge is renowned in Germany as a filmmaker who played a central role in the emergence of New German Cinema, as well as an author of numerous theoretical and literary works and the head of a television production company for which he regularly conducts interviews aired on German television. His two books available in English from New Directions are The Devil's Blind Spot and, most recently, Cinema Stories. Kluge's next project is a film adaptation of Marx's Kapital, in collaboration with Tom Tykwer, Durs Gruenbein, and Peter Sloterdijk, projected to be 420 minutes long, and bearing the working title "Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike" - News from ideological antiquity. | |
New Directions would also like to congratulate Gary Snyder, the winner of the 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which was announced on April 29. Established in 1986 and presented annually by the Poetry Foundation, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets, and at $100,000 it is one of the nation's largest literary honors. The prize will be presented to Snyder in Chicago on Thursday, May 29. Snyder, who turns 78 in May, is the author of seven books published by New Directions, including Regarding Wave, Back Country, and Turtle Island, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. He is also included, as a translator, in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself," Christian Wiman, chair of the selection committee, said in a statement Tuesday. "His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation." | |
Coral Bracho and her translator Forrest Gander read from and discuss the newly-published Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems at the New York Public Library's Mulberry Street Branch on Saturday, May 3rd, at 2:00 pm. Credited with changing the course of contemporary Mexican poetry, Bracho remains one of her country's most influential poets. Firefly Under the Tongue is Bracho's first full-length collection to appear in English. The event is co-sponsored by Poets House, New Directions and PEN World Voices. The Library is located at 10 Jersey Street (bet. Lafayette and Mulberry, one block south of Houston Street); admission is free. | |
Susan Howe will be reading in Darien, Connecticut, at the Darien Library at 3.pm. on Sunday, May 4th. A reception will follow the reading, which is free and open to the public. The reading is sponsored by the Poet's Voice, a consortium of Fairfield County public libraries, and supported by the Horace E. Manacher Poetry Fund and the Annual Campaign. Howe is the author of seven books published by ND, including the recent Souls of the Labadie Tract and the newly re-issued My Emily Dickinson. Howe will also take part in a panel, "Conceptual Poetry and its Others," which will be hosted by the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson, Arizona on May 29-31. The symposium will explore and discuss the cutting-edge in contemporary avant-garde poetry. In addition to a keynote address with renowned poetry critic Marjorie Perloff, there will be lectures, classes, panel and roundtable discussions, and literary presentations featuring Caroline Bergvall, Charles Bernstein, Christian Boek, Craig Dworkin, Peter Gizzi, Kenneth Goldsmith, Tracie Morris and Cole Swensen. Registration costs are $105 general admission and $60 for (non-resident) student admission. For more information, please contact Renee Angle, 520.626.3765 or write poetry@email.arizona.edu. | |
Eva Aridjis, the daughter of poet Homero Aridjis, will have her English-language feature film directorial debut, The Favor, open this Friday at select theaters.Written and directed by Eva Aridjis, The Favor is a deeply emotional tale of how far we will go for the ones we love, starring Tony-Award winning actor Frank Wood and Ryan Donowho. The film will open at the following theaters: MAY 2nd - MAY 8th NEW YORK - THE QUAD CINEMA, 34 West 13th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues). Call (212) 255-8800 for showtimes.MAY 2nd - MAY 8th LOS ANGELES - LAEMMLE'S GRANDE 4-PLEX, 345 S. Figueroa St. Call (213) 617-0268 for showtimes.MAY 9th- MAY 11th SAN FRANCISCO - THE RED VIC, 1727 Haight Street, between Cole and Shrader, just a block and a half east from Golden Gate Park. Call (415) 668-3994 for showtimes. For more information, please visit the film's myspace site: www.myspace.com/thefavorthefilm. Eva Aridjis's father, Homero Aridjis, is a poet whose works include Eyes to See Otherwise (Ojos De Otro Mira), which is published in a bilingual Spanish/English edition by New Directions. | |
If you were a bitter college literature professor (played by Dennis Quaid) still mourning the long-ago death of his wife, and you finally resolved to do something about it by romancing a nurse (and former student) played by Sarah Jessica Parker, what book would you reach to for assistance? The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, of course. New Directions was excited to see the book used as a prop in Smart People. It got plenty of face time, and it even shows up in the trailer. | |
New Directions is pleased to announce the publication -- by Second Evening Art -- of Ezra Pound's opera Le Testament "Paroles de Villon." The volume contains both the score for the 1926 "Salle Pleyel" concert excerpts and the final version of 1933, both composed by Pound. Editors Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, have also published Pound's operas Cavalcanti and Collis O Heliconii, and Pound's violin pieces. Robert Hughes pioneered the recovery of Pound's music with the performance (and Fantasy recording) of Le Testament in 1972. In related news, Margaret Fisher has just won the Paul Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize (a year's residence at the American Academy in Rome) to research Futurist involvement in early Italian Radio. | |
An exhibition of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's artwork will be shown at the Teatro India, an official venue of the city of Rome, on May 16. The show is provocatively entitled "Italian Ladies' Underwear." The next night, May 17, Mr. Ferlinghetti will give a bilingual reading at the Teatro Tor Bella Monaco. | |
On Wednesday, May 7, original Beat icon Michael McClure, who penned Janis Joplin's immortal "Mercedes Benz," and Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who created one of rock's most memorable instrumental lines (think "Light My Fire"), join forces with saxophonist George Brooks (Summit, Bombay Jazz, Etta James), bassist Rob Wasserman (Lou Reed, Aaron Neville, Rickey Lee Jones), and drummer Jay Lane (Charlie Hunter, Bob Weir) for two shows (8 p.m. and 10 p.m.) of sophisticated anti-politics, elegant improvisation, American haiku, and jazz-drenched dharma boogie. The show is at Yoshi's, at 1330 Filmore St., San Francisco. Call 415-655-5600 for more information, or click here for tickets ($18 & $22). | |
One of the lost classics of the 1960s, and a legendary experiment in form, The Unfortunates is B.S. Johnson's famous "book in a box" in which the chapters are presented unbound, to be read in any order the reader chooses. A sportswriter, sent to a small town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from his past when he disembarks at the train station. It is one of the key works of a novelist now undergoing an enormous revival of interest. Click on the pictures for bigger images.
