NEW DIRECTIONS BOOKS

(P/B) THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSSI
Like the ancient colossus that stood over the harbor of Rhodes, Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi stands as a seminal classic in travel literature. It has preceded the footsteps of prominent travel writers such as Pico Iyer and Rolf Potts. The book Miller would later cite as his favorite began with a young woman's seductive description of Greece. Miller headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell to explore the Grecian countryside: a flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach; the Greek poet Katsimbalis, the ...
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(P/B) THE PISAN CANTOS
Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos were written in 1945, while the poet was being held in an American military detention center near Pisa, Italy, as a result of his pro-Fascist wartime broadcasts to America on Radio Rome. Imprisoned for some weeks in a wire cage open to the elements, Pound suffered a nervous collapse from the physical and emotional strain. Out of the agony of his own inferno came the eleven cantos that became the sixth hook of his modernist epic, The Cantos, itself conceived as a Divine Comedy for our time. The Pisan Cantos wer...
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(P/B) The Beggar Student
For fans of No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai's darkly bewitching novel about the small redemptions of being a pathetic, miserable writer. A fictional writer in his thirties named Osamu Dazai has just sent his publisher a terrible manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Shortly afterward, while moping around a park in suburban Tokyo, he spots someone drowning in a nearby aqueduct. He doesn't want to become a witness to a suicide and eventually decides to flee the park. But as he is leaving, he trips over the boy who had been drowning, and...
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(P/B) THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND
Now available for the first time in paperback, "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 LXXIII (as well as a 1966 fragment concluding the work) have been added. Pound's recently found...
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(P/B) NO LONGER HUMAN
Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a 'clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness. Sem...
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(P/B) PATERSON
Paterson is both a place - the New Jersey city in whom the person (the poet's own life) and the public (the history of the region) are combined. Originally four books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams' words) "follows the course of the Passaic River" from above the great falls to its entrance into the sea. The unexpected Book Five, published in 1958, affirms the triumphant life of the imagination, in spite of age and death. This revised edition has been meticulously re-edited by Chri...
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(P/B) SATANTANGO
Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Bela Tarr's six-hour masterpiece, Satantango is proof, as the spellbinding, bleak, and hauntingly beautiful book has it, that "the devil has all the good times." The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere. Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai's meat. "At the center of Satanta...
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(P/B) THE SETTING SUN
This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis was first published by New Directions in 1956. Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu Dazai died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book has made "people of the setting sun" a permanent part of the Japanese language, and his heroine, Kazuko, a young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie which pervades so much of the modern world. (From...
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(P/B) Self-Portraits
Bringing together novelist Osamu Dazai's best autobiographical shorts in a single, slim volume, Self-Portraits shows the legendary writer at his best-and his worst. "Art dies the moment it acquires authority." So said Japan's quintessential rebel writer Osamu Dazai, who, disgusted with the hypocrisy of every kind of establishment, from the nation's obsolete aristocracy to its posturing, warmongering generals, went his own way, even when that meant his death-and the death of others. Faced with pressure to conform, he declared his individual...
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(P/B) The Flowers of Buffoonery
For the first time in English, the hilarious and deeply moving prequel to No Longer Human The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba-the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age-is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking ...
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(P/B) CAT POEMS
A gorgeous gift edition, dedicated to the mystery, grace, and charm of the cat Across the ages, cats have provided their adopted humans with companionship, affection, mystery, and innumerable metaphors; cats cast a mirror on their beholders; cats endlessly captivate and hypnotize, frustrate and delight. And to poets, in particular, these enigmatic creatures are the most delightful and beguiling of muses (Charles Baudelaire: "the sole source of amusement in one's lodgings") as they go about purring, prowling, hunting, playing, meowing, and...
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(P/B) TURTLE ISLAND
Describing the title of his latest Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poetry and occasional prose pieces, Gary Snyder writes in his introductory note that Turtle Island is "the old new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to 'North America' in recent years." The nearly five dozen poems in the book range from the lucid, lyrical, almost mystical to the mytho-biotic, while a few are frankly political. All, however, share a common vision: a rediscov...
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(H/B) WOOLGATHERING
In this small, luminous memoir, the National Book Award winner Patti Smith revisits the most sacred experiences of her early years, with truths so vivid they border on the surreal. The author entwines her childhood self and its "clear, unspeakable joy" with memories both real and envisioned from her twenties on New York's MacDougal Street, the street of cafe's. Woolgathering was completed, in Michigan, on Patti Smith's 45th birthday and originally published in a slim volume from Raymond Foye's Hanuman Books. Twenty years later, New Directi...
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(P/B) BIG SUR AND THE ORANGES OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH
In his great triptych "The Millennium," Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for fifteen years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place - one of the most colorful in the United States - and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (and writers who did not write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (...
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(P/B) INDEX CARDS
In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter-with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book-and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists-Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others-in a way that is both elliptical and...
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(P/B) A SEASON IN HELL AND THE DRUNKEN BOAT
New Directions is pleased to announce the relaunch of the long-celebrated bilingual edition of Rimbaud's A Season In Hell & The Drunken Boat - a personal poem of damnation as well as a plea to be released from "the examination of his own depths." Rimbaud originally distributed A Season In Hell to friends as a self-published booklet, and soon afterward, at the age of nineteen, quit poetry altogether. New Directions' edition was among the first to be published in the U.S., and quickly became a classic. Rimbaud's famous poem "The Drunken Boat...
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(P/B) ONE HUNDRED POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE
Now in its 23rd printing Rexroth's famous anthology of classic Japanese poems. The sound of the Japanese texts is reproduced in Romji script and the names of the poets in the calligraphy of Ukai Uchiyama. With a translator's introduction, notes on the individual poets and an extensive bibliography. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE TONGUE OF ADAM
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(P/B) SPRING AND ALL
Voted by The New York Times as one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century, Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination - a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that crystalizes in dramatic, energetic, and beautifully cryptic statements of how language recreates the world. Spring and All contains some of Williams's best known poetry, including Section I, which opens, "By the road to the contagious hospital" (now commonly known by the title "Spring and All"), and Section XXII, where Williams penned his most fam...
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(H/B) ENVELOPE POEMS
Although a very prolific poet, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) published fewer than a dozen poems. Instead, she created small handmade books. In her later years, she stopped producing these, but she continued to write a great deal, and at her death she left behind many poems, drafts, and letters. It is among the makeshift and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson's later writings that we find the envelope poems gathered here. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of he...
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