Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge's Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought: Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of mind: "Total Commitment," "Freedom," "Reality Outrivals Theater," "The Correct Slowing-Down at the Transitional Point Between Terror and an Inkling of Freedom," "A Crucial Character (Among Persons None of Whom Are Who They Think They Are)," and "Deadly Vocal Power vs. Generosity in Opera." An opera, Kluge says, is a blast furnace of the soul, telling of the great singer Leonard Warren who died onstage, having literally sung his heart out. Kluge introduces a Tibetan scholar who realizes that opera "is about comprehension and passion. The two never go together. Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills passion. This appears to be the essence of all operas, says Huang Tse-we." He also comes to understand that female roles face the harshest fates: "Compared to the mass of soprano victims (out of 86,000 operas, 64,000 end with the death of the soprano), the sacrifice of tenors is small (out of 86,000 operas 1,143 tenors are a write-off)."
The Desert and Its Seed opens with a taxi ride to the hospital: Eligia's face is disintegrating from acid thrown by her ex-husband while they signed divorce papers. Mario, her son, tries to wipe the acid from Eligia's face, but his own fingers burn.What follows is a fruitless attempt to reconstruct Eligia's face-first in Buenos Aires, thereafter in Milan. Mario, the narrator, becomes the shadow and witness of the reconstruction attempts to repair his mother's outraged flesh. In this role, he must confront his own terrible existence and identity, both of which are bound to an Argentina he sees disintegrating around him.Based on a true, tragic family story, Jorge Barón Biza's The Desert and Its Seed was rejected by publishers in Buenos Aires and was finally self-published in 1998, three years before the author committed suicide. Written in a captivating plain style with dark, bitter humor, The Desert and Its Seed has become a modern classic, published to enormous acclaim throughout the Spanish-speaking world and translated into many languages.
the people, the boats completely gone with the tsunami / tonight you would not be able to sleep -from Sea, Land, ShadowSea, Land, Shadow, the fourth collection by Kazuko Shiraishi to be published by New Directions, comprises work written over sixty-years, from 1951 to 2015. Shiraishi, described by Donald Keene as "the outstanding poetic voice of her generation of disengagement in Japan," sees the world in a grain of rice and finds poetry in a mountain-road traffic jam. In the haunting title poem, she visits Iwanuma not long after the disastrous tsunami hit in 2011 and finds "no houses but a place where houses had been." This pamphlet also includes a long, lyrical homage to Yukio Mishima, as well as playful and profound meditations on a Roman condom, lizard god, god of war, and an ear.
The Objectivist Press published George Oppen's first book Discrete Series, a collection of thirty-one short poems with a preface by Ezra Pound, in 1934. Four years earlier, the twenty-one-year-old poet had sent an unbound sheaf of typewritten poems with the title 21 Poems hand-written in pencil on the first page to the poet Louis Zukofsky, who forwarded them on to Pound in Paris. These poems, suffused with Oppen's love for his young bride Mary, as well as his love of sailing, are strikingly different from what they'd eventually become in Discrete Series. The scholar David B. Hobbs recently found 21 Poems buried in Ezra Pound's papers at Yale's Beinecke Library, and they appear here as a collection of their own for the first time.
A collection in five parts, Susan Howe's electrifying new book opens with a preface by the poet that lays out some of Debths' inspirations: the art of Paul Thek, the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, and early American writings; and in it she also addresses memory's threads and galaxies, "the rule of remoteness," and "the luminous story surrounding all things noumenal."Following the preface are four sections of poetry: "Titian Air Vent," "Tom Tit Tot" (her newest collage poems), "Periscope," and "Debths." As always with Howe, Debths brings "a not-being-in-the-no."
What does northness sound like? The music of Iceland, Greenland, the Svalbard archipelago. Songs of birds and ice and wind. In Lesley Harrison's Blue Pearl, her first collection to appear in the United States, northern landscapes come alive through an intimacy of language that forms a collective sense of place through weather, history, local myths and customs, and childhood fairy tales. Dogs on the shale, eels in the current, a ship strains as it's pulled up by a needle, a whaler unwinds the skin-Harrison's poems voyage forth with visible breath, "as snow falls as light is in paper."
