Author: Nathaniel Mackey
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: anthem, splay
Number of Pages: 112
Published: 2006-05-30
List price: $15.95
ISBN-10: 0811216527
ISBN-13: 9780811216524

In a stunning new collection of poems of transport and transcendence, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey’s "asthmatic song of aspiration" scuttles across cultures and histories—from America to Andalucía, from Ethiopia to Vienna—in a sexy, beautiful adaptive dance.Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey’s new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections—"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub" (one referent Mackey notes in his stellar Introduction: "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United Sta

Author: James Laughlin
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: poetry, prose, directions, new
Number of Pages: 1
Published: 1983-06
List price: $9.25
ISBN-10: 0811208664
ISBN-13: 9780811208666

Author: Romain Gary
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: rosa, madame, life
Number of Pages: 192
Published: 1986-02-17
List price: $12.95
ISBN-10: 081120961X
ISBN-13: 9780811209618

The Life Before Us is the story of an orphaned Arab boy, Momo, and his devotion to Madame Rosa, a dying, 68-year-old, 220-lb. survivor of Auschwitz and retired "lady of the night." Momo has been one of the ever-changing ragbag of whores’ children at Madame Rosa’s boardinghouse in Paris ever since he can remember. But when the check that pays for his keep no longer arrives and as Madame Rosa becomes too ill to climb the stairs to their apartment, he determines to support her any way he can. This sensitive, slightly macabre love story between Momo and Madame Rosa has a supporti

Author: W. G. Sebald
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: emigrants
Number of Pages: 238
Published: 1997-09-17
List price: $15.95
ISBN-10: 0811213668
ISBN-13: 9780811213660

Published to enormous critical acclaim in the US and sold out immediately in its first hardcover edition, The Emigrants has been acclaimed as "one of the best novels to appear since World War II" (Review of Contemporary Fiction) and three times chosen as the1996 International Book of the Year. The poignant and acclaimed novel about the beauty of lost things, while the protagonist traces the lives of four elderly German/Jewish exiles. The Emigrants is composed of four long narratives which at first appear to be the straightforward accounts of the lives of several Jewish exiles in England, Austr

Author: John Hawkes
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: skin, second
Number of Pages: 240
Published: 2005-11-28
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 0811216446
ISBN-13: 9780811216449

Skipper, an ex-World War II naval Lieutenant and the narrator of Second Skin, interweaves past and present—what he refers to as his "naked history"—in a series of episodes that tell the story of a volatile life marked by pitiful losses, as well as a more elusive, overwhelming, joy. The past: the suicides of his father, wife and daughter, the murder of his son-in-law, a brutal rape, and subsequent mutiny at sea. The present: caring for his granddaughter on a "northern" island where he works as an artificial inseminator of cows, and attempts to reclaim the innocence with which he faced the t

Author: Veza Canetti
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: paperbook, directions, new, tortoises
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2007-06-29
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 0811216969
ISBN-13: 9780811216968

Spare, dark, and cinematic, The Tortoises describes life in the Nazi reign of terror.A renowned writer and his wife live quietly in a beautiful villa outside Vienna, until the triumphant Nazis start subjecting their Jewish "hosts" to ever greater humiliations. Veza Canetti focuses on seemingly ordinary people to epitomize the horror: one flag-happy German kills a sparrow before a group of little children; another, more entrepreneurial Nazi brands tortoises with swastikas to sell as souvenirs commemorating the Anschluss.

Author: Javier Marias
Publisher: New Directions
Keywords: lives, written
Number of Pages: 192
Published: 2006-02-28
List price: $22.95
ISBN-10: 081121611X
ISBN-13: 9780811216111

An affectionate and very funny gallery of twenty great world authors from the pen of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe).In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe’s most intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marías is also the translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone of Written Lives. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting great writers’ lives, "or, more precisely, snippets of writers’ lives."