Books published by New Directions Publishing Corporation

A new volume of the singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel

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)

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

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, Castellanos Moya, from five to seven in the evening, telling his tale and ranting against everything his country has to offer. Written in a single paragraph and alive with a fury as astringent as the wrath of Thomas Bernhard, Revulsion was first published in 1997 and earned its author death threats. Roberto Bolano called Revulsion Castellanos Moya's darkest book and perhaps his best: "A parody of certain works by Bernhard and the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud."

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.

The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past:the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million "Communists," followed by three decades of Suharto's despotic rule.     Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years....  Drawing on local sources-folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope-and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan's distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.

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.

"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 in A Little Lumpen Novelita.Orphaned overnight as a teenager-"our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us"-she drops out of school and gets a crappy job. At night, she is plagued by a terrible brightness, and soon she drifts into bad company. Her little brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns she can fall even lower...Electric and tense with foreboding, with its jagged, propulsive short chapters beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, A Little Lumpen Novelita-one of the last novels Roberto Bolano published-delivers a surprising, fractured fairy tale of taking control of one's fate.

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.

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."

The second set of New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series, which includes Vale Ave by H. D.; Eiko & Koma by Forrest Gander; A Musical Hell by Alejandra Pizarnik; The Beautiful Contradictions by Nathaniel Tarn.

The words of a genius: Borges at Eighty transcends our expectations of ordinary conversation. In these interviews with Barnstone, Dick Cavett, and Alastair Reid, Borges touches on favorite writers (Whitman, Poe, Emerson) and familiar themes - labyrinths, mystic experiences, and death - and always with great, throw-away humor. For example, discussing nightmares, he concludes,"When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself."

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.