NEW DIRECTIONS BOOKS

(H/B) NOX
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. Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of "Poem 101" by Catallus "for his brother who died in the Troad." Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family ...
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(P/B) SEA, LAND, SHADOW
Poetry by Kazuko Shiraishi translated from the Japanese by Yumiko Tsumura. Sea, Land, Shadow, Kazuko Shiraishi's fourth collection with New Directions, contains work written from 1951 to 2015. Shiraishi, described by Donald Keene as "the outstanding poetic voice of her generation of disengagement in Japan," sees the world in a grain of rice and finds poetry in a mountain-road traffic jam. In the haunting title poem, she visits Iwanuma not long after the disastrous tsunami in 2011 and finds "no houses but a place where houses had been." Th...
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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) 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) 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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(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) 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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(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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(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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(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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(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) 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) 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) 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) THE ALBERTINE WORKOUT
The Albertine Workout contains fifty-nine paragraphs, with appendices, summarizing Anne Carson's research on Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE HOTEL YEARS
The Hotel Years gathers sixty-four feuilletons: on hotels; pains and pleasures; personalities; and the deteriorating international situation of the 1930s. Never before translated into English, these pieces begin in Vienna just at the end of the First War, and end in Paris near the outbreak of the Second World War. Roth, the great journalist of his day, needed journalism to survive: in his six-volume collected works in German, there are three of fiction and three of journalism. Beginning in 1921, Roth wrote mostly for the liberal Frankfurt...
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(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) MICROSCRIPTS
Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper (many of them written during his hospitalization in the Waldau sanatorium) covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author's death in 1956. At first considered a secret code, the microscripts were eventually discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of a Germanic script: a whole story could fit on the back of a business card. Selected from the six-volume German trans...
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(P/B) THE HOUSEGUEST
Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Davila's stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted-you'll finish each one gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Davila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatu...
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(P/B) THE RED WHEELBARROW AND OTHER POEMS
Gathered here are the gems of William Carlos Williams's astonishing achievements in poetry. Dramatic, energetic, beautiful, and true, this slim selection will delight any reader - The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems is a book to be treasured. (From the publisher) "Possibly no modern American poem is more widely known than Williams's 'The Red Wheelbarrow,' that tiny epiphany. Williams himself, not given to making high claims for his own work, considered this poem 'quite perfect.' If you look at the lingua franca of American poetry today - a ...
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