Books published by New Directions Publishing Corporation

In this selection of stories and essays, Henry Miller elucidates, revels, and soars, showing his command over a wide range of moods, styles, and subject matters. Writing "from the heart," always with a refreshing lack of reticence, Miller involves the reader directly in his thoughts and feelings. "His real aim," Karl Shapiro has written, "is to find the living core of our world whenever it survives and in whatever manifestation, in art, in literature, in human behavior itself. It is then that he sings, praises, and shouts at the top of his lungs with the uncontainable hilarity he is famous for." Here are some of Henry Miller's best-known writings: an essay on the photographer Brassai; "Reflections on Writing," in which Miller examines his own position as a writer; "Seraphita" and "Balzac and His Double," on the works of other writers; and "The Alcoholic Veteran," "Creative Death," "The Enormous Womb," and "The Philosopher Who Philosophizes."

A new expanded edition of the classic study of translation, finally back in print

A new collection from "one of the world's great essayists" (The New York Times)

An essential edition of a major avant-garde poet: "Waldrop compels us to seek out new superlatives" (Ben Lerner, Jacket)

A lively and utterly singular travelogue of the intricate curiosities that are directly within one's own reach

One of the great figures of modern French literature. Swiss-born in 1887, but French to the core in spirit, Cendrars roamed the world for many years, a restless seeker who made life an adventure and his novels and poems the record of a never-satisfied appetite for human experience. As a young man he reached the Orient across Russia, and "The Transsiberian," one of his finest long poems is included in this volume. Over the years, a number of Cendrars' works were translated into English--early among them, in 1931, John Dos Passos' brilliant version of "Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles" (reprinted in this collection)--but all are now out of print here, so that this selection from the whole range of Cendrars is most timely. It has been prepared by Professor Walter Albert of Brandeis University, whose long introductory essay is the most detailed biographical and critical study of Cendrars now available in English. While the greater part of the selection is concentrated on Cendrars' poetry (with the French text printed en face), there are also representative excerpts from the major novels and other prose books, as well as several essays, including impressions of Chagall and Picasso.

In this classic, groundbreaking exploration of early American literature, Susan Howe reads our intellectual inheritance as a series of civil wars, where each text is a wilderness in which a strange lawless author confronts interpreters and editors eager for settlement. Howe approaches Anne Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville and Emily Dickinson as a fellow writer-her insights, fierce and original, are rooted in her seminal textural scholarship in examination of their editorial histories of landmark works. In the process, Howe uproots settled institutionalized roles of men and women as well as of poetry and prose-and of poetry and prose. The Birth-mark, first published in 1993, now joins the New Directions canon of a dozen Susan Howe titles.

A powerful selection of Susan Howe's previously uncollected essays, The Quarry moves backward chronologically, from her brand-new "Vagrancy in the Park" (about Wallace Stevens) through such essential texts as "The Disappearance Approach," "Personal Narrative," "Sorting Facts," "Frame Structures," and "Where Should the Commander Be," and ending with her seminal early criticism, "The End of Art." The essays of The Quarry map the intellectual territory of one of America's most important and vital avant-garde poets.

Three mini-plays by the German wunderkind and asylum-dweller.

The first full-length collection in English by one of Latin America's most significant twentieth-century poets.

A selection of poems by the ancient Chinese poet and statesman Wang Ah-Shih, translated by David Hinton.

Often called "the Kafka of Romania," Max Blecher died young but not before creating this incandescent novel.

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 - is a gripping story seen through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy. A young Egyptian's coming of age proves halting and uncertain as he fails to outgrow dependence on his aging father and tries to come to terms with the absence of his mother. Through the boy's memories, fantasies, and blunt observations, we experience his attempts at furtively spying on the world of Egyptian adults. His adventures portray a Cairo full of movie stars, royalty, revolutionaries, and ordinary people trying to survive in the decaying city.

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 through her tales. The nights are endless, seemingly as dark as war in this haunting collection, seemingly as endless as war. Yet the poet cannot stop dreaming of a future beyond the violence of a place where "every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun." Unlike Scheherazade, however, Mikhail is writing, not to escape death, but to summon the strength to endure. Inhabiting the emotive spaces between Iraq and the U.S., Mikhail infuses those harsh realms with a deep poetic intimacy. The author's vivid illustrations - inspired by Sumerian tablets - are threaded throughout this powerful book.

Now available for the first time as a paperbook, Quetzalcoatl is D.H. Lawrence's last "unpublished manuscript" and the early version of his great Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent. Kate Burns is the widow of a failed Irish patriot, strong-minded and independent, who unlike the heroine of The Plumed Serpent, refuses to simply join the Mexican revolutionary movement based on a revival of the Aztec gods. Quetzalcoatl is arguably one of Lawrence's most feminist works: the rise of a revolution filtered through the consciousness of a woman of tremendous individuality. Quetzalcoatl, a more cohesive novel than The Plumed Serpent, is classic D. H. Lawrence-- for its vivid evocation of the Mexican culture and mythology, and its intensity of feeling and psychological insight. This edition includes an illuminating introduction and textual commentary by Sterling Professor of English at Yale, Louis Martz. "The Plumed Serpent," Martz says, "may be judged a success within its own mode of existence. For a different sort of novel, we may turn now to Quetzalcoatl."

Throughout his life, Dr. Williams tirelessly defended and promoted the best in modern literature and art. He contributed widely to leading literary magazines, wrote prefaces and introductions, and lectured at many universities. This selection represents his finest work in criticism. Much of it concerns poetry and poets--T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Karl Shapiro, E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Robert Lowell and many others. Williams also spoke out on painters and paintings as well as music and literature. There are essays on James Joyce, Shakespeare, Federico Garcia Lorca, the basis of faith in art, the American Revolution, H. L. Mencken's The American Language, Ford Madox Ford, American primitive painters, Antheil's music, and the work of Gertrude Stein.

Vale Ave - Latin for "Farewell, Hail" - is a hymn to Eros that unfolds as a gorgeous palimpsest of eternal recurrence and reincarnation, charting the course of two lovers who each seek the other across cultures, myths, and centuries. Vale Ave is alchemical - "mystery and portent, yes, but at the same time," as H. D. writes, "there is Resurrection and the hope of Paradise."

In a small, exquisite clothbound format resembling the early Swiss and German editions of Walser's work, Thirty Poems collects famed translator Christopher Middleton's favorite poems from the more than five hundred Walser wrote. The illustrations range from an early poem in perfect copperplate handwriting, to one from a 1927 Czech-German newspaper, to a microscript.