New Directions: 473 books

Lispector at her most philosophically radical. A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful,...

The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers...

With a splendid selection from a half century of marvelous poems, a major Polish poet appears in English at last One of Poland's greatest living poets—now in English at last—Ryszard Krynicki was born in 1943 in a Nazi labor camp, the son of Polish slave laborers. His 1969 volume, Act of...

From the acclaimed author of Summer in Baden-Baden, a collection of short work finally in English. Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Summer in Baden-Baden was hailed as an undiscovered classic of 20th-century Russian literature. The Washington Post claimed it “a chronicle of fevered genius,” and...

“Magisterial” (Pankaj Mishra, The New York Review of Books) and “to Urdu fiction what One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Hispanic literature” (TLS) The most important novel of twentieth-century Urdu fiction, Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire encompasses the fates of four recurring...

As concentrated as bullets, new stories by the inimitable Fleur Jaeggy Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which somehow brews up a profound paradox that seems bent on haunting the reader: despite a sort of zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is weirdly also...

A stunning new collection by one of Iraq’s brightest poetic voices The Iraqi Nights is the third collection by the acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. Taking The One Thousand and One Nights as her central theme, Mikhail personifies the role of Scheherazade the storyteller, saving herself...

A new expanded edition of the classic study of translation, finally back in print The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty—from a transliteration...

A wonderful sui generis novel about a visiting cat who brings joy into a couple’s life in Tokyo A bestseller in France and winner of Japan’s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, The Guest Cat, by the acclaimed poet Takashi Hiraide, is a subtly moving and exceptionally beautiful novel about the...

A stunning, new translation by the poet and classicist Anne Carson, first performed in 2015 at the Almeida Theatre in London Anne Carson writes, “Euripides was a playwright of the fifth century BC who reinvented Greek tragedy, setting it on a path that leads straight to reality TV. His plays...

A masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most fantastical and visionary short fiction Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, all unpublished during Kafka’s...

The essential edition of one of modern poetry’s most distinctive voices Stevie Smith is among the most popular British poets of the twentieth century. Her poem “Not Waving but Drowning” has been widely anthologized, and her life was celebrated in the classic 1978 movie Stevie. This new...

For the first time in English, a glittering novella about stardom from “one of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century” (Judith Thurman, The New Yorker) All eyes are on Rikio. And he likes it, mostly. His fans cheer, screaming and yelling to attract his attention—they...

Wonderful stories of Communist Prague by “the masterly Bohumil Hrabal” (The New Yorker) Never before published in English, the stories in Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult were written mostly in the 1950s and present the Czech master Bohumil Hrabal at the height of his...