Böcker utgivna av NEW DIRECTIONS

Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector's third novel--the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals--is in English at last

Adored by the likes of Amy Sedaris, Madonna (who optioned the film rights), and Gordon Lish, Love Junkie is Robert Plunket's cult novel of the heady heyday of gay New York at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic: scandalously long out of print, it is now gloriously reissued for a new generation of readers.Mimi Smithers, a modern-day Emma Bovary, is a fortyish suburban housewife who has an eye for décor and dreams of hosting lavish cocktail parties. Reflecting on her time in Tehran with her Union Carbide executive husband, she says, "In the waning months of the Shah's regime, entertaining became more and more difficult. Hams-always a problem in Islamic countries-were as rare as hen's teeth." After their move to Westchester, a party she hosts for Mrs. Rockefeller goes south, and she falls into a deep funk. But then life takes an unexpected turn when she stumbles down into the gay rabbit hole of Manhattan and Fire Island society and meets Joel, a porn star with a chest "as smooth as a Ken doll." Soon she's helping him with his lucrative mail order business (signed photographs, used underwear, "verbal abuse audiotapes"), and her real dreams and adventures begin.

The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Elias Canetti's powerful, disarming, and often bleakly comic observations, diatribes, musings, and commentaries on and against death. Evoking despair, melancholy, and fury, Canetti examines the inevitable demise of all beings-from the ant, the fish, and the worm to an executioner, a court painter, and a Greek god-while fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power. Interspersed with material from philosophers and writers such as Goethe, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Walser, The Book Against Death is ultimately a moving affirmation of the value of life itself. Canetti famously refused to die before he'd read all his obituaries and corrected them."I accept no death."-Elias Canetti (1905-1994)

Céline had long claimed that Death on the Installment Plan was part of a trilogy, and that the manuscripts of War and London had been stolen by the Resistance from his apartment, when he fled for his life-an abhorred collaborator-from Paris. Few believed him, but then, mysteriously, the manuscripts came to light in 2020. Greeted rapturously in France ("a miracle," Le Monde; "the discovery of a great text," Le Point), War is sure to be more controversy abroad. Though much revered as "the most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature" (London Review of Books), Céline is also reviled for his infamous antisemitic wartime pamphlets.      War begins with Ferdinand waking in shock on the battlefield, grievously injured, with all his comrades sprawled out dead around him: it's a scene of visceral horror, carnage, and pain.The novel's key idea-that trench warfare lodges itself in the soldier's head forever, goes on destroying him, cuts him off from those who have not been on the front, and makes the hypocrisies of their safe world repugnant-drives itself under the reader's skin, powered by the sheer velocity of Céline's voracious, gritty, raw, graphic style.

A taxidermied parrot, insulted by a stodgy uncle, comes violently alive and batters the poor fool to death with its beak. A terrible tyrant, Zar Palemón, presides over grotesque ritualized sex acts in his court-which is itself contained in a demonic gemstone the size of a fist. And deep in the Andes, in a hidden cave, an unremarkable house cat waits to trap its hapless victim with a Gorgon's gaze and engage him in a staring contest on which the fate of the cosmos just might depend.Such are a few of the bizarre adventures found within Juan Emar's mind-bending collection of short stories, Ten. Allegory? Parody? Horror? Surrealism? Yes to all, and none of the above: where lesser writers mark their end-point, the unclassifiable Juan Emar jumps off, straight into the deep end. Life is far from still in Emar's world, where statues come alive, gaseous vampires stalk, and our hopes and fears materialize in a web of shocking interconnections unified by twisted logic and crystalline prose.Now, Ten is available in English for the first time, deftly translated by Megan McDowell and with an introduction by César Aira, who writes: "Emar has neither precedents nor equals; his echoes and affinities-Lautréamont, Macedonio Fernández, Gombrowicz-flow from his readers' own inclinations." Byzantine and vivid, intricate and bizarre, this quiver of shorts by Chile's most idiosyncratic mad genius of literature will leave readers astounded for decades to come.

