New Directions: 473 books

This muscular, starkly impressive novel from Guatemala's premiere young writer fiercely addresses the seemingly endless violence of Latin America. A young man, Juan Luis Luna, is kidnapped in Guatemala City and held at the bottom of a rusty, empty underground fuel tank in an abandoned gas station....

"Overall, this volume will afford great pleasure to scholars, teachers, and also those who simply love to watch delightful souls disport themselves in language."—Anne Carson Here is a colorful variety pf works by seven Greek poets and philosophers who lived from the eighth to the...

**“Solstad doesn’t write to please other people. Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea...the drama exists in his voice” (Lydia Davis) ** T Singer begins with thirty-four-year-old Singer graduating from library school and traveling by train from Oslo to the small town of Notodden,...

A beautiful, compact, gift edition of some of the world’s greatest poems about loss and death, to ease the heart of the bereaved Who has not suffered grief? In Mourning Songs, the brilliant poet and editor Grace Schulman has gathered together the most moving poems about sorrow by the likes...

**A beautifully produced and exquisitely translated edition of French poems by “the best exponent of the poetry of introversion and metaphorical delirium” (Italo Calvino) ** The Galloping Hour: French Poems—never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime—gathers...

Poems of effervescent grace from one of the best-known and best-loved poets of Portugal With the elliptical looping of a butterfly alighting on one’s sleeve, the poems of Ana Lui´sa Amaral arrive as small hypnotic miracles. Spare and beautiful in a way reminiscent both of Szymborska and...

No synopsis or comparison can convey the novel's lyric comedy or, indeed, its sinister power—sinister because of the strength of will Cyril exerts over his wife, his mistress, his wife's reluctant lover; lyric, since he is also a “sex-singer" in the land where music is the food of love. "Need...

An unforgettable, sensual novel by "one of the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation" (Mark Rudman). "Heroism is a secondary virtue," Albert Camus noted, "but friendship is primary." In his gem-like first novel, Forrest Gander writes of friendship,...

A wild, experimental, polyphonic novel, recounting a typical day of diminishing returns at a nursing home House Mother Normal, subtitled “A Geriatric Comedy,” is the English writer B. S. Johnson’s fifth novel. Unusual in both its subject and structure, this novel is a remarkable study...

A delicious mix of East and West, of wonder and irony, The Fox and Dr. Shimamura is a most curious novel The Fox and Dr. Shimamura toothsomely encompasses East and West, memory and reality, fox-possession myths, and psychiatric mythmaking. As an outstanding young Japanese medical student at...

A Mexican road novel of love, hate, drugs, and the Mexican Revolution. The Trace is a masterful, poetic novel about a journey through Mexico taken by a couple recovering from a world shattered. Driving through the Chihuahua Desert, they retrace the route of nineteenth-century American writer...