Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
There are lots of adages about change. It’s inevitable. It’s good. According to Heraclitus, it’s the only thing that endures. And according to Sam Cooke, it’s gonna come.
So here we are, with a beautiful new website and a glossy new blog that we’ve decided to call Now That It's Now.
What can you expect to find here? Well, we not-so-modestly like to believe that our books, to co-opt a line from Walt Whitman, contain multitudes. From the very beginning of New Directions seventy-five years ago, our books have been invitations to explore, to investigate, to discover new shades of understanding, even new ways of thinking.
It almost goes without saying that for every new book, poem, or play that’s written, there are literally thousands, if not millions, of cultural, personal, and historical influences that contributed to its creation. And some of these new works of art will be just as influential in their own right. Because there are, in a sense, two worlds: one before the book that shaped it, and one after the book that is shaped by it. And so we’re here with the new New Directions blog to offer a wide-ranging collection of discursive guideposts, esoteric marginalia, and oblique footnotes to these worlds of influence and the influenced. We’ll be posting more and more. We hope you’ll enjoy.
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
» Read More
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.