This gathering of all Dylan Thomas's stories-ranging chronologically from the dark, almost surrealistic tales of Thomas's youth to such gloriously rumbustious celebrations of life as "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and "Adventures in the Skin Trade"-charts the progress of "The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive" toward his mastery of the comic idiom. Here, too, are stories originally written for radio and television and, in a short appendix, the schoolboy pieces first published in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine. A high point of the collection is Thomas's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog," a vivid collage of memories from his Swansea childhood that combines the lyricism of his poetry with the sparkle and sly humor of Under Milk Wood. Also here is the fiction from Quite Early One Morning, a collection planned by Thomas shortly before his death.Altogether there are more than forty stories, providing a rich and varied literary feast and showing Dylan Thomas in all his intriguing variety-somber fantasist, joyous word-spinner, and irrepressible comedian of smalltown Wales.

Catullus was undoubtedly one of the most intimate, witty, vivid, and tender poets of antiquity. Perhaps his greatest gift was his ability to truthfully reveal the fleeting instants of his bare psyche: moments of erotic passion, of scorn and jealousy, of heartfelt devotion, of consuming love. The cycle of poems to his love, "Lesbia," have entranced poets and translators across the centuries, enriching many different traditions in English-language poetry.This anthology of Catullus's love poems showcases translations from many New Directions authors, including James Laughlin, Bernadette Mayer, Muriel Spark, and Louis and Celia Zukofsky, as well as beloved timeless translations, like those of Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, and inimitable modern versions from the likes of Dorothy Parker and Horace Gregory. Also included are several newly commissioned translations from contemporary poets and writers.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 ALTA FIRST TRANSLATION PRIZEIn the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, one summer in the 1970s, a family-a husband and wife, their daughter, and their crippled teenage son Camilo-take in an orphan named Cosme. The boys unexpectedly fall in love, but an act of violence shatters their intimate world and changes their lives forever. Decades later, when Camilo returns to his hometown, he is haunted by his first love and the long shadow of Brazil's military dictatorship. At once an incisive and unforgiving study of Brazilian society and a fluid, queer coming-of-age story, Victor Heringer's exhilarating and moving novel is worthy of Machado de Assis.

Sophie-a clever and charming young woman-is trying to get out from under her mother's thumb. She's in love with her childhood friend Philip (pragmatic, attractive, a bit of a bore), but she often worries that she loves him too much for her own good, and that he might only be another thumb to crawl under.Both a sincere bildungsroman of Sophie's attempt to seize a life for herself and a comic masterpiece with cutting observations and asides, The Halt During the Chase is flutteringly alive as it discusses different forms of love, adulthood ("Isn't buying new lampshades a form of slow death?"), marriage, insecurity, and stifling British snobbery and classism. Sophie's voice, fueled by Tonks's acidic narration, evolves from thrashing about in various traps into a triumphant, croaky-throated liberation song.

The celebrated writer Álvaro Mutis envied new readers of Ida Vitale's poetry: "unexpected pleasures await them." Time Without Keys: Selected Poems is the first volume of Vitale's illustrious poetry to appear in the US. The selection spans seventy-five years and the wonders within abound-the skies over Montevideo, falconry, the saxifrage's bloom, gratitude for the alphabet and summer-as do urgent questions about our relationship with the world. How does our perception of time shape history, as well as our social and political constructs? Vitale's poetic and human vitality have made her a storied figure in the Spanish language and beyond; her writing revered for being classic and modern, precise and lucid, intellectually challenging and rich in tradition. This bilingual edition, presented in reverse chronological order, offers the reader both a wide range of Vitale's most beloved poems, as well as a wealth of recent work. The translator Sarah Pollack, Vitale's first translator into English, has written an informative afterword about Vitale's life and work.

In her first book-length collection of poems to appear in the US, Lesley Harrison looks North to the sea, with the heat of the land at her back, to bring us meditations on whale hunts and lost children, Manhattan sky towers, and the sound of the gamelan in the Gulf of Bothnia. A poetry of spareness in multilayered depths, of textural silence and aural place, Kitchen Music plunges deep through the strata of language where "weather is body" and an Iceland poppy is "as delicate as birch." In poems and sequences of poems, Harrison spins folktales into threads of family and gender, engages with the work of the artists Roni Horn and Marina Rees, transcribes John Cage and Johannes Kepler into song and litany, pens a hymnal of bees, and turns to storms, glaciers, and the lapwing life in a field of young barley. As the novelist Kirsty Gunn writes in the foreword, Harrison has "taken up the old white whale of the fixed and masculine narratives and made of its seas and weathers her own Moby Dick, a female poetry 'in praises / repeated, repeating.'"

