New Directions: 473 books

A collection that gathers everything Bolano was working on before his untimely death. A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation’s political ills....

Poignant, hilarious, and spooky, Memento Mori addresses old age In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone reminds each: Remember you must die. Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled, and many an old unsavory secret is dusted off.

Dame Muriel Spark delivers a delightfully alarming novel, full of high society and low cunning. One October evening five posh London couples gather for a dinner party, enjoying "the pheasant (flambe in cognac as it is)" and waiting for the imminent arrival of the late-coming guest...

Spark’s very British bachelors come in every stripe First found contentedly chatting in their London clubs, the cozy bachelors (as any Spark reader might guess) are not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously tormented — defrauded or stolen from, blackmailed or pressed to attend horrid séances — and then plunged into the nastiest of lawsuits.

Spark’s mind-bogglingly stunning 1957 debut With easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil.

The fraying fringes of 1950s literary London Rich and slim, the celebrated author Nancy Hawkins takes us in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London, where she spends her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher (“of very good books”) and her nights dispensing...

Household servants and accidental guests must wait out the orders of the lords of the house: not to disturb. A winter’s night; a luxurious mansion near Geneva; a lucrative scandal. The first to arrive is the secretary dressed in furs with a bundle of cash, then the Baron, and finally the...

Eight spooky stories from the mistress of the unexpected. I aim to startle as well as please," Muriel Spark has said, and in these eight marvelous ghost stories she manages to do both to the highest degree. As with all matters in the hands of Dame Muriel her spooks are entirely original....

"All homage to Muriel Spark, the coolest writer ever to scald your liver and your lights" (The Washington Post). The Public Image, which the author has called "an ethical shocker," provides a scalding the reader is unlikely to forget, particularly as it is so enjoyable. Spark...

Published in Spain just before Bolano’s death, A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a fierce and tender love of women “Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime”: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome. Orphaned overnight...

The eleven short stories in this prize-winning collection pivot on life's ambiguities and the central question they pose in Tabucchi's fiction: is it choice, fate, accident, or even, occasionally, a kind of magic that plays the decisive role in the protagonists' lives? The eleven short stories...

A gorgeous collection of fantastic and dreamlike tales by one of the world's most innovative contemporary writers. Chosen as a 2005 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, Where Europe Begins has been described by the Russian literary phenomenon Victor Pelevin as "a spectacular journey...

A young son wanders Cairo trying to comprehend why his mother has disappeared Set in the turbulent years before the 1952 revolution that would overthrow King Farouk and bring Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, Stealth — by Sonallah Ibrahim, one of Egypt’s most respected and uncompromising novelists...

A startling and gorgeous work by Denmark's most admired poet finally available in English translation. Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time....