The Illustrious House of Ramires, presented here in a sparkling new translation by Margaret Jull Costa, is the favorite novel of many Eça de Queirós aficionados. This late masterpiece, wickedly funny and yet profoundly tender, centers on Gonçalo Ramires, heir to a family so aristocratic that it predates even the kings of Portugal. Gonçalo-charming but disastrously effete, idealistic but hopelessly weak-muddles through his pampered life, burdened by a grand ambition. He is determined to write a great historical novel based on the heroic deeds of his fierce medieval ancestors. But "the record of their valor," as The London Spectator remarked, "is ironically counterpointed by his own chicanery. A combination of Don Quixote and Walter Mitty, Ramires is continually humiliated but at the same time kindhearted. Ironic comedy is the keynote of the novel. Eça de Queirós has justly been compared with Flaubert and Stendhal."
Gondwana: an ancient supercontinent long-dispersed into fragments in the Southern Hemisphere. Contemplating this once-massive landmass at the the end of the world while looking out at the ethereal blue ice of Antarctica, Nathaniel Tarn writes: "They said back then / there was a frozen continent / in those high latitudes encircling the globe: /are you moving toward it?" The various parts of Gondwana cohere into a unified whole that celebrates bird flight, waves, and innervating light while warning against environmental calamity. Some poems celebrate the New Mexican desert as it becomes a place of protest against the invasion of Afghanistan; in another, the rising and falling stairs at Fez in Morocco meld into a meditation on marriage, empire, and the origins of climbing. Elsewhere the heroic fighter pilot Lydia Litvyak is personified as Eurydice speaking to her Captain as Orpheus; and in the final long section, "Exitus Generis Humani," lines pour over the reader in slow, mournful, yet often humorous, song, revealing "the poets' hearts are a world's heart" as the human race ends and whole armies sink into the earth "yearning for mother love." Celebrated as a poet where "inquiry and ethical action are imperative" (Joseph Donahue, Jacket2), Nathaniel Tarn has lifted up a mind-heart mirror of our contemporary existence in Gondwana and warns us of a definitive ending if we do not demand radical change.
The Christ of Fish is a gorgeous novel conjured out of a mosaic of 233 pieces of Aunt Magda's life in Tel Aviv. Originally from Vienna, Hoffmann's heroine is a widow who still speaks German after decades in Israel: we see many views of Aunt Magdaher childhood, her marriage, her nephew, her best friend Frau Stier, Wildegans' poetry, apple strudel, visions and dreams, two stolen handbags, a favorite cafe, and a gentleman admirer.
A unique and personal portrait of the beloved, legendary Swiss writer, finally in English
In Cape of Storms, Nina Berberova portrays a very specific generation--one born in Russia, displaced by the Revolution, and trying to adapt to a new home, Paris. Three sisters--Dasha, Sonia, and Zai--share the same father, Tiagen, an attractive, weak-willed, womanizing White Russian, but each thinks differently about her inner world of beliefs and aspirations, and consequently each follows a different path. Dasha marries and leaves for a bourgeois expatriate life in colonial Africa. Zai, the youngest, and an appealing adolescent, flirts with becoming an actress or a poet. Sonia, the middle daughter, completes a university degree but falls victim to a shocking tragedy. Cape of Storms is a shattering book that opens with a hair-raising scene in which Dasha witnesses her mother's murder at the hands of Bolshevik thugs, and ends with the Blitzkrieg sweeping toward Paris. It is unparalleled in Berberova's work for its many shifts of mood and viewpoint and secures the author's place as "Chekhov's most vital inheritor" (Boston Review).
