New Directions: 473 books

The greatest Chinese novel of the twentieth century, Fortress Besieged is a classic of world literature, a masterpiece of parodic fiction that plays with Western literary traditions, philosophy, and middle-class Chinese society in the Republican era.

All of the author's previously published poems, including poems from the plays, are in this definitive edition that comes with a CD of the author reading some of his poems in his unmistakable Mississippi drawl. Few writers achieve success in more than one genre, and yet if Tennessee Williams...

"I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny."—John Waters “I cannot write any sort of story,” said Tennessee [to Gore Vidal] “unless there is at least one character in it...

Marvelous stories by the Irish writer acclaimed by Zadie Smith as “idiosyncratic and fascinating” Never Love a Gambler is a showcase for the exceptional talents of Keith Ridgway. The Times (London) praised his stories as “flawlessly structured yarns told in lovingly crafted prose.”...

A far-out, far-fetched, and fiendishly funny story about a strange nightclub and its outrageous entertainment. After auditioning for the part as a singing geisha at a dubious bar, Lena and eleven other “lucky” girls are sent to work at a posh underground nightclub reserved exclusively for...

Nikolai Gogol's hilarious and macabre tale of a Christmas Eve with a devil and a romantic twist. It is the night before Christmas and devilry is afoot. The devil steals the moon and hides it in his pocket. He is thus free to run amok and inflicts all sorts of wicked mischief upon the village...

Cronopios and Famas is one of the best-loved books by Julio Cortázar, one of the greatest of Latin American novelists. "The Instruction Manual," the first chapter, is an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format. "Unusual Occupations," the second chapter,...

Bolano’s radical first novel makes its paperback debut as a New Directions Pearl. Written when he was only twenty-seven, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolano’s fictional universe. This novel presents the genesis of Bolano’s enterprise in prose; all the elements are...

The Flight of Icarus (Le Vol d'lcare) is his only novel written in the form of a play: seventy-four short scenes, complete with stage directions. Called by some the French Borges, by others the creator of le nouveau roman a generation ahead of its time, Raymond Queneau's work in fiction continues...

A new edition of a French modernist classic - a Parisian scene told ninety-nine different ways - with new material written in homage by the likes of Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen, and many more. On a crowded bus at midday, Raymond Queneau observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately....

The masterworks of W. G. Sebald, now in gorgeous new covers by the famed designer Peter Mendelsund New Directions is delighted to announce beautiful new editions of these three classic Sebald novels, including his two greatest works, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. All three novels are...

As alive as a Godard movie, this lost classic of ’60s French literature is back As if the reader were riding shotgun, this intensely vivid novel captures a life on the lam. “L’astragale” is the French word for the ankle bone Albertine Sarrazin’s heroine Anne breaks as she leaps from...

A beautiful facsimile of the 1923 original edition which is considered "one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century". (The New York Times) Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination — a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that coalesce in dramatic,...

Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems is a new, expanded edition of Jimmy Santiago Baca's best-selling first book of poetry (originally published by Louisiana State University Press in 1979). A number of poems from early, now unavailable chapbooks have also been included so that the...