New Books!

We’re kicking off Fall with eight new publications!

Helen Dewitt

Lightning Rods

$24.95 US / $29.00 CAN

Jacket by Steve Attardo for Rodrigo Corral Design

“All I want is to be a success. That’s all I ask.” Joe fails to sell a single set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in six months. Then he fails to sell a single Electrolux and must eat hundreds of pieces of homemade pie, served up by his would-be customers who feel so sorry for him. Holed up in his trailer, Joe finds an outlet his for frustrations in a series of ingenious sexual fantasies, and at last strikes gold. His brain storm, Lightning Rods, Inc., will take Joe to the very top—and to the very heart of corporate insanity — with an outrageous solution to the spectre of sexual harassment in the modern office.

         An uproarious, hard-boiled modern fable of corporate life, sex, and race in America, Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods brims with the satiric energy of Nathanael West and the philosophic import of an Aristophanic comedy of ideas. Her wild yarn is second cousin to the spirit of Mel Brooks and the hilarious reality-blurring of Being John Malkovich. Dewitt continues to take the novel into new realms of storytelling — as the timeliness of Lightning Rods crosses over into timelessness. 

“In Lightning Rods, the nonperil Helen DeWitt has written a hilarious and pretty near perfect novel about…well, about selling and sex and the sound of the stories we tell ourselves, and of the stories we tell ourselves about the stories we tell ourselves, and of the stories we sell to others to help them have another story to sell to themselves, and about…did I mention sex?  Lightning Rods is a strange and ingenious and happy-about-the-state-literature-making book.”  ––Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

“Helen DeWitt shocks the reader with her intelligence.  Lightning Rods, an exploration of the collective Id, is as lucid, methodical, and elegantly argued as a mathematical proof.  It is also unremittingly filthy.  DeWitt begins with a premise and goes on to think everything thinkable about it.  A weird, generous, hilarious marvel.” ––Teju Cole, author of Open City

Roberto Bolaño

Tres

Translated by Laura Healy

$24.95 US / $29.00 CAN

Jacket by Rodrigo Corral

Roberto Bolaño’s Tres is a showcase of the author’s willingness to freely cross genres, with poems in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized. As the title implies, the collection is composed of three sections. “Prose from Autumn in Gerona,” a cinematic series of prose poems, slowly reveals a subtle and emotional tale of unrequited love by presenting each scene, shattering it, and piecing it all back together, over and over again. The second part, “The Neochileans,” is a sort of On the Road in verse, which narrates the travels of a young Chilean band on tour in the far reaches of their country. Finally, the collection ends with a series of short poems that take us on “A Stroll Through Literature” and remind us of Bolaño’s masterful ability to walk the line between the comically serious and the seriously comical.

“One of my two best books.”  ––Roberto Bolaño

“In verse, as in prose, Bolaño leads us on journeys through a surreal landscape of exile, longing, and nostalgia.”  ––The Independent

Roberto Bolaño

By Night In Chile

With a new jacket and typesetting

$13.95 US

Jacket by Rodrigo Corral

A hypnotic deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei, poetry, and Pinochet, By Night in Chile––Bolaño’s first novel to be published in English, pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia.  As through a crack in the wall, Urrutia’s single nightlong rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of those strange bedfellows: Church and State. 

“By Night in Chile is regarded by many as Bolaño’s best.”  ––Benjamin Kunkel, The London Review of Books

Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie: Centennial Edition

Introduction by Tony Kushner

$26.95 US / $31.00 CAN

Jacket Sculpture by Lia Zuvilivia inspired by the original Alvin Lustig drawing.  Comissioned by Rodrigo Corral

The Glass Menagerie marked a crucial turning point in American theater, and forever changed the life of its then unknown author. Williams’s elegiac masterpiece brought a radical new lyricism to Broadway — the tragedy, fragility, and tenderness of this “memory play” have made it one of America’s most powerful, timeless, and compelling plays. The introduction by Tony Kushner sparkles with the kind of rich, unique insight that only a fellow playwright could convery.

The “Centennial Edition” includes:

• Tony Kushner’s astonishing Introduction

• The pioneering essay, “The Homosexual in Society,” by Tennessee’s friend, Robert Duncan, and poems by Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Walt Whitman, and Tennessee Williams, which Kushner discusses as sources of inspiration.

• “The Pretty Trap,” a cheerful one-act run up to The Glass Menaagerie.

• “The Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” Tennessee’s short story variation of the play 

• Photographs of great actresses who have played Amanda, and stills from various stage and film incarnations of The Glass Menagerie.

• Williams’s classic essay about fame, “The Catastrophe of Success.”

• The playwright’s original “Production Notes.”

• The 1944 opening night rave reviews from Chicago.

