May News

May 2013 News from New Directions

News & Events

Lots of cool events to tell you about for May, but before we get to those we'd like to point you to some interesting items from around the Internet, beginning with an excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's The Unknown University that recently appeared in The New Yorker, entitled "Mexican Manifesto." 

The magazine Music & Literature devotes its entire Spring 2013 issue to writer László Krasznahorkai, filmmaker Bela Tarr, and artist Max Neumann.

The New York of Review of Books' blog features an incredible review of Sonallah Ibrahim's That Smell & Notes from Prison. 

Writing for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rebecca Ariel Porte offers a stunning and in-depth review of Susan Howe's Poetry Pamphlet, Sorting Facts: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker. 

Elsewhere, at The Paris Review Daily, Sadie Stein read Albertine Sarrazin's Astragal and "reveled in its entertaining, gritty weirdness," while Nathaniel Rich, writing for The Daily Beast, says that Nathanael West's 1933 novel Miss Lonelyhearts "shines the brightest light in the blackest places." 

And, for your listening pleasure, Helen DeWitt recently appeared on Marfa Public Radio's  "Talk at Ten" program. Enjoy it here. 

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Last month we told you about "Lorca in NY: A Celebration," a months long series of events all commemorating the poet's time spent in New York in 1929-30. May's highlights include "After Lorca" — an evening of performances including Eileen Myles — and a series of film screenings at the Instituto Cervantes. You can see the entire program here.   

Also being celebrated this month is Henry Miller. Located in Big Sur, California but setting up shop for a week in Brooklyn (where Miller lived for nearly a decade) is the Henry Miller Memorial Library, with a series of events called "Big Sur Brooklyn Bridge." You can see the schedule here, or get an early take on it from The New York Times. 

Anne Carson continues her California tour (of sorts) with an appearance at Stanford this evening, and then at the Los Angeles Public Library on May 30. 

Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim — author of That Smell & Notes from Prison — will be in the US for a series of events. First, Georgetown University is hosting a colloquium on his work that will take place on May 2 and 3 (details on all of the events are here). Then on May 6 he'll touch down at Stanford for another discussion and reading. 

Poet Nathaniel Tarn also makes a pair of appearances in May, first on May 8 at The Poetry Project, and then on May 9 at 61 Local at a reading hosted by the literary magazine Stonecutter Journal. 

Also at the Los Angeles Public Library this month, on May 16, ND publisher Barbara Epler will join Ben Ehrenreich, Mónica Maristain, and David Shook on a panel entitled "The Making of the Great Bolaño: The Man and the Myth." 

And it gives us no small amount of giddy pleasure to tell you that poet Bernadette Mayer will read from her collection The Helens of Troy, New York at Market Block Books in Troy, New York on May 25. No word yet on whether any of the Helens in the book will be in attendance. 

Illustration by Alejandro Magallanes

 

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New Books: Alvin Lustig for New Directions: 50 Postcards

A collection of 50 of Alvin Lustig's best designs for New Directions in one box

Between 1941 and 1952, Lustig produced one masterpiece after another for New Directions — stylized, fragmented, some combining multiple photographs, others drawn by hand in glorious abstraction. Each cover displayed an artistic unity where even the book’s title and author became simply one integral part, joined together by Lustig’s unerring sense of composition and his exquisite sense of color. Gorgeous and radically original, these designs immediately caught the public eye and became an iconic part of New Directions’ history. We are proud to honor the great designer with this postcard collection of his fifty best book covers, works of art in their own right.

“Alvin Lustig was the undisputed master of the twentieth-century modern book jacket. His work is nothing less than a primer on what makes brilliant graphic design.” — Chip Kidd

“A current of electricity runs through everything Alvin Lustig created for New Directions.” — Rodrigo Corral

Order a set here. 

 

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Now in Paperback: The Insufferable Gaucho

by Roberto Bolaño
translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

A treasure trove of strange, arresting, short masterworks

As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bolaño's short stories is that they can do the "work of a novel." The Insufferable Gaucho contains tales bent on returning to haunt you. Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire, a Bolaño story might concern an elusive plagiarist or an elderly lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the family estate, now gone to wrack and ruin.

“The Insufferable Gaucho reminds us how many kinds of story Bolaño could write in his favorite themes. It is full of ironic respect for the trade of the pulp writer and wry disdain for the vagaries of literary fashion, and makes an ideal introduction.” — Lorin Stein, Harper’s Magazine

“Readers trying to navigate Bolaño’s gathering body of work may find themselves wondering where to turn: The Insufferable Gaucho would be an excellent place to start. The title story of this collection is one of Bolaño’s most powerful fictions.” — Michael Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review

Order a copy here.

 

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Other News

If you happen to be out and about for the PEN World Voices Festival this Friday evening — May 3 — the winners of the Best Translated Book Awards for fiction and poetry will be announced at a short ceremony at 5:30pm, at the Washington Mews on NYU's campus. We'll be there hoping for a sweep of both categories: both Satantango and A Breath of Life are on the fiction shortlist, and Notes on the Mosquito is on the poetry shortlist. With such strong contenders, we like our chances. 

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April, as you know, was National Poetry Month, and we posted several excerpts and appreciations over on our blog, including samples of all four of the first four collections in the revitalized Poetry Pamphlets series. (1, 2, 3, 4) The best ways to learn about new blog posts and excerpts are via Facebook and Twitter. See you in the ether!

 

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