Gennady Aygi's longtime translator and friend Peter France has compiled this moving collection of tributes dedicated to some of the writers and artists who sustained him while living in the Moscow "underground." Written in a quiet intensely expressive poetic style, Aygi's inventive essays blend autobiography with literary criticism, social commentary, nature writing, and enlightening homage. He addresses such literary masters as Pasternak, Kafka, Mayakovsky, Celan, and Tomas Tranströmer, along with other writers from the Russian avant-garde and his native Chuvashia. Related poems by Aygi are also threaded between the essays. Reminiscent of Mandelstam's elliptical travel musings and Kafka's intensely spiritual jottings in his notebooks, Time of Gratitude glows with the love and humanity of a sacred vocation. "These leaves of paper," Aygi says, 'are swept up by the whirlwind of festivity; everything whirls-from Earth to Heaven-and perhaps the Universe too begins to swirl. Everything flows together in the rainbow colors and lights of the infinite world of Poetry.'
At last, just in time for his 99th birthday, a powerful overview of one of America's most beloved poets: New Directions is proud to present a swift, terrific chronological selection of Ferlinghetti's poems, spanning more than six decades of work and presenting one of modern poetry's greatest achievements.
Concluding-set in a single summer day-has at its heart old Mr. Rock, a famous retired scientist: he lives in a cottage on the grounds of a girl's boarding school. Living with him is Elizabeth, his somewhat unstrung granddaughter; his white cat; his white goose; and Daisy, his white pig. Miss Edge and Miss Baker-the two inseparable spinster harpies who run the school-scheme to dislodge him from the cottage. Concluding opens with the discovery that two of the schoolgirls have vanished in the night: searching, eavesdropping, worrying, jostling, and giggling all ensue. A love affair, a dance, that magnificent pig, small joys, and low ambitions all stream together, crowding up to the reader's eye, as Henry Green brews up an enchanting, heartbreaking, and darkly sunny novel.
Published in 1917 by The Four Seas Press, Al Que Quiere! was William Carlos Williams's breakthrough book and contains some of his best-loved poems ("Tract," "Apology," "El Hombre," "Danse Russe," "January Morning," and "Smell!"), as well as a Whitmanesque concluding long poem, "The Wanderer," that anticipates his epic masterpiece Paterson. Al Que Quiere! is the culmination of an experimental period for Williams that included his translations from Spanish. The Spanish epigraph of Al Que Quiere! is from the short story "El hombre que parecía un caballo" ("The Man Who Resembled a Horse"), by the Guatemalan author Rafael Arévalo Martínez. This centennial edition contains Williams's translation of the story, as well as his commentary from a book of conversations, I Wanted to Write a Poem, on the individual poems of Al Que Quiere!
In this selection of stories and essays, Henry Miller elucidates, revels, and soars, showing his command over a wide range of moods, styles, and subject matters. Writing "from the heart," always with a refreshing lack of reticence, Miller involves the reader directly in his thoughts and feelings. "His real aim," Karl Shapiro has written, "is to find the living core of our world whenever it survives and in whatever manifestation, in art, in literature, in human behavior itself. It is then that he sings, praises, and shouts at the top of his lungs with the uncontainable hilarity he is famous for." Here are some of Henry Miller's best-known writings: an essay on the photographer Brassai; "Reflections on Writing," in which Miller examines his own position as a writer; "Seraphita" and "Balzac and His Double," on the works of other writers; and "The Alcoholic Veteran," "Creative Death," "The Enormous Womb," and "The Philosopher Who Philosophizes."
A new expanded edition of the classic study of translation, finally back in print
A new collection from "one of the world's great essayists" (The New York Times)
In her first full-length collection published in the United States, Sylvia Legris probes and peels, carves and cleaves, amputates and dissects, to reveal the poetic potential of human and animal anatomy.Starting with the Greek writings of Hippocrates and the Latin language of medicine, and drawing from Leonardo da Vinci's Anatomical Manuscripts, the dermatologist Robert Willan's On Cutaneous Diseases (1808), and Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, Legris infuses each poem with unique rhythms that roll off the tongue. The Hideous Hidden boldly celebrates anatomy's wonders: "Renounce the vestibule of non-vital vitals. / Confess the gallbladder, / the glandular wallflowers, / the objectionable oblong spleen."
