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READING GUIDES

We now offer free reading guides to accompany some of our new and classic titles, including the following:

César Aira, Ghosts

Roberto Bolaño, The Skating Rink

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Yoel Hoffmann, Curriculum Vitae

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

Guillermo Rosales, The Halfway House

W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn

Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust

All reading guides can be viewed and downloaded from ND's page at scribd.com.

For other resources for educators, see our Professors page.

 

 
NEWS & EVENTS

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In Memoriam: Ben Sonnenberg

Ben Sonnenberg, a beloved friend to New Directions, died Thursday, June 24, in Manhattan. Mr. Sonnenberg, founder of the seminal literary quarterly Grand Street, published only writers whose work he loved and which met the high standards of his own personal taste—a unique array. His memoir, Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy, was published in 1991. 

ND authors whom Ben particularly advocated include Anne Carson, Javier Marías, Tibor Déry, Eça de Queiros, Roberto Bolaño, W.G. Sebald, Robert Walser, and Elias Canetti (though he believed no gentleman would have published Party in the Blitz, Canetti's final, bitter, blistering memoir).  He was also a fervent supporter of some of our translators: Richard Howard, George Szirtes, Margaret Jull Costa, Michael Hofmann, Susan Bernofsky, and Chris Andrews. 

Ben pulled many strings on our behalf and always encouraged and helped us, although he noted that he himself was the first to publish Anne Carson.

There is no one like him and he will be sorely missed.
ND Exclusive: Interview with Anna Kushner

Check out the video on our blog of an exciting New Directions interview with The Halfway House translator Anna Kushner, whose "commanding translation captures the unlikely combination of insouciance and resignation that defines Rosales' tone" (Words Without Borders). Kushner tells the story of discovering the book, and her journey of securing the rights in order to translate it. Her insight into Rosales and his work provides an original perspective that truly enhances the book's meaning and significance.
In Memoriam: José Saramago

José Saramago, Portugal's first Nobel Literary Laureate, died on June 18. His works, including Blindness and All the Names, published by Harcourt's Drenka Willen, were rendered into English by the award-winning translator Margaret Jull Costa. His forthcoming novel, The Elephant's Journey, will be published in the fall by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Patti Smith ♡ ND

"We savor all Roberto Bolaño has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius." —Patti Smith

It doesn't have to be Valentine's Day for love. We recently discovered that Patti Smith is a big fan of ND. At the headline opening night event of last month's PEN International Voices Festival, she recited a poem inspired by the work of Roberto Bolaño. And you can spot the cover for César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and some comments on the book on Patti Smith's Coffee Break blog.

Smith's memoir Just Kids was recently published by Ecco Books and is available at your local independent bookstore.

Norfolk ArtsWave to Feature James Laughlin and New Directions Publishing

The weekend of August 15-17, Norfolk's ArtsWave celebrates the area's commitment to its long cultural heritage. This year there will be a library-centered event honoring ND's James Laughlin. Information can be found here.
Susan Howe at the Grenfell Press

The poems in Frolic Architecture were inspired by Susan Howe’s experience of viewing various manuscripts, sermon notebooks, books, and pamphlets of the eighteenth-century American Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards. Frolic Architecture is the third section of Howe's That This, forthcoming from ND next spring. 

Frolic Architecture, an exquisite sixty-eight page book, comprises forty-eight collage poems printed letterpress on Somerset paper at Leslie Miller's Grenfell Press by Brad Ewing, with ten photograms printed in James Welling’s studio. The book was bound by Claudia Cohen using handmade Izumo Mitsumata-shi and Cave papers. The book, published in an edition of twenty-six, is issued with a separate, signed photogram/poem. Orders are being taken at the Grenfell Press website.

ND Creative Director at Large Rodrigo Corral Captures 6 of AIGA's 50 Books/50 Covers

Six covers designed for ND by our Creative Director at Large, Rodrigo Corral, were recognized by AIGA for outstanding book design, including Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges and Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. The covers will be exhibited at the AIGA National Design Center in New York in December 2010.
Gearing up for the Microscripts Exhibit

Robert Walser's Microscripts continues to be a huge hit with readers and reviewers as well as the darling of many independent bookstores. The Christine Burgin Gallery, which co-published the Microscripts with New Directions, will be exhibiting the actual scripts this autumn. There will also be some incredible surprises to accompany this fantastic show — more details to come in the near future. 

