NEW DIRECTIONS BOOKS

(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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(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) THAT SMELL AND NOTES FROM PRISON
That Smell is Sonallah Ibrahim's modernist masterpiece and one of the most influential novels written in Arabic since WWII. Composed after a five-year term in prison, the semi-autobiographical story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo, adrift in his native city. Living under house arrest, he tries to write of his tortuous experience, but instead smokes, spies on the neighbors, visits old lovers, and marvels at Egypt's new consumer culture. Published in 1966, That Smell was immediately banned and the p...
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(P/B) ONE HUNDRED MORE POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE
Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955) proved such an extremely popular book that he put together a sequel. The poems are representative of a large range of classical, medieval, and modern poetry, but the emphasis, as in his companion Chinese collections (1955 and 1970), is on folk songs and love lyrics. And because women have had such an outstanding role in Japanese literature, included here are selections from the work, among others, of the remarkable early twentieth-century poet Yosano Akiko and the more contempora...
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(P/B) BLASTS CRIES LAUGHTER
Fearless new poems by America's everyman bard. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blasts contains blasts, blessings, and curses in the vortex of today, taking its cues from the original little magazine, Blast (published by Wyndham Lewis with Ezra Pound in 1914-15), which helped create the modernist movement in literature and the visual arts. Ferlinghetti speaks for the poor, the forgotten, the beaten, and the bombed. (From the publisher) And speak to us in the poet's voice the voice of the people mixed with a wild soft laughter -...
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(P/B) A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND
The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's Into the Night Life and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950s - as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul. A Coney Island of the Mind is not about the geographical Coney Island. The author intended it as a sustained metaphor or allegory of modern life. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT
Celine's revulsion at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society bursts from nearly every page of this novel. Written in urgent and explosive language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence and cruelty. The story of the improbable travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu-from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and the Ford factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor-takes the reader by the scruff as it hurtle...
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(P/B) THE JOURNAL OF ALBION MOONLIGHT
Inspired by one of the finest lyrics in the English language, the anonymous, pre-Shakespearean Tom O'Bedlam: ("By a knight of ghosts and shadows / I am summoned am to tourney / Ten leagues beyond The wide world's end / Methinks it is no journey..."), Kenneth Patchen sets off on an allegorical journey to the furthest limits of love and murder, madness and sex. While on this disordered pilgrimage to H. Roivas (Heavenly Savior), various characters offer deranged responses, conveying an otherworldly, imaginative madness. A chronicle of violent...
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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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(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) 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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(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) 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) 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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(P/B) LOVE POEMS
A beautiful new gift book of Pablo Neruda's greatest love poems for all occasions. Charged with sensuality and passion, Pablo Neruda's love poems caused a scandal when published anonymously in 1952. In later editions, these verses became the most celebrated of the Noble Prize winner's oeuvre, captivating readers with earthbound images that reveal in gentle lingering lines an erotic re-imagining of the world through the prism of a lover's body: "today our bodies came vast, they grew to the edge of the world / and rolled melting / into a sin...
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(P/B) SATANTANGO
Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker B?la 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) A HERMIT'S GUIDE TO HOME ECONOMICS
A Hermit's Guide to Home Economics combines three long poems Robert Lax composed on the Island of Patmos, where he lived apart from the world. Lax writes humorously about his "hermit" life, as if he were King Solomon doing a stand-up routine. But he also writes like a mystic whose surroundings speak to him, and he uses the whole field of the page to explore the full potential of the word as image and the poet as citizen. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) MEMOIRS
For the "old crocodile," as Williams called himself late in life, the past was always present, and so it is with his continual shifting and intermingling of times, places, and memories as he weaves this story. When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media--though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called "a raw display of pr...
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IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN
Although admired by D. H. Lawrence, this modern classic went generally unnoticed during the years after its publication in 1925. Yet it is "a fundamental book, essential if one proposes to come to terms with American literature" (London Times Literary Supplement). William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but he was fascinated by the texture of American history. Beginning with Columbus's discovery of the Indies and moving on through Sir Walter Raleigh, Cotton Mather, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Edgar Allan...
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(P/B) ALICE IRIS RED HORSE
Yoshimasu Gozo's groundbreaking poetry has spanned over half a century since the publication of his first book, Departure, in 1964. Much of his work is highly unorthodox: it challenges the print medium and language itself, and consequently Alice Iris Red Horse is as much a book on translation as it is a book in translation. Since the late '60s, Gozo has collaborated with visual artists and free-jazz musicians. In the 1980s he began creating art objects engraved on copper plates and later produced photographs and video works. Alice Iris Red...
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