Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Like all publishers, I believe, we have a library containing copies of every book we've ever published. And since it contains first editions of Lustig-designed titles by Ezra Pound, Tennessee Williams, Nabokov, and on an on, we like to show it off to visitors. All of that handling, however, means that the books get out of alphabetical order. It's like a bookstore in that way, I suppose (I do not miss shelving books).
Today one of our interns, Annie, is going through the shelves and putting everything in the proper order. Not the most challenging or edifying task, but there are perks. She came across, for example, a collection of Inuit poetry — called Anerca — that one is urged to recite aloud with a drum accompaniment.
And then there's this:
See that little note that says it was originally published as The Hunt? Well, it turns out that New Directions published that book in 1952, and presumably sold the reprint rights to Berkley Books for this edition some years later. This is our edition:
Our cover is absolutely not sexy, while theirs puts sex front and center.
Comparing the description copy is interesting, too. Berkley's reads:
FORCED INTIMACY
A young and beautiful girl finds herself trapped in a lonely cabin in the Rockies with two men — her murdering fiancé and his evil brother. Now a web of terror and hatred draws these three desperate people down into an orgy of violence and death…
While ours reads:
This powerful first novel by a new young writer of exceptional promise is bound to compel wide critical attention. It is the story of a murderer's flight, exciting both on the level of sheer physical narrative and in its reconstruction of an involved psychological motivation. Forces he could not comprehend drove Christopher to kill; insight came only in the dreadful aftermath, when the girl who loved him too much and the brother who understood him too little attempted his rescue.
The only common thread is a tendency towards hyperbole. Utterly fascinating.
One last comment: this "complete and unabridged" edition is all of 125 pages long.
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.