In the meantime, you can check out more information about the Microscripts, including a free preview, on our website, to see what the excitement is all about! Or find out more — and see more samples — on the New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog.
Introducing PEN Reads

PEN Reads is a new book club being launched by PEN. To our great excitement, we have the honor of having The Hour of the Star chosen as its first selection. Clarice Lispector's novel about the hard life of a young Brazilian girl will be available for purchase through the PEN site for $9.95 (or at your favorite bookstore). Colm Tóibín will lead the discussion with a short piece, and next up will be the noted Lispector biographer Ben Moser (author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, Oxford University Press). More information can be found on the PEN website.
Anne Carson Performances and Praise

Anne Carson will be reading on Tuesday, July 20, at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston.  The reading will feature a performance by Rashaun Mitchell and Marcie Munnerlyn, both leading dancers with The Merce Cunningham Dance Company. 

Carson's Nox, a book in a box written as an elegy for her deceased brother, has been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker, where Meghan O'Rourke writes, "Nox is a luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of an elegy, which is why it evokes so effectively the felt chaos and unreality of loss ... a questioning, unsentimental excursion into the meaning of not understanding."

Highlights from Reviews of Muriel Spark: The Biography, by Martin Stannard

Muriel Spark: The Biography was published in April by W.W. Norton. Here's a sampling from the rave reviews that the book received:

"There was much in the 22 novels Muriel Spark wrote in her 88 years that drew upon her life, even if the drawing was as slyly phantasmagoric as Chagall’s moon flights or Picasso’s nose with three nostrils."
—Richard Eder for The Boston Globe

"For all Spark's brilliant comic sense and her accuracy as a social observer, she was not a novelist of manners but a strictly disciplined writer who chose to explore moral and philosophical questions and who was especially interested in slipping between the natural and supernatural worlds. However various her works, readers tend to agree on the integrity of her voice: unsparingly clear, insidiously funny."
—Frances Talliaferro for The Wall Street Journal

"Her gifts were unusual – a piercing eye; an acute ear; an incisive, often caustic wit; a voice so distinctive; a style so inimitable that once having read her prose, even the mildly attentive reader could select another Spark text from three unsigned samples."
—Robert E. Hosmer for The Chicago Tribune

For a complete list of the seventeen Muriel Spark titles published by New Directions, please see our Complete Catalog. Forthcoming is her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae.

We Salute Dame Muriel Spark:

“A master of malice and mayhem.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times…. My admiration for Spark’s contribution to literature knows no bounds. She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent, the crème de la crème.”
—Ian Rankin

“The most sharply original fictional imagination of our time.”
—The London Sunday Times

“An empress of literary sleight of hand.”
—The Washington Post

“Surely the most engaging, tantalizing writer we have.”
—Frank Kermode, The London Review of Books

“One of this century’s finest creators of the comic-metaphysical entertainment.”
—The New York Times

“One of the giants of post-war fiction.”
—The Independent

“I’ve always tried to make the supernatural into part of natural history.”
—Muriel Spark in ArtForum

Michael Moore and Poets House Honor Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Among Lawrence Ferlinghetti's numerous fans, the famed documentary filmmaker Michael Moore recently sent him an incredible note of praise:

Lawrence,

The fact that I even get the chance to write you this personal note has brought tears to my eyes. May I wish you a happy 91st birthday?! And thank you for all you have given this world. And what you have meant to me. I began reading your poetry as a teenager. I would read it aloud to friends. Instead of passing them a joint, I would pass them a Ferlinghetti. We had an open minded priest at our working class Catholic church and one Sunday he let me read one of your poems at the "guitar mass" instead of the reading from the old testament. As a young adult I came to your bookstore on a visit to SF and I went to a reading of yours. I felt like I was walking on sacred ground.  

I cannot overstate what you meant to me, and to have this opportunity to thank you for that is very humbling. Thank you. For that. For everything. 

