Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Last week, editor Barbara Epler and I were in New Orleans, where we were meeting (and wining and dining) booksellers at the American Booksellers Association's Winter Institute — sort of like Book Expo America minus all the glitz and carnival barking. While we were there, we took some time to find Faulkner House Books, a store in the heart of the French Quarter (with a very cool Pirate's Alley address) where owner Joe DeSalvo, along with his wife Rosemary, specializes in all things literarily New Orleans. Faulkner wrote his first novel in the same building, hence the name, but Joe also knows plenty about Walker Percy and our favorite former New Orleans resident — Tennessee Williams. In addition to new and rare editions of our books, they also possess some correspondence between Tennessee and various friends, directors, actors, and our founder James Laughlin, along with the wonderful framed photograph you see below, which sits nestled between shelves of poetry.
After we chatted with Joe and Rosemary for a while, Joe brought us around the corner to show us the building where Tennessee lived while he wrote A Streetcar Named Desire. In the picture below, it's the large loft room on the top floor, and Joe told us that a restaurant used to occupy the second floor, and they gave him all of his meals. It being New Orleans, there's a plaque on the building (also pictured).
I couldn't resist asking Joe if he knew where Tennessee had liked to do his drinking. Although one locale is now gone forever, he did point us to the Napolean House a few blocks away from the store on Chartres. The bar's name, in case you're wondering, comes from the original owner's offer to house Napolean there if he ended up in exile in the Americas. Their house speciality is a Pimm's Cup, which you see below sitting on their bar. A delicious drink. Alas, no one-armed hustler to be found.
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We also stopped in a wonderful used and antique bookstore called Crescent City Books. Not only did I find a rare copy of one of our New Directions quarterlies, I found this playbill for a Hanna Theater production of A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Elia Kazan and starring Anthony Quinn!
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And then, on the way back to the hotel and all of the hubbub, I passed this little store, and couldn't resist taking a picture. Tennessee's legacy knows no boundaries.
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.