New Directions

01/14/2025

Today marks the centennial of Japanese master Yukio Mishima, born in 1925. In honor of the occasion, you can now read one of Mishima’s most beloved stories, “The Pearl,” on the ND blog.

Pictured are three New Directions editions of Mishima’s masterpiece CONFESSIONS OF A MASK, beginning with the hardcover 1958 edition and ending with the 2015 paperback.

Photo by Elliott Erwitt / Magnum Photos, 1970.

12/19/2024

We are delighted to announce that four of our titles are long listed for the National Book Critics Circle’s Barrios Book in Translation Prize! 🏆 📚🎊

HERSCHT 07769 by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet

WRONG NORMA by Anne Carson

HOLY WINTER 20/21 by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky

12/02/2024

Join us at Seaport next Monday Dec. 9 for a conversation with Daniel Kehlmann and Peter Filkins on Elias Canetti’s THE BOOK AGAINST DEATH.

The Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti all his life declared himself a “mortal enemy” of death—and here, in English at last, is his landmark book on the subject. THE BOOK AGAINST DEATH is ultimately a moving affirmation of the value of life itself.

“I accept no death.”—Elias Canetti

11/18/2024

Happy November 18th! We’re very excited to announce the publication of Books I and II of ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME—Solvej B***e’s award-winning speculative fiction septology, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland 💚💛

Tara Selter has stepped off the train of time: in her world, November 18th repeats itself endlessly. We meet her on its 122nd iteration—by now so familiar that she knows to the second when the blackbird will burst into song and the rain will begin. These are books to fall into: B***e’s hypnotic, masterful remixing of the endless recursive day exerts a gravitational pull, with the effect of a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute, circling always the deepening mystery of Tara’s estrangement…

Book I is our New Classics Club selection for December 2024. Click the link in our bio to learn more 🌀

“Absolutely, absolutely incredible.”—Karl Ove Knausgård

“You have never read anything like it. Unforgettable.”—Hernan Diaz

“An unparalleled cliffhanger.”—Morganbladet

“Impossible to put down.”—Kate Briggs

“Richly strange and dreamy.”—Booklist ⭐️

“A hypnotic feat of prose writing.”—John Vincler, Culture

“Deeply mysterious.”—Publishers Weekly ⭐️

11/06/2024

"To A Politician" by Bernadette Mayer ♥️

Bernadette Mayer reads a new poem at Berl's on October 22nd, 2017.

10/24/2024

Join us at to celebrate the release of Megan McDowell’s translation of TEN by Juan Emar. Get there at 7:30 for a champagne toast (on us) before the reading at 8! 🥂

Juan Emar is the pen name of Chilean writer, painter, and art critic Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi. Born in Chile in 1893, he was a strong advocate of the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s, and his critical writings helped revolutionize the art scene in his country. Underappreciated in his time, he is now considered to be one of the most important 20th-century Latin American writers.

Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important contemporary Spanish language authors, including Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, and Lina Meruane. She has been nominated four times for the International Booker Prize, and was the recipient of a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She won the 2022 National Book Award in translation alongside Samanta Schweblin for Seven Empty Houses.

Lauren Sandler is the author of three books of nonfiction, including the New York Times Notable Book This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home. The book was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize, given by Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Sandler is currently developing her reporting in a Brooklyn shelter into a Broadway musical, expected to be staged in 2026.

10/21/2024

We are thrilled to announce that IT LASTS FOREVER AND THEN IT’S OVER by the brilliant has won the 2024 Prize for Fiction.

The judges call the book “a work of quietly detonative imagination. Written in the guise of a zombie novel, it quickly reveals itself to be a deeply felt meditation on the many afterlives of memory, the strange disorienting space where our pasts go to disintegrate. As the heroine wanders a shattered world, clutching a dead crow that is still muttering away, she becomes an incarnation of grief—its numbness and regrets and heartbreaks—and of the inevitability of our decline: we are what we lose. Haunting, poignant, and surprisingly funny, Anne de Marcken’s book is a tightly written tour de force about what it is to be human.”

