Authors:Julio Cortázar, Julio Cortazar,
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: kit, model
Number of Pages: 288
Published: 2000-04
List price: $16.95
ISBN-10: 0811214370
ISBN-13: 9780811214377

First published in English in 1972 and long out of print, 62: A Model Kit is Julio Cortázar’s brilliant, intricate blueprint for life in the so-called "City." As one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona; to another it might appear as a beer hall in Oslo. This cityscape, as Carlos Fuentes describes it, "seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi!" It is the meeting place for a wild assortment of bohemians in a novel describe

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: directions, paperbook, new, knight, life, sebastian, real
Number of Pages: 224
Published: 2008-07-17
List price: $12.95
ISBN-10: 0811217507
ISBN-13: 9780811217507

Nabokov’s first novel in English, one of his greatest and most overlooked, with a new Introduction by Michael Dirda.The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov’s first novel in English, was completed in Paris in 1938, first published by New Directions in 1941, reissued in 1959 to wide critical acclaim and now relaunched again, with an appreciative introduction by Pulitzer-Prize winning critic Michael Dirda. This, the narrator tells us, is the real life of famous author Sebastian Knight, the inside story. After Knight’s death,

Author: Tomas Transtromer
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: poems, collected, new, enigma
Number of Pages: 288
Published: 2006-10-17
List price: $17.95
ISBN-10: 0811216721
ISBN-13: 9780811216722

The collected poems of one of the world’s greatest living writers, Tomas Transtromer, available in this comprehensive edition. In day’s first hours consciousness can grasp the world as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone. Translated into fifty languages, the poetry of Tomas Transtromer has had a profound influence around the world, an influence that has steadily grown and has now attained a prominence comparable to that of Pablo Neruda’s during his lifetime. But if Neruda is blazing fire, Transtromer is expanding ice. The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems gathers all t

Author: Alexander Kluge
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: spot, blind, devil
Number of Pages: 336
Published: 2007-09-15
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 0811217361
ISBN-13: 9780811217361

Scathingly clever short stories. Includes "The Devil in the White House" and "The Development of Iraq as a Case for the Files."At once a genuine story-teller and a literary documentarian, Alexander Kluge’s genius lies in the very special way he makes found material his own. Each of the miniatures collected here touches on "facts" and is only several pages long. In just a paragraph he can etch a whole world: he is as great a master of compression as Kafka or Kawabata.Arranged in five chapters, the dozens of stories of The Devil’s Blind Spot are condensed, like novels in pill form. T

Author: Charles Baudelaire
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: paperbook, directions, new, spleen, paris
Number of Pages: 118
Published: 1970-01-17
List price: $11.95
ISBN-10: 0811200078
ISBN-13: 9780811200073

One of the founding texts of literary modernism. Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art, and women. Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry—a format which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of

Author: Thomas Merton
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: appetite, birds, zen
Number of Pages: 144
Published: 1968-01-17
List price: $12.95
ISBN-10: 081120104X
ISBN-13: 9780811201049

Merton, one of the rare Western thinkers able to feel at home in the philosophies of the East, made the wisdom of Asia available to Westerners. .

Author: W.G. Sebald
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: saturn, rings
Number of Pages: 296
Published: 1999-04-01
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 0811214133
ISBN-13: 9780811214131

"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England’s imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. . . . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. . . . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work." The Rings of Saturn-with its curious archive of photographs-chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down