Books published by New Directions Publishing Corporation

Little Elegies for Sister Satan presents indelibly beautiful new poems by Michael Palmer, "the foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations" (citation for The Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Award). Grappling with our dark times and our inability to stop destroying the planet or to end our endless wars, Palmer offers a counterlight of wit (poetry was dead again / they said again), as well as the glow of wonder. In polyphonic passages, voices speak from a decentered place, yet are rooted in the whole history of culture that has gone before: "When I think of 'possible worlds,' I think not of philosophy, but of elegy. And impossible worlds. Resistant worlds."In the light of dayperhaps all of thiswill make sense.But have we come this far,come this close to death,just to make sense?

In the searing poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations.      While conducting fieldwork with a celebrated mycologist, Gander links human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens. Throughout Twice Alive, Gander addresses personal and ecological trauma-several poems focus on the devastation wrought by wildfires in California where he lives-but his tone is overwhelmingly celebratory. Twice Alive is a book charged with exultation and tenderness.

Benjamin, on the verge of becoming a father, discovers a tragic family secret involving patrimony and determines to get to the root of. Those most immediately involved are all dead, but their three closest confidantes are still alive-Isabel, his grandmother; Haroldo, his grandfather's friend; and Raul, his father's friend-and each will tell him a different version of the facts. By collecting these shards of memories, which offer personal glimpses into issues of class and politics in Brazil, Benjamin will piece together the painful puzzle of his family history. Like a Faulkner novel, Beatriz Bracher's brilliant Antonioshows the expansiveness of past events and the complexity of untangling long-buried secrets.

A series of poems traces the course of a love affair from both the man's and the woman's point of view.

In 1940, when John Wheelwright was killed by a speeding car, Boston lost one of its most colorful personalities and American poetry one of its most original and provocative talents. Wheelwright received little popular recognition in his short lifetime, although his work caught the eyes of perspicacious critics, who market him as a man to watch.

Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages)."Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment," as Stach comments in his afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings."   In fact, as Hofmann recently added: "'Finished' seems to me, in the context of Kafka, a dubious or ironic condition, anyway. The more finished, the less finished. The less finished, the more finished. Gregor Samsa's sister Grete getting up to stretch in the streetcar. What kind of an ending is that?! There's perhaps some distinction to be made between 'finished' and 'ended.' Everything continues to vibrate or unsettle, anyway. Reiner Stach points out that none of the three novels were 'completed.' Some pieces break off, or are concluded, or stop-it doesn't matter!-after two hundred pages, some after two lines. The gusto, the friendliness, the wit with which Kafka launches himself into these things is astonishing."

In his new collection Torn Awake, Gander continues to blend passion with intelligence, unveiling the forces of physical nature and personhood, the self as a construction of reciprocally reflective relations. Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

Charles Olson (1910-1970), described by William Carlos Williams as "a major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world" and who, as Joel Oppenheimer once wrote, "brought two generations to life," stood as a bridge between the first leaders of the modern movement, such as Pound and Stein, and some of the most important later innovators (Denise Levertov acclaimed his work "magnificent"). This landmark collection, first published in 1967 and edited by his long-time friend Robert Creeley, includes poems from Olson's superlative book, The Distances, as well as from his epic Maximus Poems. Also included are the entirety of the "Mayan Letters," written to Creeley while Olson was in the Yucatan studying Mayan hieroglyphs; "Appolonius of Tyana," a background script for an original dance play; and his ground-breaking manifesto on "Projective Verse" as well as other essential essays.

Poet, Trappist monk, religious philosopher, translator, social critic: the late Thomas Merton was all these things. This classic selection from his great body of poetry affords a comprehensive view of his varied and progressively innovative work. Selected by Mark Van Doren and James Laughlin, this slim volume is now available again as a wonderful showcase of Thomas Merton's splendid poetry.

Originally a cloth coedition with the Christine Burgin Gallery, this rapturous hymn to discoveries and archives is now a paperback

Four beguiling tales for children of all ages. A surprising new facet of Clarice Lispector's genius

A new poetry book by Susan Howe is always an event

Yoko Tawada-winner of the National Book Award-presents three terrific new ghost stories, each named after a street in Berlin

A writer is offered a devil's bargain: will he give up reading books in exchange for total world domination?

A joyful ode-in a single soaring, crazy sentence-to the interconnectedness of great (and mad) minds

A bilingual companion to The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa

Empathy, first published by Station Hill Press in 1989, marked a turning point in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry, her lines lengthening across the page like so many horizons, tuned intimately to the natural world and its human relations, at once philosophical, lush, and rhythmic. As she writes in the new note for this edition, "I started to feel my way toward an intuited subliminal wholeness of composition." In these poems, empathy not only becomes the space of one person inside another, but of one element (water, or fog), one place (tundra or desert mesa), one animal (the swan) as the locus of human illumination and desire.

A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a "field of heaven...outside spacetime." Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought "a form of organized light." All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge's radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where "days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present."

The two sequences of this book form a braided ars poetica: "Killing Plato" and "Writing." The first is a numbered sequence of twenty-eight poems organized around an accident: a pedestrian has been hit by a truck and is dying in the middle of the road. Various characters appear-the philosopher Michel Serres, Robert Musil, a woman smoothing out her stocking, the truck driver, a boy on a balcony, the Spanish poet Jesús Aguado. At the bottom of the page another tale unfolds: a woman bumps into an old friend, a male poet who has written a book called Killing Plato about "a woman who has been knocked over by the force of a sound." "Writing," the second part, unfolds as a lyrical meditation on mortality and literary production.