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Roberto Bolaño
The Return
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
$23.95 US / $30.00 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1715-6

Here is the eagerly anticipated second volume of stories by Roberto Bolaño. Tender or etched in acid; hazily suggestive or chillingly definitive: a trove of strangely arresting, short masterworks.

"The late Bolaño, a Chilean writer whose posthumous reputation only grows as more of his works are translated into English, practiced the short story and the novel with equal genius. This new collection of 13 stories proves to be a defining sampler of Bolaño's style, thematic concerns, and favored character types."
—Brad Hooper, Booklist

"Bolaño has joined the immortals."
––The Washington Post

"Bolaño has proven [literature] can do anything."
––Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times

Ah Cheng
The King of Trees
Translated from the Chinese by Bonnie S. MacDougall
$15.95 US / $20.00 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1866-5

"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 Lê
The 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 is one of the most moving novels I have ever read."
––Thomas McGonigle, The L.A. 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
Roberto Bolaño
Antwerp
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
$15.95 US/$20.00 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1717-0

Antwerp’s signature elements — crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits — mark this, his first novel, as pure Bolaño.

“Never less than mesmerizing.”              

—The Los Angeles Times 

“Literature’s new patron saint.”            
—Sam Anderson, New York Magazine

“The real thing and the rarest.” 
—Susan Sontag

Anne Carson
Nox
$29.95 US/$37.50 CAN
Ltd. Ed. $150.00 US/$187.50 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1870-2
ISBN Ltd. Ed. 978-0-8112-1884-9 

Anne Carson’s haunting and beautiful Nox is her first book of poetry in five years — a unique, illustrated, accordion-fold-out “book in a box.” 

“Carson has . . . created an individual form and style for narrative verse. . . . Seldom has Pound’s injunction ‘Make It New’ been so spectacularly obeyed.” 
—The New York Review of Books

“She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote.”          
—Susan Sontag

Michael McClure
Mysteriosos and Other Poems
$15.95 US/$20.00 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1842-9

A spiritual odyssey by preeminent Beat Generation poet Michael McClure.

“McClure’s poetry is a blob of protoplasmic energy.”  
—Allen Ginsberg

“McClure’s advantage is sheer scope. . . ." 
—Rolling Stone

“This poetry is soulful freedom play in the Desire-realm . . . ." 
—Gary Snyder

“There is no other poet like Michael McClure. . . .” 
—Diane Di Prima

“[McClure] shares a place with the great William Blake, with the visionary Shelley, with the passionate D.H. Lawrence."  
—Robert Creeley
Dylan Thomas
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
New Introduction by Paul Muldoon
$14.95 US/$18.50 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1881-8

The original and classic Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas is available once again, now with a brilliant new preface by Paul Muldoon.

“Thomas meant much to me and my generation, he is still singing in his chains like the sea – a force driving the flowers.” 
—Seamus Heaney
Thalia Field
 $15.95 US/$20.00 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1840-5

Thalia Field’s third book with New Directions is a tour de force of blending literary genres (poetry, prose, essay, and drama) and examining our control of the natural world.

“Thalia Field’s curiosity and probe is infectious, tantalizing, irrepressible. She is one of our most startling, original younger writers.”
—Anne Waldman

“Thalia Field’s poetry is mesmerizing, complex, and stands on its own with original forms.”        
—The Bloomsbury Review

“Thalia Field’s powers and preoccupations . . . make for poignant, compelling reading that is equal parts cerebral, mythical, vulnerable and political.”
 —The Believer
Tennessee Williams
New Introduction by John Patrick Shanley
$13.95 US/$17.50 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1882-5
Published as a trade paperback for the first time, with a new Introduction by the acclaimed playwright John Patrick Shanley (Doubt) and the one-act on which The Rose Tattoo was based.

“The Rose Tattoo is life-loving and affirmative.”
—Time

“The Rose Tattoo is a buoyantly comic celebration of life and its inexhaustible capacity for breaking free from the past . . . it would be a hard heart that failed to surrender to its generous adult fairy tale vision.”  
—The Independent, London

“The Rose Tattoo is singular in the Williams canon . . . as poetic and wistful a work as Williams ever composed.”        
—The New York Times
Robert Walser
Bilingual edition, translated and with an Introduction by Susan Bernofsky
Afterword by Walter Benjamin
$24.95 US/$31.00 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1880-1

W.G. Sebald called Robert Walser “a clairvoyant of the small,” and nowhere is the phrase more apt than in his “microscripts.” 

