Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
The night of Thursday, October 27 was rainy and chilly and the heat in the Great Hall at Cooper Union was basically nonexistant, but that didn't stop several hundred people from showing up to see our all-star roster of New Directions fans read from and discuss their favorite books in honor of our 75th anniversary. Thanks again for coming, and we hope you snagged a door prize.
Since we wanted to allow the readers to reveal their favorites as they took the stage, we didn't include that information in the program. So in case you missed certain details, or want to investigate further, here is a list of what was read, and by whom:
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, by Delmore Schwartz — read by Lou Reed
The Christ of Fish, by Yoel Hoffman — read by Nicole Krauss
Conversations with Kafka, by Gustav Janouch & Microscripts, by Robert Walser — both read by Francine Prose
New Collected Poems, by George Oppen — read by Paul Auster
An Elemental Thing, by Eliot Weinberger — read by Rackstraw Downes
Sweet Bird of Youth, by Tennessee Williams — read by Carroll Baker
Nox, by Anne Carson — read by Anne Carson herself, with a (hauntingly beautiful) dance accompaniment on video
Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes — read by Frederic Tuten
Film interlude: the opening scene from an Italian-made adaptation of The Driver's Seat, by Muriel Spark
The Rain Came Last & Other Stories, by Niccolò Tucci — read by Thomas Beller
The Cantos, by Ezra Pound — read by Helen DeWitt
Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño — read by Paul Beatty
It, by Inger Christensen — read by Siri Hustvedt
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, by César Aira — read by Francisco Goldman
June 2013 News from New Directions
» Read More
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.