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A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including testimonies of the survivors. The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Publishers Weekly calls Senselessness a "crushing satire," remarking, "It's Moya's genius to make this difficult character seem a product of the same death and disorder documented in the report, as the survivors' voices merge with his own"; and Russell Banks writes, "This is a brilliantly crafted moral fable, as if Kafka had gone to Latin America for his source materials. I've not read anything quite like it. Clearly, Castellanos Moya is a major writer who deserves a wide audience in the U.S." |
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Amulet embodies in one woman's breathtaking voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. It follows the story of the Uruguayan born Auxilio Lacouture, the "Mother of Mexican Poetry." She becomes famous as the sole person who resists the invasion of Mexico City's university campus by hiding in a ladies' room for twelve days. As she waits out the occupiers with nothing to eat, Auxilio recalls her adventures in exile and the people she has met through them. Now available as a paperbook Amulet keenly demonstrates, as The L.A. Times notes, that Bolano is by far the most exciting writer to have come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time." |
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Your
Face Tomorrow has been acclaimed "exquisite" (Publishers
Weekly), "gorgeous" (Kirkus), and "outstanding:
anoher work of urgent originality" (London Independent).
And now, Dance and Dream takes Javier Marias daring experimental
magnum opus out for a wild new ride. Skillfully constructed around
a central mesmerizing scene in a nightclub, a scene of real and
perplexing horror, Dance and Dream again features Jacques Deza.
But in Volume II Deza -- hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinary
sophisticated powers of perception -- discovers the dark side of
his new employers. |
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A
tale unlike any other, where machetes can fly, severed heads demand
justice, the wind thinks its a radio, and a word can literally cut
a throat. At the heart of this kaleidoscopic drama is the loving
and sensual bond between Pedro and Adele, tenderly evoked in language
of astonishing inventiveness by a narrative voice that can turn on
a dime, careening through young romance, heartbreak, skin-crawling
evil, and Looney Tunes madness to a tumultuous, breathtaking finale worthy
of Hieronymus Bosch. |
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The radiant subway. The wall that clears up, endless. A thundering prayer of steel that fastens together the days, a brush of cloud hanging upon it, O beginning, it is there--your nest. Thus the keynotes of Hiraide's utterly original book-length poem unfold--a mix of narrative, autobiography, minute scientific observations, poetics, rhetorical experiments, hyper-realistic images, and playful linguistic subversions--all scored with the precision of a mathematical-musical structure.Even in translation, [Hiraide's] fine poetry really shines. At times I am reminded of T.S. Eliot." --Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Laureate
The Club of Angels is an irresistible, enticing book about the sin of gluttony. With wit and dark humor, Verissimo tells the story of ten well-to do-men who meet every month to dine fabulously. When their leader and chef dies of AIDS, he is replaced by a mysterious, strangely taciturn cook who gives them gastronomic experiences to die for!"A wickedly satirical, tongue-in-cheek commentary on contemporary values, human relationships, consumerism, and literature.
Nobel Prize Winner Cela's Boxwood might perhaps be best described as a kind of whirlwind: a vortex of marvelous writing about folklore, traditions, superstitions, cooking, nautical disasters on the Coast of Death (ships from afar spilling cargoes of oranges, typewriters, iron ore, oil, spices), elements of nature both cruel and beautiful, whales, priests, witches, ghosts -- sprinkled with various autobiographies -- everything exquisite and crass in Cela's native home, Galicia, Spain. |
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©2008 by New Directions
Publishing Corp. |
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Alexander
Kluge Wins Lifetime Achievement Award 
Gary
Snyder Wins 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
Coral
Bracho and Forrest Gander to Read at NYPL
Howe
Reading in Darien, CT; Panel in Tuscon, AZ
Eva
Aridjis's The Favor Debuts in New York 
Smart
People Read William Carlos Williams 
Pound
Opera to be Published by Second Evening Art 
Ferlinghetti's
Art to be Exhibited in Rome
McClure
and Manzarek Perform in SF
B.S.
Johnson,
NOW
IN PAPERBACK: Roberto
Bolano, 