An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too-she is a mass of confusion. She's in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is miserable; her sister's unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her. She falls into disgrace and then "marries up," but without any joy, blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes. The Road to the City was Ginzburg's very first work, originally published under a pseudonym. "I think it might be her best book," her translator Gini Alhadeff remarked: "And apparently she thought so, too, at the end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work for Mondadori.

When My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket's glittering story of literary sleuthing and deceit, first appeared in 1983, it garnered immediate and far-reaching acclaim. Frank Conroy at The Washington Post exclaimed, "The author pulled me in so deftly, moved me up an escalating scale of sly hyperbole so cunningly, that after a hundred pages, I seemed to have turned over the keys, so to speak, of my nervous system"; Florence King at , "The most exciting event in American letters for a very long time: a momentous book." More recently, though long out of print, it was canonised in The Guardian's "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read," ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top five books of "great American comic fiction," and praised by Michael Leone in The Los Angeles Review of Books as "a classic picaresque novel in the tradition of Cervantes."Set against the fading light of early-1980s Hollywood, our deeply flawed, bigoted, closeted antihero Elliot Weiner is a historian-Harvard BA, Columbia PhD-with a passion for Morris dancing and Warren Harding, "the shallowest President in history." After Weiner receives a research grant to write a book on the tumultuous life of Harding, he gets wind of a trunkful of the 29th president's bawdy billets-doux that is rumoured to be fiercely guarded by his ancient mistress Rebekah Kinney on her declining Hollywood Hills estate. Nothing and no one can stand in the way of Weiner getting his paws on the treasure, and along the way, as the words dance across the page, a hysterical, guffaw-inducing punchline around every corner, Weiner reaches new lows of humiliation and self-delusion.

The apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends, and gossips with neighbors. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life confined to a middle-class home, where both everything and nothing happens.With shades of Clarice Lispector, Elena Ferrante, and Kobo Abe, this verbally acrobatic novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist, and critic Mieko Kanai-whose work enjoys a cult status in Japan-is a disconcerting and radically imaginative portrait of selfhood in late-stage capitalist society.

The Kappa is a creature from Japanese folklore known for dragging unwary toddlers to their deaths in rivers: a scaly, child-sized creature, looking something like a frog, but with a sharp, pointed beak and an oval-shaped saucer on top of its head, which hardens with age.Akutagawa's Kappa is narrated by Patient No. 23, a madman in a lunatic asylum: he recounts how, while out hiking in Kamikochi, he spots a Kappa. He decides to chase it and, like Alice pursuing the White Rabbit, he tumbles down a hole, out of the human world and into the realm of the Kappas. There he is well looked after, in fact almost made a pet of: as a human, he is a novelty. He makes friends and spends his time learning about their world, exploring the seemingly ridiculous ways of the Kappa, but noting many-not always flattering-parallels to Japanese mores regarding morality, legal justice, economics, and sex. Alas, when the patient eventually returns to the human world, he becomes disgusted by humanity and, like Gulliver missing the Houyhnhnms, he begins to pine for his old friends the Kappas, rather as if he has been forced to take leave of Toad of Toad Hall...

In the Act begins: "As long as Helen was attending her adult education classes twice a week, everything worked out fine: Edgar could have a completely quiet house for his work, or his thinking, or whatever it was." In Rachel Ingall's blissfully deranged novella, the "whatever it was" her husband's been up to in his attic laboratory turns out to be inventing a new form of infidelity. Initially Helen, before she uncovers the truth, only gently tries to assert her right to be in her own home. But one morning, grapefruit is the last straw: "He read through his newspaper conscientiously, withdrawing his attention from it for only a few seconds to tell her that she hadn't cut all the segments entirely free in his grapefruit-he'd hit exactly four that were still attached. She knew, he said, how that kind of thing annoyed him." While Edgar keeps his lab locked, Helen secretly has a key, and what she finds in the attic shocks her into action and propels In the Act into heights of madcap black comedy even beyond Ingalls's usual stratosphere.

