Bøger udgivet af New Directions Publishing Corporation

The Illustrious House of Ramires, presented here in a sparkling new translation by Margaret Jull Costa, is the favorite novel of many Eça de Queirós aficionados. This late masterpiece, wickedly funny and yet profoundly tender, centers on Gonçalo Ramires, heir to a family so aristocratic that it predates even the kings of Portugal. Gonçalo-charming but disastrously effete, idealistic but hopelessly weak-muddles through his pampered life, burdened by a grand ambition. He is determined to write a great historical novel based on the heroic deeds of his fierce medieval ancestors.  But "the record of their valor," as The London Spectator remarked, "is ironically counterpointed by his own chicanery. A combination of Don Quixote and Walter Mitty, Ramires is continually humiliated but at the same time kindhearted. Ironic comedy is the keynote of the novel. Eça de Queirós has justly been compared with Flaubert and Stendhal."

Gondwana: an ancient supercontinent long-dispersed into fragments in the Southern Hemisphere. Contemplating this once-massive landmass at the the end of the world while looking out at the ethereal blue ice of Antarctica, Nathaniel Tarn writes: "They said back then / there was a frozen continent / in those high latitudes encircling the globe: /are you moving toward it?" The various parts of Gondwana cohere into a unified whole that celebrates bird flight, waves, and innervating light while warning against environmental calamity. Some poems celebrate the New Mexican desert as it becomes a place of protest against the invasion of Afghanistan; in another, the rising and falling stairs at Fez in Morocco meld into a meditation on marriage, empire, and the origins of climbing. Elsewhere the heroic fighter pilot Lydia Litvyak is personified as Eurydice speaking to her Captain as Orpheus; and in the final long section, "Exitus Generis Humani," lines pour over the reader in slow, mournful, yet often humorous, song, revealing "the poets' hearts are a world's heart" as the human race ends and whole armies sink into the earth "yearning for mother love." Celebrated as a poet where "inquiry and ethical action are imperative" (Joseph Donahue, Jacket2), Nathaniel Tarn has lifted up a mind-heart mirror of our contemporary existence in Gondwana and warns us of a definitive ending if we do not demand radical change.

Young Dr. Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend's aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What Bromgard uncovers in the entries is Polyakov's uncontrollable and merciless descent into morphine addiction - his first injection to ease his back pain, the thrill of the drug as it overtakes him, the looming signs of addiction, and the feverish final entries before his death.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is vintage Tennessee Williams. Published in 1950, his first novel was acclaimed by Gore Vidal as "splendidly written, precise, short, complete, and fine." It is the story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow recently a famous stage beauty, but now "drifting." The novel opens soon after her husband's death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting, too, to aging. ("The knowledge that her beauty was lost had come upon her recently and it was still occasionally forgotten.") With poignant wit and his own particular brand of relish, Williams charts her drift into an affair with a cruel young gigolo: "As compelling, as fascinating, and as technically skillful as his play" (Publishers Weekly).

Orpheus Descending is a love story, a plea for spiritual and artistic freedom, as well as a portrait of racism and intolerance. When charismatic drifter Valentine Xavier arrives in a Mississippi Delta town with his guitar and snakeskin jacket, he becomes a trigger for hatred and a magnet for three outcast souls: storekeeper Lady Torrance, "lewd vagrant" Carol Cutrere, and religious visionary Vee Talbot.Suddenly Last Summer, described by its author as a "short morality play," has become one of his most notorious works due in no small part to the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift that shocked audiences in 1959. A menacing tale of madness, jealousy, and denial,the horrors in Suddenly Last Summer build to a heart-stopping conclusion.With perceptive new introductions by playwright Martin Sherman - he reframes Orpheus Descending in a political context and explores the psychology and sensationalism surrounding Suddenly Last Summer - this volume also offers Williams's related essay, "The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps," and a chronology of the playwright's life and works.

