New Directions: 473 books

An undiscovered modern Argentinian classic, based on the tragic lives of the renowned Raúl Barón Biza (a wealthy politician and notorious writer) and his wife Rosa Clotilde Sabattini The Desert and Its Seed opens with a taxi ride to the hospital: Eligia’s face is disintegrating from acid...

**The essential work of Mallarmé, collected in a bilingual French and English edition. ** Selected Poetry and Prose of Stéphane Mallarmé presents what can be considered the essential work of the renowned “father of the Symbolists.” Mallarmé’s major elegies, sonnets, and other verse,...

Four full-length plays by one of the greatest dramatists Europe has produced. Among the great figures who pioneered the modern movement in world literature, none showed himself more versatile than France's Jean Cocteau. Poet, novelist, critic, artist, actor, film-maker, Cocteau was also one...

This collection of traditional and experimental stories by Argentinian novelist Bioy Casares ( The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata ) offers sophisticated, seamless prose, as well as magical realism and biting political satire. - Publishers Weekly A Russian Doll and Other Stories is...

Revolving around the opera, these tales are an “archaeological excavation of the slag-heaps of our collective existence” (W. G. Sebald) Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and...

The eight stories contained in Antonio Tabucchi's Letters from Casablanca introduce to an American audience a rising Italian writer (born 1943) whose intriguing narrative strategies make the reader an active participant in his work. Each story can be seen from at least two perspectives, and each...

"An enjoyable, well-crafted little book."—The Complete Review Translated from the Italian, this winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger for 1987 is an enigmatic novel set in modern India. Roux, the narrator, is in pursuit of a mysterious friend named Xavier. His search, which develops into a quest, takes him from town to town across the subcontinent.

A delightful fictional account of the small town César Aira grew up in—not so long ago A delightful fictional memoir about César Aira's small hometown. The narrator, born the same year and now living in the same great city (Buenos Aires) as César Aira, could be the author himself. Beginning...

Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the...

A high-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home to El Salvador. High-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home at the tail end of El Salvador's long civil war. Is the plan a dream or a nightmare? Is he courageous,...

The 1997 novel that put Horacio Castellanos Moya on the map, now published for the first time in English An expatriate professor, Vega, returns from exile in Canada to El Salvador for his mother’s funeral. A sensitive idealist and an aggrieved motor mouth, he sits at a bar with the author,...

"John Hawkes is an extraordinary writer. I have always admired his books. They should be more widely read."—Saul Bellow Skipper, an ex-World War II naval Lieutenant and the narrator of Second Skin, interweaves past and present—what he refers to as his "naked history"—in...

The “prequel” to Rosales’s “tragically beautiful and unforgettable” (Los Angeles Times) Cuban-American novel The Halfway House Leapfrog depicts one summer in the life of a very poor young boy in Havana ofthe late ’50s. He has superhero fantasies, hangs around with the neighborhood...

In print for fifty years, this gem of lyric prose has enchanted both young and old from its very first edition. Dylan Thomas, one of the greatest poets and storytellers of the twentieth century, captures a child's-eye view, and an adult's fond memories, of a magical time of presents, aunts and uncles, the frozen sea, and in the best of circumstances, newly fallen snow.