A collection of three stories describes the origins of the universe featured in the author's previous novel, "Telex from Cuba," and includes tales of the illegal broadcasts of a faith healer and a pre
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
Formed as a rondel of interlocking stories with a clutch of more or less loosely connected repeating characters, it's at once deracinated yet potent with place, druggy yet frighteningly shot through with reality. His people appear, disappear, and reappear. They're on the fringes of London, clinging to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingernails, consumed by emotions and anxieties in fuzzily understood situations. A deft, high-wire act, full of imprecise yet sharp dialog as well as witchy sleights of hand reminiscent of Muriel Spark, A Shock delivers a knockout punch of an ending.Perhaps Ridgway's most breathtaking quality is his scintillating stealthiness: you can never quite put your finger on how he casts his spell--he delivers the shock of a master jewel thief (already far-off and scot-free) stealing your watch: when at some point you look down at your wrist, all you see is that in more than one way you don't know what time it is...
New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy’s strange and mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist ofhyper-brevity in fiction, Fleu
In this poetic handbook, the world-famous high-wire artist Philippe Petit offersa window into the world of tightrope walking. Petit masterfully explains howpreparation and self-control contributed to
In this collection of prose, prose poems, and verse, The Shutters reconstructs vivid scenes of Morocco and its history, weaving and winding through antiquity, myth, and a fictional present; through ce
“Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines,
With the elliptical looping of a butterfly alighting on one’s sleeve, the poems of Ana Lui´sa Amaral arrive as small hypnotic miracles. Spare and beautiful in a way reminiscent both of Szymborska and
In Rothenberg's hands, the body of the poem is an extraordinarily malleable object. Collage, translation, even visual improvisation serve to open up his latest book to the presence of poets and artist
The wealthy scientist Martial Canterel guides a group of visitors through his expansive estate, Locus Solus, where he displays his various deranged inventions, each more spectacular than the last. Fir
As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the i
"A unique and personal portrait of the beloved, legendary Swiss writer, finally in English. After a nervous breakdown in 1929, Robert Walser spent the remaining twenty-seven years of his life in menta
In 1506, Michelangelo—a young but already renowned sculptor—is invited by the Sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, t