We are so proud to publish this wonderful book. IT LASTS FOREVER was co-winner of our 2022 Novel Prize, which we award together with and . Congratulations Anne!

Buy a copy at the ND Shop, link in bio

10/09/2024

MOJAVE GHOST is out now 🏜️

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander’s new collection—a “novel poem”—initiates an unusually tender bond with the reader as it chronicles an intimate relationship with arresting honesty and vividness. Gander, trained as a geologist, walked much of the 800-mile San Andreas Fault toward the desolate town of his birth, crossing permeable dimensions of time and space—and discovering an articulate language of the merging of interior and exterior landscapes.

“This is poetry of consummate awareness that offers instruction on what it might mean to live enraptured by a fractured earth, to steady ourselves against its ruins past and those to come.”—Albert Mobilio,

Join Forrest Gander on tour in Iowa City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas—see our events page at the link in our bio for a full list! 🌵

10/03/2024

48 years ago this month, literature lost one of its true originals: the hilarious, mercurial Raymond Queneau! Here are some favorite Queneau titles from over the years:

THE BARK TREE
THE SUNDAY OF LIFE
THE FLIGHT OF ICARUS
WE ALWAYS TREAT WOMEN TOO WELL
EXERCISES IN STYLE

Each translated by the inimitable Barbara Wright!

“When it came to the novel, Raymond Queneau imagined a kind that would advance along strict compositional lines, like poetry or architecture, yet upset all expectation.”
—The New Yorker

09/18/2024

Congratulations to Anne Carson and Elizabeth Willis! WRONG NORMA and LIONTAMING IN AMERICA are longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry ⚡

“Reading this astounding, virtuosic book is a sampling of interiority. WRONG NORMA is extraordinary because the form partakes of the unjoined nature of human thought. But it needs adding, lest this should confound, that Carson’s trump card is that she is funny.”—The Guardian

“Elizabeth Willis’s prose-poetic LIONTAMING IN AMERICA plays a just-the-facts-ma’am tack against pronouncements and interrogatives of an aporetic, testimonial cast. Such are the holes in history. Such is the scribe’s pepper, history’s cracks and cuts, its ravages, wounds, omissions, vatic scat.”––Nathaniel Mackey

09/12/2024

Congratulations to Solvej B***e and Barbara J. Haveland, and Fernando Vallejo and Yvette Siegert. We’re very excited to see ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME Book I and THE ABYSS on this year’s NBA longlist.

ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME Book I
By Solvej B***e
Translated by Barbara J. Haveland
Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November 18th repeats itself endlessly. Solvej B***e’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, B***e’s fiction consists of writing that listens: “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”


THE ABYSS
By Fernando Vallajo
Translated by Yvette Siegert
THE ABYSS is a caustic masterwork of incredible power and force, an unforgettable autobiographical work of q***r fiction about the demise of a crumbling house in Medellín, Colombia

09/09/2024

Congratulations to translators Michael Hofmann, Sophie Hughes, Hiroaki Sato, and Frank Wynne for being longlisted for the 2024 National Translation Awards FOR:

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hofmann
KAIROS tells the story of a romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, KAIROS is the great post-Unification novel.

THIS IS NOT MIAMI by Fernanda Melchor, translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes
Set in and around the Mexican city of Veracruz, THIS IS NOT MIAMI delivers a series of devastating stories—spiraling from real events—that bleed together reportage and the author’s rich and rigorous imagination.
“Skillfully translated by Hughes, this is a book that’s as gorgeous as it is dark” - Kirkus reviews

BATHHOUSE AND OTHER TANKA by Tatsuhiko Ishii, translated from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato
Ishii pens songs of momentary love and flames of lust, of mankind’s self-destruction and the self mirrored in the seven deadly sins. Hiroaki Sato, the bestselling author of ON HAIKU, has been translating Ishii for over thirty years and captures the rhythmic pulse and turn of his “Poetry … harmful, a dream. Even the world, finally, due to poetry, liquefies …”

THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGERS’ GUILD by Mathias Énard, translated from French by Frank Wynne
The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess.
“Mazon’s account of his wayward life in the village is frequently funny, and this particular sense of humour is honoured by Frank Wynne’s lucid, textural translation.”
- Issy Brooks-Ward, The Arts Desk

09/09/2024

This Thursday at 7pm Adania Shibli will be in conversation with Maaza Mengiste at McNally Jackson Seaport.
Please note: this event is sold out.