“One of the profoundest products of modern literature.”     
—Walter Benjamin

“Incredibly interesting and beautiful.”     
—John Ashbery

“[These] painstakingly transcribed texts brought to light some of Walser’s most beautiful and haunting writing . . . .  The incredible shrinking writer is a major 20th-century prose artist who, for all that the modern world seems to have passed him by, fulfills the modern criterion: he sounds like nobody else.” 
—Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker
César Aira
Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver
$10.00 US/$12.50 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1878-8

New in our Pearls series: an extremely rich mad scientist attempts to clone a leading genius in a bid to take over the world.
“Aira is one of the most provocative and idiosyncratic novelists working in Spanish today and should not be missed.”   
—Natasha Wimmer, The New York Times
Jorge Luis Borges
Introduction by Donald A. Yates
Various Translators from the Spanish 
$10.00 US/$12.50 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1883-2

A pocket-sized Pearl edition of some of Borges’ best fictions and essays.

Everything and Nothing collects the best of Borges’ highly influential work — written in the 1930s and ‘40s — that foresaw the internet (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”), quantum mechanics (“The Garden of Forking Paths”), and cloning (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”). David Foster Wallace described Borges as  “scalp-crinkling . . . Borges’ work is designed primarily as metaphysical arguments . . . to transcend individual consciousness.” 

“I could live under a table reading Borges.” 
—Roberto Bolaño
Albert Cossery
Translated from the French by Alyson Waters
$14.95 US/$18.50 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1779-8

Three friends in a small Egyptian city celebrate idleness, elegance, and joie de vivre.
“A legend . . . His caustic satire burned like the desert sun, undermining all forms of authority. Cossery despised materialism and eschewed the rat race. . . . The overt message [is] that paradise is not lost, but most of us are too busy to bask in the Edenic simplicity of the world.”        
—The Guardian

“I never see anything anywhere like it.  All of Cossery’s books have a rare, exotic, haunting, unique flavor.”     
—Henry Miller

“Above all Cossery, one of the last and quirkiest links to the postwar glory days of St.-Germaine-de-Pres, elevated idleness to an art form.”
 —The London Times
Muriel Spark
$12.95 US/$16.00 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1867-2

Household servants and accidental guests must wait out the orders of the lords of the house: not to disturb.
“Spark is a natural, a paradigm of that rare sort of artist from whom work of the highest quality flows as elementally as current through a circuit: hook her to a pen and the juice purls out of her.”   
—Stephen Schiff, The New Yorker

“Her books enact a modern anxiety about the viability of fiction while being full of old-fashioned novelistic consolations and satisfactions.”  
—James Wood, The  Guardian (U.K.)

“A very rare bird . . . Spark explored [her] metafictional-theological theme further in the brilliant and audacious novellas The Driver’s Seat and Not to Disturb, which I especially admire.”        
—David Lodge

Henry Miller
The Colossus of Maroussi
With an introduction by Will Self and an Afterword by Ian S. MacNiven
$12.95 US/$16.00 CAN
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1857-3

“One of the five greatest travel books of all time.”
—Pico Iyer

“Miller captures the spirit and warmth of the resilient Greek people in his story of a wartime journey from Athens to Crete.”
—National Geographic

“Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi, a paean to Greece drawn out of a nine-month visit ... the gestation time for a human and, in Miller’s case, for the imaginative re-creation of a country, a culture and his own fierce energies.”
—Richard Eder, The New York Times

Henry Miller
Sextet
$14.95 US/$18.50 CAN
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1800-9

“The people that banned words in books didn’t stop people from buying those books. If you couldn’t buy Henry Miller in the early sixties, you could go to Paris or England. We used to go to Paris, and everybody would buy Henry Miller books because they were banned, and everybody saw them, all the students had them. I don’t believe words can harm you.”
—John Lennon

