Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
To say that it's been a bit crazy around here since Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature last Thursday is a vast understatement. We were giddy, of course. Beside ourselves. There's nothing quite like the Nobel Prize to remind you — to reassure you — that what you do on daily basis on behalf of all of these brilliant writers and poets matters tremendously, and in turn that a great many people find enormous value in literature.
There were requests for comments and interviews, and there were phone calls and emergency meetings as we scrambled to reprint copies of The Great Enigma (it's flattering and heartwarming, by the way, to know that so many people are so anxious to get their hands on his poetry), but we also received an incredible number of phone calls and emails (and even some champagne!) congratulating us. Now, we're very proud of having published Tomas as far back as the 1960s, and to publish the only complete collection of all of his writing available in English, but all of the credit and congratulations should go to two people. First, to translator Robin Fulton for his years of dedication to The Great Enigma. And of course to Tomas Tranströmer himself, who is so eminently deserving of this honor. So, from across the ocean and six time zones, we'd like to raise our glasses and offer this simple toast: "Congratulations, you deserve this."
And I couldn't resist including this picture, a screengrab from a Swedish newspaper's site. According to a friend in Sweden:
They opened their door to a swarm of journalists who each year come to their place (hoping that he'll win) and at first they were taking pictures of just Tomas, but then his Monika kneeled down next to him and he put his arm around her, and everyone continued to take pictures like crazy.
Head over to Slate to read the entirety of Patti Smith's wonderful introduction to Albertine Sarrazin's Asrtagal.
ND editor Michael Barron interviewed Elaine Lustig for Bomb's blog. Read it here.
May 2013 News from New Directions
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In this week's issue of The New Yorker, you can read an excerpt from The Unknown University entitled "Mexican Manifesto". Enjoy.
Lina Meruane interviews Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas in the current issue of BOMB. Read it here.
Congratulations to Enrique Vila-Matas, whose novel Dublinesque is on the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Shortlist.
While in Denmark last August for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's Literature Festival, César Aira sat down to discuss his "ideal fairy tale." Watch it here.
Rebecca Ariel Porte, in a beautiful essay written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, dicusses Susan Howe's Sorting Facts: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, addressing Chris Marker's films, as well. Definitely worth a read — here.
In one of the most creative reviews we've seen in a while, Bookslut's Lightsey Darst discusses all four collections in the first set of New Directions Poetry Pamphlets. Enjoy it here.
Calling it "breathatkingly subversive" in a review for the New York Review of Books, Yasmine El Rashidi discusses That Smell's English debut. Read it here.
Saying that the reading experience comes with a "sad sweetness," Vol. 1 Brooklyn dives into The Bridge Over the Neroch & Other Works, a newly translated collection by Leonid Tsypkin. Read it here.
Writing for Bookslut, Christopher Merkel reviews the 65th anniversary edition of the classic modernist text. Read it here.
Writing for The Washington Post, Scott Esposito reviewed our new edition of Queneau's Exercises in Style. Read it here.
In recent episode of Marfa Public Radio's "Talk at Ten", DeWitt read from and discussed Lightning Rods. You can listen to the entire program here.
The finalist shortlist for the annual Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction was recently announced, and Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods is among them. Congratulations!
In an essay entitled "Walking with Walser", The Quarterly Conversation tackles A Little Ramble and a book by Elfriede Jelinek that was inspired by Walser.
Poet Luljeta Lleshanaku recently contributed to The Paris Review Daily's "Windows on the World", a series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. Read it here.
Music & Literature's spring 2013 issue is devoted to László Krasznahorkai, the director Bela Tarr, and the artist Max Neumann. Needless to say, we're fans. Check it out here.
Poetry editor Jeffrey Yang recently spoke to The Atlantic's "By Heart" about George Oppen, grief, and the new collection Time of Greif: Mourning Poems.