I've written a poem for you, on the occasion of your birthday:

Ferlinghetti at 91
What a day!
In the beginning there was the word...
1919 
the last year before women could vote
The last year when there was no radio or tv or xbox or all the noise that blasts humanity into a lethargy that serves the rulers well
Thank God 1919 gave us Ferlinghetti 
And his words
And the beautiful, joyful, rebellious noise he has made.

—Michael Moore (© 2010)

We thank Michael Moore for this wonderful birthday note.
Poets House recently honored Mr. Ferlinghetti at the The 15th Annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge. The event featured Galway Kinnell, Thomas Lux, Anne Carson, and Bill Murray. After readings, a walk across the bridge, and a celebratory dinner, the Elizabeth Kray Award, "The Betty," for service to the field of poetry was awarded to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "one of our ageless radicals and true bards" (Booklist) who has authored such ground-breaking works as A Coney Island of the Mind, Americus, and Poetry As Insurgent Art. Founder of the legendary City Lights Bookstore, he launched the City Lights publishing house, which first published Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems, among other seminal works.

Dunya Mikhail Wins The Arab American Book Award

Dunya Mikhail won the 2010 Arab American Book Award for her most recent book of poems Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, published this year by ND. The public announcement was made June 1, and there will be a ceremony in Washington D.C. this fall.

Hooray Dunya!!!
László Krasznahorkai Wins Brücke Berlin Prize

The Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has won the Brücke Berlin Prize for his exceptional Seiobo, published last month in German by Fischer Verlag. This is a handsome award (20,000 EUR), in more ways than one: half of it goes to the translator, Heike Flemming.

A chapter of the novel appeared in The Guardian last year.

"Tennessee Williams saved my life."

John Waters' recent memoir, Role Models, began when Thomas Keith of New Directions asked him to write the introduction for Tennessee Williams's own Memoirs. A recent write-up of John Waters in The Baltimore Sun picks up where he left off in Memoirs:

"For the 12-year-old Waters, growing up in suburban Baltimore, Williams was more than a naughty writer whose books carried the ominous stamp 'See Librarian' at the library. 'Yes, Tennessee Williams was my childhood friend,' writes Waters. 'I yearned for a bad influence, and Tennessee was one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny.'"
César Aira's The Literary Conference

"Aira writes novels as a saxophonist might produce variations on an atonal theme, beginning with a typically absurd premise and then following it wherever it leads him. Although Aira’s short novels frequently serve as metaphors for art and literature, he doesn’t usually address his working method directly—which is what makes The Literary Conference, the fifth and most recent of his novels to be translated into English, noteworthy."
—Scott Esposito, editor of The Quarterly Conversation, for The National


"Aira, an experimental Argentine writer, has published more than sixty books, though only a few have appeared in English. At a literary conference, César, the protagonist—author and translator by day, mad scientist by night—hatches a plan to rule the world by creating an army cloned from the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. But César accidentally clones a cell that’s not from Fuentes but from Fuentes’s silk tie, thus loosing lumbering, thousand-foot-long electric-blue silkworms upon the city of Mérida. Aira writes, 'It seems like the insertion of a different plot line, from an old B-rated science fiction movie.' It sure does. But Aira’s writerly self-reference, while hardly subtle, is disarming, and the result is amusing, self-conscious camp." 
—The New Yorker
Mr. Magoo's Glasses

Alvin Lustig was involved in a lot of different projects in his heyday—among them, Mr. Magoo's walking into his name and using the oo's for glasses in the opening sequence of the cartoon. Check out the video here.
Michael McClure Featured in When You're Strange, a New Documentary about The Doors

Michael McClure was a close friend of the band and currently reads his poetry to live music by Doors member Ray Manzarek. Read more about the film and see a preview here.

McClure's newest book of poems, Mysteriosos, is currently available at your local fine bookstore.
Celebrating Nathaniel Tarn

"A Multitude of One: Celebrating Nathaniel Tarn" was featured in the most recent issue of Jacket Magazine. It includes poems and essays by and about Nathaniel Tarn.

New Directions published Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, Tarn's latest collection of poems, in 2008.
©2010 by New Directions Publishing Corp.