“One of the few honest and uncompromising American writers.”
—Hunter S. Thompson

“Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive accepter of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.”
—George Orwell

Thomas Merton
The Way of Chuang Tzu
New Preface by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama
$11.95 US/$15.00 CAN
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1851-1

“A most admirable introduction to this less known but important source book of Taoism.”
—Alan Watts, The New York Times Book Review

“Thomas Merton is the saintly man who caused the Dalai Lama to come to admire Christianity as the equal of his beloved Buddhism.”
—Robert Thurman

“Merton is an artist, a Zen.”
—Thich Naht Hanh

Roberto Bolaño
Monsieur Pain
Translated by Chris Andrews
$22.95 US / $28.50 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1714-9

“Roberto Bolaño was an examplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown, he had to go there himself, and there invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results are multi-dimensional."
 —Sarah Kerr, The New York Review of Books

“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

“John Coltrane jamming with the Sex Pistols.”
—John M. Richardson, Esquire

Yukio Mishima
Patriotism
Translated by Geoffrey W. Sargent
$9.95 US/ $12.50 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1854-2

One of the most powerful short stories ever written: Yukio Mishima’s masterpiece about the erotics of patriotism and honor, love and suicide.

“A palpable energy of brilliance and wit.”
—The Believer

“Patriotism is my favorite story.”
—Yukio Mishima

Tennessee Williams
Tales of Desire
$9.95 US/ $12.50 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1856-6

“I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny.”
— John Waters

One of the world’s greatest playwrights (The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was also a master of the short story with “a narrative tone of voice that is totally compelling” (Gore Vidal).

“Disturbing, moving and funny”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Javier Marías
Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico
Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen
$9.95 US/ $12.50 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1858-0

“It all happened because of Elvis Presley.”

A boiled-down gem of a Marías story about how Elvis (in Acapulco to film a movie) and his hard-drinking entourage abandon their interpreter in a seedy cantina full of enraged criminals after insults start to fly.  When the local kingpin demands to be told what the Americans are saying, Elvis himself delivers an even more stinging parting shot–and who has to translate that?

“Sexy, contemplative, elusive, and addictive.”
—San Francisco Bay Guardian

Federico García Lorca
In Search of Duende 
Prose selections edited and translated by Christopher Maurer
Poems translated from the Spanish by Norman di Giovanni, Edwin Honig, Langston Hughes, Lysander Kemp, W. S. Merwin, Stephen Spender, J. L. Gili and Christopher Maurer
$9.95 US/ $12.50 CAN
ISBN 978-0-8112-1855-9

An excellent compilation of Lorca’s poetry and prose, emphasizing Lorca’s notion of the duende, the “earth spirit of irrationality and death.”

“Spain’s great poet and playwright is being rediscovered.”               
—The New York Times

Elias Canetti
Party in the Blitz: The English Years
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann; with an Afterword by Jeremy Adler
$13.95 US
ISBN 978-0-8112-1830-6

“This is the fourth and final volume of Elias Canetti’s memoirs. Its predecessors...were poised, richly detailed and slightly dull; Party in the Blitz, however, is chaotic... and horribly fascinating.”                      
—John Banville, The Nation

“Before there was the mysterious W.G. Sebald, there was the even more mysterious Elias Canetti.”                           
—Clive James, The New York Times Book Review

“Canetti invites—indeed, compels—judgment. His exacting presence honors literature.” 
 —George Steiner, The New Yorker

Luljeta Lleshanaku
Child of Nature
Translated by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi
$13.95 US
ISBN 978-0-8112-1847-4

In my house praying was considered a weakness,
like making love.
And like making love
it was followed by a long night
of fear,
so alone with the body.

         —Luljeta Lleshanaku

“Lleshanaku does not dwell on the harsh past and the brutal climate she knew as a child. Rather, she celebrates the variety of new experience, filling her verse with powerful imagery and stark, surprising visions.”
—Multicultural Review

“She is a love poet.... She makes explicit what it means to live in a violent and corrupt public world which penetrates privacy and betrays every intimacy.”
—Allen Grossman

©2010 by New Directions Publishing Corp.