NEW DIRECTIONS BOOKS

(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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(H/B) POETRY AS INSURGENT ART
Since publishing A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been the poetic conscience of America. Now in Poetry as Insurgent Art, he offers a primer, in prose, of what poetry is, could be, and should be. If you read poetry, find out what is missing from the usual fare you are served; if you are a poet, read at your own risk--you will never again look at your role in the same way. (From the publisher)...
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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) 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 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) HER
"A surreal semi-autobiographical blackbook record of a semi-mad period of my life, in that mindless, timeless state most romantics pass through, confusing flesh madonnas with spiritual ones." This is how the author describes this extraordinary expatriate novel. "To all those who have for several years sought to discredit the new American literature, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has just dealt a most powerful blow," wrote French critic Pierre Lepape in 1961 when Her was published in France as La Quatrieme Personne du Singulier. Calling it "a maste...
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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) THE HAPPY BIRTHDAY OF DEATH
The young poet Gregory Corso has been much publicized as one of the leading literary spokesmen for the "Beat Generation," together with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. It is true that he has been one of the inner circle of the "Beats" from the first, but many admirers of his poetry feel that it belongs quite as much to other and older traditions in world literature. One of these is the revival of pure poetry whenever an "original" - be it Rimbaud or Whitman - has broken with current verse conventions to give free rein ...
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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) VALE AVE
Vale Ave - Latin for "Farewell, Hail" - is a hymn to Eros that unfolds as a gorgeous palimpsest of eternal recurrence and reincarnation, charting the course of two lovers who each seek the other across cultures, myths, and centuries. Vale Ave is alchemical - "mystery and portent, yes, but at the same time," as H. D. writes, "there is Resurrection and the hope of Paradise." (From the publisher) "Ave and vale but the parting came before the greeting, it was vale, ave, keep the wine till the last, I hold this cup, I need not taste this sleep...
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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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(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) 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) 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 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 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 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) WE MEET
The singular work of Kenneth Patchen has influenced poets, artists and political activists for decades. New Directions is proud to launch a Patchen revival beginning with omnibus editions of his unique compositions. We Meet highlights Patchen's more outlandish side and includes, like fabrics stitched into a crazy quilt, Because It Is, A Letter to God, Poemscapes, Hurrah For Anything, and Aflame & Afun of Walking Faces. "Because to understand one must begin somewhere," opens Patchen's fabulous book of poems Because It Is: perhaps the most i...
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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) POEMS OF OSIP MANDELSTAM
Peter France writes in his foreword: "I have always been conscious that Mandelstam was an outstanding figure, arguably the outstanding Russian poet of the twentieth century. This is a personal selection from the poetry - poems that for one reason or another I wanted to translate. I have tried to make it reasonably representative of different strands and periods in his work, with a certain stress on the brilliant and fragmentary Voronezh poems." "The transparent one still sings to no avail, still swallow, Antigone, beloved girl..." (From th...
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