Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
One of the great unexpected pleasures of redesigning our website came as we uploaded author photos. Many of them are incomparably wonderful, and in what I hope will be a semi-regular feature on the blog, we'll point them out to you.
Nicanor Parra. Theoretical physicist, cosmologist, anti-poet. Beloved by Roberto Bolaño as the antidote to Pablo Neruda, and the reason he's on my mind lately (he's mentioned repeatedly in Between Parentheses).
I'm not exactly sure what I envisioned when I looked up his photograph, but I think it was something a bit more… revolutionary. Perhaps South American hipster, if such a thing exists. A mix of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's guerrilla chic and Ernesto Cardenal's socialist roguishness. Whatever it was that I'd expected, it wasn't the photo you see to the right.
He's downright debonair. The shirt/sweater/ascot combination suggests a man who is very thoughtful about his wardrobe, very precise, and yet the slightly long, windblown hair suggests a man of the world, a man who enjoys a drink and a cigar at three in the morning - like the inspiration for XX's "Most Interesting Man in the World." And the eyes… whatever it is he's looking at, he's understanding it quickly and thoroughly — and also slightly dismissively.
In retrospect, this is exactly how I should have pictured him: knowing, exacting, and daring.
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.