An essential edition of a major avant-garde poet: "Waldrop compels us to seek out new superlatives" (Ben Lerner, Jacket)
A lively and utterly singular travelogue of the intricate curiosities that are directly within one's own reach
Michael Palmer's new book-a collection in two parts, "The Laughter of the Sphinx" and "Still (a cantata-or nada-for Sister Satan)"-contains 52 poems.The title poem begins "The laughter of the Sphinx / caused my eyes to bleed" and haunts us with the ruin we are making of our world, even as Palmer revels in its incredible beauty. Such central tensions in The Laughter of the Sphinx-between beauty and loss, love and death, motion and rest, knowledge and ignorance-glow in Palmer's lyrical play of light and entirely hypnotize the reader. The stakes, as always with Palmer, are very high, essentially life and death: "Please favor us with a reply / regarding our one-time offer / which will soon expire."
One of the great figures of modern French literature. Swiss-born in 1887, but French to the core in spirit, Cendrars roamed the world for many years, a restless seeker who made life an adventure and his novels and poems the record of a never-satisfied appetite for human experience. As a young man he reached the Orient across Russia, and "The Transsiberian," one of his finest long poems is included in this volume. Over the years, a number of Cendrars' works were translated into English--early among them, in 1931, John Dos Passos' brilliant version of "Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles" (reprinted in this collection)--but all are now out of print here, so that this selection from the whole range of Cendrars is most timely. It has been prepared by Professor Walter Albert of Brandeis University, whose long introductory essay is the most detailed biographical and critical study of Cendrars now available in English. While the greater part of the selection is concentrated on Cendrars' poetry (with the French text printed en face), there are also representative excerpts from the major novels and other prose books, as well as several essays, including impressions of Chagall and Picasso.
With easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil.
Inside an apartment building on the outskirts of Milan, the working-class residents gossip, quarrel, and conspire against each other. Viewed through the eyes of Chino, an impressionable thirteen-year-old boy whose mother is the doorwoman of the building, the world contained within these walls is tiny, hypocritical, and mean-spirited: a constant struggle. Chino finds escape in reading.One day, a new resident, Amelia Lynd, moves in and quickly becomes an unlikely companion and a formative influence on Chino. Ms. Lynd-an elderly, erudite British woman-comes to nurture his taste in literature, introduces him to the life of the mind, and offers a counterpoint to the only version of reality that he's known. On one level, Lost Words is an engrossing coming-of-age tale set in the seventies, when Italy was going through tumultuous social changes, and on another, it is a powerful meditation on language, literature, and culture.
Sensual and glimmering, Lorenzo Chiera's elliptical fragments evoke nights of bawdy excess in Trastevere ("City made of Roman ruins . . . / what a whorehouse!"), translated here by one of the most renowned poets of our time.In his preface, Lawrence Ferlinghetti describes the experience of reading Chiera for the first time: "We soon realize we are in the presence of a savage erotic consciousness, as if the lust-driven senses were suddenly awakened out of a hoary sleep of a thousand years, a youth shaken awake by a rude medieval hand, senses still reeling, drunk in the hold of some slave ship, not knowing night from day nor sight from sound, the eye and the ear and the nose confounding each other, not yet knowing which function each was to take up in the quivering dawn."
In this classic, groundbreaking exploration of early American literature, Susan Howe reads our intellectual inheritance as a series of civil wars, where each text is a wilderness in which a strange lawless author confronts interpreters and editors eager for settlement. Howe approaches Anne Hutchinson, Mary Rowlandson, Cotton Mather, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville and Emily Dickinson as a fellow writer-her insights, fierce and original, are rooted in her seminal textural scholarship in examination of their editorial histories of landmark works. In the process, Howe uproots settled institutionalized roles of men and women as well as of poetry and prose-and of poetry and prose. The Birth-mark, first published in 1993, now joins the New Directions canon of a dozen Susan Howe titles.
The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past:the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million "Communists," followed by three decades of Suharto's despotic rule. Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years.... Drawing on local sources-folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope-and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan's distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.
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