Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
I first came across Tony Fitzpatrick's wonderful collage art when this post came up in google alert for Roberto Bolaño. Explaining his "Bird for the Daughters of Juarez" (below), he writes:
The underlying thematic device, for me, seems to be the world’s rapid untethering from any idea of sanity. The murdered women part of '2666' is where we hear Bolaño at his most ferocious. The murder of innocents is still a thing of incomprehensible sadness; well-worthy of moral outrage even in an insane world.
I’ve heard people describe this book as “apocolyptic” or “millennial,” whatever the fuck that means. I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure about anything with '2666' – even as to whether it was completed or not. Oddly enough though, I was convinced I’d read a great book – in fact, a great few books.
After looking through his blog and at many more beautiful Juarez-inspired pieces (here, here, and here, for example), I got in touch with him and offered to send him some of our Bolaño novels. When he got the package, he called to thank me and we ended up talking for an hour — about everything from Charles Bowden to boxing. Needless to say, I'm a fan.
And then yesterday he posted this image:
New Directions' kindred spirit that he seems to be, Fitzpatrick has had a long and loving relationship with the city of New Orleans, and specifically with Tennessee Williams. In the accompanying text, he writes:
The one who interests me the most in this most American of plays is Stella. Stella Kowalski knows her mentally-challenged, Pop-Tart of a sister and her brutal, sexually rapacious husband are headed toward one another like two locomotives, and it has always seemed to me that she practically curtsies to get out of the way as this happens; knowing that both will exact their temporary satisfaction, as well as their own damning punishments from this act.
After Stanley rapes Blanche, he is finished as a man. Even he knows it. Blanche is taken away to an institution and grateful for “the kindness of strangers” and Williams hints that they get not only what they deserve, but perhaps, darkly, what they actually want.
Well put.
June 2013 News from New Directions
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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.