Victor Pelevin is "the only young Russian novelist to have made an impression in the West" (Village Voice). A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, the second of Pelevin's Russian Booker Prize-winning short story collections, continues his Sputnik-like rise. The writers to whom he is frequently compared-Kafka, Bulgakov, Philip K. Dick, and Joseph Heller-are all deft fabulists, who find fuel for their fires in society's deadening protocol."At the very start of the third semester, in one of the lectures on Marxism-Leninism, Nikita Dozakin made a remarkable discovery," begins the story "Sleep." Nikita's discovery is that everyone around him, from parents to television talk-show hosts, is actually asleep. In "Vera Pavlova's Ninth Dream," the attendant in a public toilet finds that her researches into solipsism have dire and diabolical consequences. In the title story, a young Muscovite, Sasha, stumbles upon a group of people in the forest who can transform themselves into wolves. As Publishers Weekly noted, "Pelevin's allegories are reminiscent of children's fairy tales in their fantastic depictions of worlds within worlds, solitary souls tossed helplessly among them." Pelevin-whom Spin called "a master absurdist, a brilliant satirist of things Soviet, but also of things human"-carries us in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia to a land of great sublimity and black comic brilliance.

the maps one comes to knoware but boulders which are shattered by spoilage                              -Will AlexanderIn navigation a loxodrome, or rhumb-line, is a line that crosses all meridians at the same angle, maintaining one compass direction, a path of constant bearing. In his breakthrough poetry collection, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, Will Alexander connects this theme to a lone Sri Lankan sailor who beheads sea snakes as an ongoing meditation while sailing the expanse of the Indian Ocean. Along the way he meets various African communities as he journeys eastward, from Madagascar to Sri Lanka. In lush, perfumed language filled with the spirit of Aimé Césaire and Sun Ra, Alexander maps an epic voyage unlike any other in contemporary poetry.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof first heated up Broadway in 1955 with its gothic American story of brothers vying for their dying father's inheritance amid a whirlwind of sexuality, untethered in the person of Maggie the Cat. The play also daringly showcased the burden of sexuality repressed in the agony of her husband, Brick Pollitt. In spite of the public controversy Cat stirred up, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award for that year. Williams, as he so often did with his plays, rewrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for many years-the present version was originally produced at the American Shakespeare Festival in 1974 with all the changes that made Williams finally declare the text to be definitive, and was most recently produced on Broadway in the 2003-04 season. This definitive edition also includes Williams' essay "Person-to-Person," Williams' notes on the various endings, and a short chronology of the author's life. One of America's greatest living playwrights, as well as a friend and colleague of Williams, Edward Albee has written a concise introduction to the play from a playwright's perspective, examining the candor, sensuality, power, and impact of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof then and now.

Everyone in Cape Verde knows Senor da Silva. Successful entrepreneur, owner of the island's first automobile, a most serious, upright, and self-made businessman, Senor da Silva is the local success story. Born an orphan, he never married, he never splurged--one good suit was good enough for him--and he never wandered from the straight and narrow. Or so everyone thought. But when Senor da Silva's 387-page Last Will and Testament is read aloud--a marathon task on a hot afternoon which exhausts reader after reader--there's eye-opening news, and not just for the smug nephew so certain of inheriting all Senor da Silva's property. With his will, Senor da Silva leaves a memoir that is a touching web of elaborate self-deceptions. He desired so ardently to prosper, to be taken seriously, to join (perhaps, if they'll have him) the exclusive Gremio country club, and, most of all, to be a good man. And yet, shady deals, twists of fate, an illegitimate child: such is the lot of poor, self-critical Senor da Silva. A bit like Calvino's Mr. Palomar in his attention to protocol and in his terror of life's passions; a bit like Calvino's Mr. Palomar in his attention to protocol and in his terror of life's passions; a bit like Svevo's Zeno (a little pompous, a little old-fashioned, and often hapless), Senor da Silva moves along a deliciously blurry line between farce and tragedy: a self-important buffoon becomes a fully human, even tragic, figure in the arc of this hilarious and touching novel - translated into Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and now, at last, English.

