New Directions: 473 books

The convergence of Cortés and Montezuma is the most emblematic event in the birth of what would come to be called "America." Landing on the Mexican coast on Good Friday, 1519, Hernán Cortés felt himself the bearer of a divine burden to conquer and convert the first advanced civilization...

“She writes as if Everything were still possible in the work of a lifetime at the coincidence of all the turvy moments. Better that she’s read without a thought to stop. Best so this world is found changed.” —Clark Coolidge “What a clear, insistent health there is here––as if...

Nathalie Sarraute's stunning debut—vignettes of "inner movements"—foreshadowed the rise of the nouveau roman. Hailed as a masterpiece by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Tropisms is considered one of the defining texts of the nouveau roman movement. Nathalie...

**Of the full-length prose works that Thomas Merton wrote before he entered the Cistercian Order in 1941, only My Argument with the Gestapo has survived––perhaps in part because it was a book that Merton never ceased wanting to see in print. ** Although it first appeared after his death...

"On the Edge of Reason is one of the great European novels of the first half of the twentieth century – and Krleza's themes, his seriousness, his protest against the normality of delusion and cruelty, could hardly be more relevant to the century's end." —Susan Sontag During...

Listed as a "2009 Indie Next List Poetry Top Ten" book by the American Booksellers Association: Roberto Bolano as he saw himself, in his own first calling as a poet. Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four...

Saroyan’s debut collection of stories. A timeless selection of brilliant short stories that won William Saroyan a position among the foremost, most widely popular writers of America when it first appeared in 1934.With the greatest of ease William Saroyan flew across the literary skies in...

Aira's latest concerns a reluctant but powerful doctor who finally decides to use his healing powers to help a hopeless patient. César Aira’s newest novel in English is not about a conventional doctor. Single,in his forties, and poor, Dr. Aira is a skeptic. His personality — his weaknesses,whims,...

The true story of a beekeeper who risks his life to rescue enslaved women from Daesh Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women. The Beekeeper, by...

Where does art start or reality end? Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world” at the very peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs writing their memoirs...

A literary look at one of Europe’s most acclaimed art exhibitions by a Spanish author “offering strange cerebral satisfactions” (Village Voice). A puzzling phone call shatters a writer’s routine. An enigmatic female voice extends a dinner invitation, and it soon becomes clear that this...

A play produced only twice in the 1940s and now published for the first time reveals that Tennessee Williams anticipated the themes of Star Trek by decades. Sixty years ago a young Tennessee Williams wrote a play looking toward the year 2001. Stairs to the Roof is a rare and different Williams'...

A great masterpiece never before available in English, Kornél Esti is the wild final book by a Hungarian genius. Crazy, funny and gorgeously dark, Kornél Esti sets into rollicking action a series of adventures about a man and his wicked dopplegänger, who breathes every forbidden idea of...

The celebrated Swedish author's American debut, The Death of a Beekeeper is a gentle, courageous, and sometimes comic meditation on living with pain. In the beginning of the winter thaw, Lars Lennart Westin has learned that he has cancer and will not live through spring. Told through the journals...