• An essay by distinguished Williams scholar Allean Hale, “Inside The Menagerie,” provides autobiographical particulars about Williams family life in St. Louis.

• A gorgeous new jacket design by Rodrigo Corral

“Seeing The Glass Menagerie was like stumbling on a flower in a junkyard — Williams had pushed language and character to the front of the stage as never before.” —Arthur Miller

“Delicate and perceptive, The Glass Menagerie inhabits a half-world between comedy and tragedy.” —The New York Times

Arthur Rimbaud

A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat

With a New Preface by Patti Smith

$12.95 US / $15.00 CAN

Jacket based on the original Alvin Lustig cover

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” was subsequently added to the first paperbook printing.  Allen Ginsberg proclaimed Arthur Rimbaud as “the first punk”  — a visionary mentor to the Beats for both his recklessness and his fiery poetry. This new edition proudly dons the original Alvin Lustig designed cover, and a introduction by another famous rebel — and now National Book Award-winner — Patti Smith.

“Every writer produces some haunting passages, some memorable phrases, but with Rimbaud they are strewn all over the pages like gems tumbled from a rifled chest.”  —Henry Miller

“At 16, 17, 18 Rimbaud transformed French poetry, completely modernized it.”  —Allen Ginsberg

“Our greatest poet of revolt.” —Albert Camus

Madame de Lafayette 

The Princess of Clèves

Translated by Nancy Mitford

$14.95 US

Jacket based on the original Alvin Lustig cover

The Princess of Clèves recounts a tragic love affair amid the intrigues of the sumptuous court of Henry II.  At root, it’s the story of a girl who marries the wrong man. Beautiful and unusually virtuous, Madame de Clèves is not unhappy with her husband (“prudent beyond his years”) until she meets the dashing Duc de Nemours and finds honor pitted against passion.

“An excellent translation, all coolness and detached elegance. One of the most convincing stories of devotion and enduring love in any language.” ––The New Yorker

William Carlos Williams

By Word Of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959

Compiled and Edited by Jonathan Cohen

Foreward by Julio Marzán

$16.95 US / $19.50 CAN

Jacket by Sylvia Frezzolini Severance

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) produced a startling number of translations of both Spanish and Latin American poetry starting during WWI and continuing through the late fifties. Williams grew up in a Spanish-speaking home and sometimes described himself as half-Spanish. His mother was Puerto Rican and his father spoke Spanish fluently. “Spanish is not, in the sense to which I refer, a literary language,” Williams wrote in his Autobiography. “It has a place of its own, an independent place very sympathetic to the New World.” Williams approached translation as a way not only to present the work of unknown Spanish poets, but also to extend the range and capacity of American poetry, to use language “with unlimited freshness.” Included in this bilingual edition are beautifully rendered translations of poets well-known — Neruda, Paz, and Parra — and lesser-known: Rafael Arévalo Martínez (from Guatemala), Rafael Beltrán Logroño (from Spain), and Eunice Odio (from Costa Rica).

“Jonathan Cohen shows us why translation is crucial to understanding Williams, who approached it as an essential act of poetry. The poet emerges as the first among our modernist writers to see the literary value of translating classical and contemporary verse from both Spain and Latin America. By Word of Mouth makes that clear.”—Edith Grossman 

“This book will reinforce the sense of Williams as one deeply invested in the language and rhythm of the New World — North as well as South.”  —Paul Mariani, author of William Carlos Williams, A New World Naked

Evelio Rosero

Good Offices

Translated by Anne McLean with Anna Milsom

$13.95 US

Jacket by Eileen Baumgartner

Tancredo, a young hunchback, observes and participates in the rites at the Catholic church where he lives under the care of Father Almida. Also in residence are the sexton Celeste Machado, his goddaughter Sabina Cruz, and three widows known collectively as the Lilias, who do the cooking and cleaning and provide charity meals for the local poor and needy. One Thursday, Father Almida and the sexton must rush off to meet the parish’s principal benefactor, Don Justiniano. It will be the first time in forty years Father Almida has not given mass. Eventually they find a replacement: Father Matamoros, a drunkard with a beautiful voice whose sung mass is spellbinding to all. The Lilias prepare a sumptuous meal for Father Matamoros, who persuades them to drink with him. Over the course of the long night the women and Tancredo lose their inhibitions and confess their sins and stories to this strange priest, and in the process reveal lives crippled by hypocrisy.

“Translated into a dozen European languages, published by the finest houses in Spain and Latin America, praised by critics, studied in universities, Rosero’s dark worlds have managed to reach a wide audience. He is an oddity indeed, a writer who in spite of the considerable recognition he has attained has never come out of hiding…. Rosero affirms unashamedly that literature can and should change social reality, and that this is one of its main functions…..” —Antonio Ungar, BOMB