The Selected Poems of René Char is a comprehensive, bilingual overview reflecting the poet's wide stylistic and philosophical range, from aphorism to dramatic lyricism. In making their selections, the editors have chosen the voices of seventeen poets and translators (Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Cid Corman, Eugene Jolas, W.S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams, and James Wright, to name a few), in homage to a writer long held in highest esteem by the literary avant-garde.

The "Young Dog" of the title is of course Thomas himself, and this volume of autobiographical stories by the great modern poet, who died at 39 while on his third lecture tour in the United States, shows his waggish humor at its best, his exuberance and verbal magic in spectacular display. It also shows him a spinner of tales and a creator of memorable characters. There is the grandfather who marches off in his best clothes to be buried in the next town, the sardonic "senior reporter" on a provincial newspaper, servant girls who know how to deal triumphantly with a fast-talking dandy, a twenty-year-old farmer preaching wildly to boys in a deserted barn, a group of respectable worthies who play at literature behind closed blinds, and always the observant and unfazed young Thomas.

A unique and personal portrait of the beloved, legendary Swiss writer, finally in English

The Complete Poems of Li Ch'ing-chao (1084-c. 1151) brings together for the first time in English translation all the surviving verse of China's greatest woman poet.

In Cape of Storms, Nina Berberova portrays a very specific generation--one born in Russia, displaced by the Revolution, and trying to adapt to a new home, Paris. Three sisters--Dasha, Sonia, and Zai--share the same father, Tiagen, an attractive, weak-willed, womanizing White Russian, but each thinks differently about her inner world of beliefs and aspirations, and consequently each follows a different path. Dasha marries and leaves for a bourgeois expatriate life in colonial Africa. Zai, the youngest, and an appealing adolescent, flirts with becoming an actress or a poet. Sonia, the middle daughter, completes a university degree but falls victim to a shocking tragedy. Cape of Storms is a shattering book that opens with a hair-raising scene in which Dasha witnesses her mother's murder at the hands of Bolshevik thugs, and ends with the Blitzkrieg sweeping toward Paris. It is unparalleled in Berberova's work for its many shifts of mood and viewpoint and secures the author's place as "Chekhov's most vital inheritor" (Boston Review).

Gennady Aygi's longtime translator and friend Peter France has compiled this moving collection of tributes dedicated to some of the writers and artists who sustained him while living in the Moscow "underground." Written in a quiet intensely expressive poetic style, Aygi's inventive essays blend autobiography with literary criticism, social commentary, nature writing, and enlightening homage. He addresses such literary masters as Pasternak, Kafka, Mayakovsky, Celan, and Tomas Tranströmer, along with other writers from the Russian avant-garde and his native Chuvashia. Related poems by Aygi are also threaded between the essays. Reminiscent of Mandelstam's elliptical travel musings and Kafka's intensely spiritual jottings in his notebooks, Time of Gratitude glows with the love and humanity of a sacred vocation. "These leaves of paper," Aygi says, 'are swept up by the whirlwind of festivity; everything whirls-from Earth to Heaven-and perhaps the Universe too begins to swirl. Everything flows together in the rainbow colors and lights of the infinite world of Poetry.'

At last, just in time for his 99th birthday, a powerful overview of one of America's most beloved poets: New Directions is proud to present a swift, terrific chronological selection of Ferlinghetti's poems, spanning more than six decades of work and presenting one of modern poetry's greatest achievements.

Anne Carson writes, "Euripides was a playwright of the fifth century BC who reinvented Greek tragedy, setting it on a path that leads straight to reality TV. His plays broke all the rules, upended convention and outraged conservative critics. The Bakkhai is his most subversive play, telling the story of a man who cannot admit he would rather live in the skin of a woman, and a god who seems to combine all sexualities into a single ruinous demand for adoration. Dionysos is the god of intoxication. Once you fall under his influence, there is no telling where you will end up."