Álvaro de Campos is one of the most influential heteronyms created by Portugal's great modernist writer Fernando Pessoa. According to Pessoa, Campos was born in Tavira (Algarve) in 1890 and studied mechanical engineering in Glasgow, although he never managed to complete his degree. In his own day, Campos was celebrated-and slandered-for his vociferous poetry imbued with a Whitman-inspired free verse, his praise of the rise of technology and his polemical views that appeared in manifestos, interviews and essays. Here in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari's translations are the complete poems of Campos. This edition is based on the Portuguese Tinta-da-china edition and includes an illuminating introduction about Campos by the Portuguese editors Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello, facsimiles of original manuscripts and a generous selection of Campos's prose texts.

Here at last is an exciting new edition of the Brazilian modernist epic Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character, by Mário de Andrade. This landmark 1928 novel follows the adventures of the shapeshifting Macunaíma and his brothers as they leave their Amazon home for a whirlwind tour of Brazil, cramming four centuries and a continental expanse into a single mythic plane. Having lost a magic amulet, the hero and his brothers journey to São Paulo to retrieve the talisman that has fallen into the hands of an Italo-Peruvian captain of industry (who is also a cannibal giant). Written over six delirious days-the fruit of years of study-Macunaíma magically synthesizes dialect, folklore, anthropology, mythology, flora, fauna, and pop culture to examine Brazilian identity. This brilliant translation by Katrina Dodson has been many years in the making and includes an extensive section of notes, providing essential context for this magnificent work.

Narrated in a series of stark, brief vignettes, The Illiterate is Ágota Kristóf's memoir of her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956 with her husband and small child, her early years working in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook. Few writers can convey so much in so little space. Fierce yet almost pointedly flat and documentarian in tone, Kristóf portrays with a disturbing level of detail and directness an implacable message of loss: first, she is forced to learn Russian as a child (with the Soviet takeover of Hungary, Russian became obligatory at school); next, at age twenty-one, she finds herself required to learn French to survive: I have spoken French for more than thirty years, I have written in French for twenty years, but I still don't know it. I don't speak it without mistakes, and I can only write it with the help of dictionaries, which I frequently consult. It is for this reason that I also call the French language an enemy language. There is a further reason, the most serious of all: this language is killing my mother tongue.

World-Ana Luísa Amaral's second collection with New Directions-offers a new exhilarating set of poems that convey wonder, bemusement and an ever-deepening appreciation of life. Weaving the thread that connects the poem to life, World speaks of our immense human perplexity in the face of everything around us and our oneness with it all. As Amaral notes, all of us, "humans and non-humans, are on the same ontological level, the differences being only a matter of perspective. We are all made of the same stuff as dreams-and stars." Asked about her thoughts on World, Amaral's peerless translator Margaret Jull Costa replied: "What I take from this collection of poems is a sense of joy in the ordinary-seeing an ant going about its business, or a bee or a fish, or the feeling of sharing a whole history with a particular table, or watching a very ordinary woman sitting on a train playing with the handle of her handbag. World also brings us meditations on colonisation, slavery and whaling. Like the world, it is full of surprises and full of joy and sadness." These vibrant, exultant poems invite you to share this marvellous world: Yes, all you need (how easy!) is to say yes.

Alison Mills Newman's innovative, genre-bending novel has long been out of print and impossible to find. A "fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English," as the poet and scholar Harryette Mullen once put it, Francisco is the first-person account of a young actress and musician and her growing disillusionment with her success in Hollywood. Her wildly original and vivid voice chronicles a free-spirited life with her filmmaker lover, visiting friends and family up and down California, as well as her involvement in the 1970s Black Arts Movement. Love and friendship, long, meaningful conversations, parties and dancing-Francisco celebrates, as she improvises in the book, "the workings of a positive alive life that is good value, quality, carin, truth ... the gift of art for the survival of the human heart."

