Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
It's not often that we announce future publications prior to publicly sharing a forthcoming season's list, but this is a special case, prompted by a gathering curiosity among American readers that has resulted in queries in the form of emails, tweets, and questions over cocktails at totally unrelated events. So, for everyone who has asked, yes, we will be publishing Irish author Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn & Child, which was published by Granta books back in July of 2012.
We first heard about the book back in April and immediately got our hands on the Granta edition. Within a week, half of the New Directions staff had read the mesmerizing book, and all of us were cooing over it in the hallways. A couple of weeks after that we got the rights and were thoroughly pleased about it. This is absolutely a New Directions book, and we think those of you who've fallen in love with Javier Marías or Roberto Bolaño or László Krasznahorkai as much as we did will agree. Wholeheartedly.
Granta's description of the book:
Hawthorn and Child are mid-ranking detectives tasked with finding significance in the scattered facts. They appear and disappear in the fragments of this book along with a ghost car, a crime boss, a pick-pocket, a dead racing driver, and a pack of wolves. The mysteries are everywhere, but the biggest of all is our mysterious compulsion to solve them. In Hawthorn & Child, the only certainty is that we've all misunderstood everything.
Intrigued yet? This novel is incredibly evocative and provocative, and the path Ridgway leads you along is endlessly captivating. Each successive chapter manages to both add to the panoramic view of the detectives' world and, at the same time, complicate the scene, creating a pleasantly claustrophobic sense of pervasive mystery. It is — in short — addictive reading. And we can't wait to put copies in American readers' hands.
Still not convinced? Killian Fox, writing for The Observer (of London) had this to say:
The real subject of the novel, perhaps, is how mysterious we are to one another and how lives are damaged, sometimes irreparably, by the gaps of comprehension. Ridgway, a Dublin author who lived in north London for more than a decade, writes these interlocking stories with the keen sense of place and lucid, pared-down prose of a good crime novel, which makes the more outlandish deviations from the genre even more arresting.
The most persistent mystery, in a book filled with unlikely tales, has to do with the reliability of the narrative itself. Is the novel a collective fantasy, a series of elaborate delusions? Is it all an extension of Hawthorn's dream in the opening pages? No clear answers are forthcoming, but that doesn't make the novel any less engaging.
So consider this an official announcement, and look for more news here as we approach the publication date in late September later this year.
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.