Concluding-set in a single summer day-has at its heart old Mr. Rock, a famous retired scientist: he lives in a cottage on the grounds of a girl's boarding school. Living with him is Elizabeth, his somewhat unstrung granddaughter; his white cat; his white goose; and Daisy, his white pig. Miss Edge and Miss Baker-the two inseparable spinster harpies who run the school-scheme to dislodge him from the cottage. Concluding opens with the discovery that two of the schoolgirls have vanished in the night: searching, eavesdropping, worrying, jostling, and giggling all ensue. A love affair, a dance, that magnificent pig, small joys, and low ambitions all stream together, crowding up to the reader's eye, as Henry Green brews up an enchanting, heartbreaking, and darkly sunny novel.

Published in 1917 by The Four Seas Press, Al Que Quiere! was William Carlos Williams's breakthrough book and contains some of his best-loved poems ("Tract," "Apology," "El Hombre," "Danse Russe," "January Morning," and "Smell!"), as well as a Whitmanesque concluding long poem, "The Wanderer," that anticipates his epic masterpiece Paterson. Al Que Quiere! is the culmination of an experimental period for Williams that included his translations from Spanish. The Spanish epigraph of Al Que Quiere! is from the short story "El hombre que parecía un caballo" ("The Man Who Resembled a Horse"), by the Guatemalan author Rafael Arévalo Martínez. This centennial edition contains Williams's translation of the story, as well as his commentary from a book of conversations, I Wanted to Write a Poem, on the individual poems of Al Que Quiere!

Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, "one of the most significant German-language novelists of her generation" (The Millions). The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis, but also a touching portrait of a man who finds he has more in common with the Africans than he realizes. Exquisitely translated by Susan Bernofsky, Go, Went, Gone addresses one of the most pivotal issues of our time, facing it head-on in a voice that is both nostalgic and frightening.

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)

Yoshimasu Gozo's groundbreaking poetry has spanned over half a century since the publication of his first book, Departure, in 1964. Much of his work is highly unorthodox: it challenges the print medium and language itself, and consequently Alice Iris Red Horse is as much a book on translation as it is a book in translation. Since the late '60s, Gozo has collaborated with visual artists and free-jazz musicians. In the 1980s he began creating art objects engraved on copper plates and later produced photographs and video works. Alice Iris Red Horse contains translations of Gozo's major poems, representing his entire career. Also included are illuminating interviews, reproductions of Gozo's artworks, and photographs of his performances. Translated by Jeffrey Angles, Richard Arno, Forrest Gander, Derek Gromadzki, Sawako Nakayasu, Sayuri Okamoto, Hiroaki Sato, Eric Selland, Auston Stewart, Kyoko Yoshida, and Jordan A. Y. Smith. Introduction and notes by Derek Gromadzki. Edited by Forrest Gander.

In her first full-length collection published in the United States, Sylvia Legris probes and peels, carves and cleaves, amputates and dissects, to reveal the poetic potential of human and animal anatomy.Starting with the Greek writings of Hippocrates and the Latin language of medicine, and drawing from Leonardo da Vinci's Anatomical Manuscripts, the dermatologist Robert Willan's On Cutaneous Diseases (1808), and Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Legris infuses each poem with unique rhythms that roll off the tongue. The Hideous Hidden boldly celebrates anatomy's wonders: "Renounce the vestibule of non-vital vitals. / Confess the gallbladder, / the glandular wallflowers, / the objectionable oblong spleen."

In the beginning there was one language-one tongue that Adam used to compose the first poem, an elegy for Abel. "These days, no one bothers to ask about the tongue of Adam. It is a naive question, vaguely embarrassing and irksome, like questions posed by children, which one can only answer rather stupidly." So begins Abdelfattah Kilito's The Tongue of Adam, a delightful series of lectures. With a Borgesian flair for riddles, stories, and subtle scholarly distinctions, Kilito presents an assortment of discussions related to Adam's tongue, including translation, comparative religion, and lexicography: for example, how, from Babel onward, can we explain the plurality of language? Or can Adam's poetry be judged aesthetically, the same as any other poem? Drawing from the commentators of the Koran to Walter Benjamin, from the esoteric speculations of Judaism to Herodotus, The Tongue of Adam is a nimble book about the mysterious rise of humankind's multilingualism.