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD IN PROSESet in and around the Mexican city of Veracruz, This Is Not Miami delivers a series of devastating stories-spiraling from real events-that bleed together reportage and the author's rich and rigorous imagination. These narrative nonfiction pieces probe deeply into the motivations of murderers and misfits, into their desires and circumstances, forcing us to understand them-and even empathize-despite our wish to simply label them monsters. As in her hugely acclaimed novels Hurricane Season and Paradais, Fernanda Melchor's masterful stories show how the violent and shocking aberrations that make the headlines are only the surface ruptures of a society on the brink of chaos.

Two elderly people, Artur and Isabella, meet and have a passionate sexual encounter on New Year's Eve. Details of the lives of Artur, a retired Yugoslav army captain, and Isabella, a Holocaust survivor, are revealed through police dossiers. As they fight loneliness and aging, they take comfort in small things: for Artur, a collection of 274 hats; for Isabella, a family of garden gnomes who live in her apartment. Later, we meet the ill-fated Pupi, who dreamed of becoming a sculptor but instead became a chemist and then a spy. As Eileen Battersby wrote, "As he stands, in the zoo, gazing at a pair of rhinos, in a city most likely present-day Belgrade, this battered Everyman feels very alone: 'I would like to tell someone, anyone, I'd like to tell someone: I buried Mother today.'" Pupi sets out to correct his family's crimes by returning silverware to its original Jewish owners through the help of an unlikely friend, a pawnbroker.Described by Dasa Drndic as "my ugly little book," Doppelgänger was her personal favorite.

It is no surprise that one of Muriel Spark's most lively and entertaining works would be her own memoir, Curriculum Vitae. Born to a Scottish Jewish father and an English Presbyterian mother, Spark describes her childhood in 1930s Edinburgh in brief, dazzling anecdotes. In one she recalls a cherished schoolteacher, Christina Kay, who would later be used as the prototype for Miss Jean Brodie. Spark boldly details her disastrous first marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark (S.O.S.) - himself thirty-two, she just nineteen - whom she followed to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and left behind to return to England. In the midst of WWII, Spark took a bizarre position working in the disinformation campaign of the British Secret Service, eliciting information from German POWs to combat Nazi propaganda. She later moved to the Poetry Society of London, where she mingled with literati and other intellectuals, befriended by some (such as Graham Greene, an early supporter of her work) and sparring with others. We experience Spark's joy with the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, her trials with other writers' envy, and her emergence as the most brilliant femme fatale of 20th-century English literature.

Forrest Gander's Core Samples from the World is a magnificent compendium of poetry, photography, and essay (a form of Japanese haibun). Collaborating with three acclaimed photographers, Gander explores tensions between the familiar and foreign. His eloquent new work voices an ethical concern for others, exploring empathic relations in which the world itself is fundamental. Taking us around the globe to China, Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Chile, Core Samples shows how Gander's "sharp sense of place has made him the most earthly of our avant-garde, the best geographer of fleshly sites since Olson" (Donald Revell, The Colorado Review).

The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 is San Francisco poet Bob Kaufman's third collection and his first to be published since the late 1960s. One of the original Beat poets (the coinage "beatnik" is his), Kaufman's work has always been essentially improvisational, often done to jazz accompaniment. And he became something of a legendary figure at the poetry readings in the early days of the San Francisco renaissance of the 1950s. With his extemporaneous technique, akin in many ways to Surrealist automatic writing, he has produced a body of work ranging from a visionary lyricism infused with satirical, almost Dadaistic elements to a prophetic poetry of political and social protest. Born in New Orleans of mixed Black and Jewish parentage, Kaufman was one of fourteen children. During twenty years in the Merchant Marine, he cultivated an intense taste for literature on his long sea voyages. Settling in California, in the '50s, he became active in the burgeoning West Coast literary scene. Disappointment, drugs, and imprisonment led him to take a ten-year vow of complete silence that lasted until 1973. The present volume includes previously uncollected poems written prior to his pledge and newer work composed in the years 1973-1978, before the poet once again lapsed into silence.