A searing, beautiful novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people.

A Finalist for the National Book Award and Longlisted for the International Booker Prize.

“The power in the syntax and diction—the pulsing lyricism in its raw realities—reminds me of how central poetry is to the prose of Palestinian storytellers.”— Sarah Schulman, Bookforum

08/28/2024

TEN, Juan Emar’s mind-bending collection of short stories—in which statues come alive, vaporous vampires stalk their prey, and our hopes and fears materialize—is here at last, in Megan McDowell’s deft translation.

🦜 Read the first story from the collection, “The Green Bird,” on the New Directions blog (link in bio) 🦜

“Emar’s stories expand and surprise, so, even when one is alert to his penchant for trickery, their focus and direction remain unpredictable… It is this strangeness and lack of inhibition that makes his prose so captivating. We are lucky to finally have the short stories of this remarkable storyteller and thinker available in English.”–Colm McKenna, TLS

“Emar has no precedents, and no equals.”—César Aira

To get TEN as soon as possible, join the New Classics Club at the link in our bio by the end of the month. You’ll also receive Junichiro Tanizaki’s final, sparkling novel THE MAIDS, translated by Michael P. Cronin—our gift to new subscribers.

Available at your local indie on September 30!

08/27/2024

This week we wish a happy birthday of three essential New Directions writers: Julio Cortázar (born August 26, 1914) Christopher Isherwood (born August 26, 1904), and Jorge Luis Borges (born August 24, 1899)!

Pictured here are three 1st editions from our library from each of these giants:

FINAL EXAM by Julio Cortázar (trans. Alfred MacAdam)
THE BERLIN STORIES by Christopher Isherwood
LABYRINTHS by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. Donald Yates and James Irby)

08/22/2024

I don’t Care is here! Ágota Kristóf’s short—sometimes very short—stories, which she selected herself, are translated by the peerless Chris Andrews. The world of I Don’t Care has hard edges: cruelty is almost omnipresent, peace and consolation are scarce. It’s austere and minimalist, but with a poetic force that shifts walls in the reader’s mind. Kristóf’s penetrating short fictions make for extraordinary and essential reading.

“Mischievous and mournful… moves at a velocity that puts one in mind of Italo Calvino. Readers of modernist European fiction ought to sn**ch this up.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Kristóf’s stark vignettes, reported in unflinching detail, have a cool, disturbing power—part documentary-like, part surreal that is fierce and distinctive.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Available Sep, 03 2024 🤩

08/20/2024

A beautiful broadside printed by , featuring an excerpt of George Oppen’s poem “Of Being Numerous,” reprinted in George Oppen’s New Collected Poems.

“There are things
We live among and to see them
Is to know ourselves.

Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series,

The sad marvels;

Of this was told
A tale of our wickedness.
It is not our wickedness.”

—George Oppen, “On Being Numerous”

A letterpress broadside hand set in multiple sizes of Sabon, with a letterpress printed photoengraving collaged onto the sheet. Edition of 50. 14.75 x 11.25 inches.

08/13/2024

Celebrating Women in Translation Month this August with some favorite titles from our catalogue:

NEAR TO THE WILD HEART by Clarice Lispector, pictured here in Giovanni Pontiero’s translation.

THE BOOK OF HAPPINESS by Nina Berberova, translated by Marian Schwartz.

IT by Inger Christensen, translated by Susanna Nied.

FRESCO: SELECTED POETRY by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated by Peter Constantine.

THE END OF DAYS by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky.