New Directions Publishing

13 Ways of Looking at Nox

2012-02-07T18:15:20Z

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of talking to hundreds of booksellers — in groups of about eight at a time — about Anne Carson's forthcoming book, Antigonick. Of course I mentioned her previous book, Nox, and of course I ended up saying "beautiful book-in-a-box" dozens of times over the course of three days. Which led me to wonder (since I wasn't here at New Directions when Nox was first published, and didn't read every review of it) how the various reviewers chose to describe the physical nature of the "book." Below is a sampling of what I found.

* * *

With "Nox," she mixes form to such an extent that it’s hard even to call the finished product a book. It is, instead, a gray box containing a single sheet of heavy-stock paper, folded accordion-style and covered with text, old photographs, letters, illustrations and mementos.
Time Out New York

The manuscript, housed in a box, is a single accordion-folded sheet, which the reader must unfurl slowly, page by page — it becomes clear that Carson aims to school her reader in patience when deciphering texts.
Kate Ringo, Virginia Quarterly Review

A unique assemblage of bits of conversation, letters, postmarked stamps, memories, cut-up photographs, drawings, paint, staples, etc., "Nox" is here replicated as one long accordion foldout in a clamshell box.
Mark Gustafson, Rain Taxi

The book is most of all remarkable for its other forms of expression, the physical as well as the linguistic, including an individualist etymology of the poem’s every word, simultaneously professorial and passionate in a way that Catullus, that greatest of Roman innovators, might very plausibly have approved of himself. Opposite the left-hand pages, presented as part of a Latin dictionary, are childhood photographs, postage stamps and scraps of letters, the whole work connected in single sheet, a winding-sheet as it seems, contained in a solid-sided box.
Peter Stothard, Times Literary Supplement

The book is an extraordinary object to behold, and more extraordinary to read, but it's hardly accurate to even call it a “book.” It's perhaps 10 feet of paper, folded accordionlike, displaying as near a reproduction of Carson's original collage journal as is possible. The whole thing is folded and packed into a beautiful gray box: the faded letters, the dog-eared corners of the photos, the awkward way all of it was held to the page with staples and glue.
Craig Morgan Teicher, Publishers Weekly

She offers us a cardboard box containing a book. But what a book….It's a book with pages you can turn. But all the pages are connected, in one long folded concertina. It's a challenge, physically speaking, to read.
John Timpane, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Nox" (Latin for night) is not a collection in the ordinary sense, but a box containing a single long sheet of paper folded like a concertina. On one side of this sheet appear a collection of quotes, definitions, translations, letter-fragments, pieces of poetry, photographs, paintings, scribbles, and drawings.
Andrew Motion, The Guardian

"Nox" is unwieldy. It is, very deliberately, a literary object—the opposite of an e-reader designed to vanish in your palm as you read on a train. It comes in a box the size of my external hard drive, and its pages fold out, accordion-style, to colonize all your available space.
Sam Anderson, New York Magazine

Anne Carson’s new book comes in a box the color of a rainy day, with a sliver of a family snapshot on the front. Inside is a Xerox-quality reproduction of a notebook, made after the death of her brother, including text and photographs and letters, pasted-in inkjet printouts, handwriting, paintings and collage. “Nox” has no page numbers, and it’s accordion-folded. It carries a whiff of visual art multiple or gift shop souvenir or “Griffin & Sabine.”
Ben Ratliff, The New York Times Book Review

"Nox" doesn’t look or behave like any other book of poetry (or prose) out there. It’s not a book in the traditional sense; the usual binary of verso and recto is confounded by one long page that accordions out of a coffin-like box. But its physical shape isn’t the only thing that makes "Nox" so special; the text itself is an assemblage of words and images so artfully arranged that they make us reconsider not only what poetry can do — and should do — but even what a book is.
Andrew Ervin, The Believer

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that there are no page numbers indicated above for "Nox," an elegy for her brother by the highly esteemed poet and classicist Anne Carson. This is because Carson's moving yet strikingly unconventional work arrives as a single accordioned sheet, folded into a handsome clamshell box — a kind of reliquary, perhaps.
Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

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The last two (below) are my favorites; Chiasson's because of his extended musing on the nature of "accordion-fold" books, and O'Rourke's because she's the only one to liken the box's size to that of a Bible, and a specific version at that.

* * *

Carson took a notebook and made a long book-collage of everything she’d collected. "Nox" is the facsimile of that strange homemade object. It is a most unusual book, printed on one side of a long single sheet of paper folded like an accordion. “Accordion-fold” books are their own minor genre, and are often homemade: folding a sheet of paper, first this way, then that, is among the simplest ways to make a book, requiring no binding. This chain-link form is especially suited to panoramas, alphabets, bestiaries, souvenir books, and almanacs. The format allows for the simultaneous representation of episode and arc, individual and ensemble: stretched out along the length of a table, you can see all at once the succession of English monarchs, or the stages of the evolution of man, or one hundred full-color views of Paris.
Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books

“Nox” is as much an artifact as a piece of writing. The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson. The reproduction has been done painstakingly, and conjures up an almost tactile sense of the handmade original. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook’s physicality — bits of handwriting, stamps, stains — add testimonial force: this person existed.
Meghan O’Rourke, The New Yorker

Photo © Hannah Whitaker

Related Author: Anne Carson
Related Book: Nox

Poet of the Week: Forrest Gander

2012-02-06T15:45:43Z

Due to popular demand, and as a concession to common sense, we've decided to put poems here on our website — one poet per week.

This week, we present Forrest Gander. Following in the footsteps of many New Directions poets, Forrest is a Renaissance man with degrees in geology and literature. He's written novels, poetry, and criticism, and has translated, as well. His most recent collection, Core Samples from the World, has been named a finalist for the 2012 NBCC Award in Poetry.

The collection is a collaboration with three photographers that travels the globe exploring the tension between the foreign and the familiar, and what emerges is an empathetic portrait of the world's fundamental nature. To give you an idea of the unique structure Gander has created for the mixture of poetry and short essays, as well as the scope of landscapes, here's the table of contents:

One:
Evaporation
A Clearing With photos by Raymond Meeks
Xinjiang: The Pamirs Poetry Journey

Two:
Evaporation
Tinajera Notebook With photos by Graciela Iturbide
Mexico: A Core Sample through 24 Hours

Three:
Evaporation
Moving Around for the Light, A Madrigal With photos by Lucas Foglia
Bosnia-Herzegovina: Life is Waiting

Four:
Evaporation
Lovegreen With photos by Raymond Meeks
Chile: Pigs of Gold

* * *

Below are three poems, two from the second section, and one from the fourth. Enjoy.

* * *

Evaporation 2

In increments enunciated (Oh) within
             where the meanings (in increments) lie
bare (she says) (Oh, to her friend)

who is watching (I am watching) a cat slink
(while we walk) keeping pace with us
through the fenestrated walls (adobe) of

a ruined house (Oh, this finger) in the village
             where she grew up (her accent
makes clear) This finger, she says,

delighted, holding it up,
has a heart in it! (Pulse)
And thinking I don’t see (the friend), she

takes (from her purse) a toothpaste tube
             (purse open) as she walks (we walk)
(where’s the cat?) along the soft

path between (adobe) walls,
squeezes toothpaste
on her finger (with its heart) and smears

it (looking away) against her upper
             and (still looking away) lower teeth
then touches me (with her breath)

* * *

from "The Tinajera Notebook"

So the present
hoses itself out. And with it—

Sitting in the lobby of the clinic,
its walls painted
like children’s rooms with starfish

and trains and jungle birds
and the children shuttling back and forth, the nurse
calling their name and a few words

in English or Spanish, the children
taking their mother’s
or father’s hand,

trailing the nurse past
a registration desk, down
the hall, the sequence of closed doors,

toward the one door open. Radiance inside. Bald
children wearing hats, and a bald baby in a mother’s arms, and
here in the lobby, where I wait for you

to be X-rayed,
some stranger whose exhaustion
can’t be fathomed, begins to snore. If this

is the world and its time, as irrevocably it is,
when I step out into sunlit air
suffused with sausage smoke and bus exhaust,

with its relentless ads
for liquor and underwear,
where am I then?

* * *

from "Lovegreen"

That the trunk, submerged in air,
whirling leaves, thresholds-out. On the bark of
its leader stem, a black-capped
chickadee pins caterpillars and lacewings.
Its water-sprouts and spurs unpruned,
unbraced, the Yellow Transparent tree’s
boughs release the girl open-mouthed
pumping her two-wheeler
across a meadow softly-furred
as a bumble bee, her plastic bag
pendant with hard apples
from one handlebar swaying—

Coffee cut with honeysuckle.
The unprimed pump won’t give up its water.
Mosquito hawk clings to the barn wall’s shadow.

* * *

If you happen to be in New York on March 7, the NBCC finalists reading is free and open to the public, and Forrest will be there. All of the details are here.

Related Author: Forrest Gander
Related Book: Core Samples from the World

TLS on Lighting Rods

2012-01-30T20:25:06Z

"DeWitt," they claim, "is one of the sharpest and most unforgiving writers at work today." Read the full review here.

Related Author: Helen DeWitt
Related Book: Lightning Rods

New Yorker Guide to Reading Bolano

2012-01-19T18:30:03Z

Wondering where to begin with Bolaño? Giles Harvey has some advice.

Related Author: Roberto Bolaño
Related Book: Distant Star | Nazi Literature in the Americas | Last Evenings On Earth

Tin House on The Passion According to G.H.

2011-12-05T20:14:03Z

And, per usual, this sort of language is unavoidable: "Lispector has written a novel in which every word—like a mythical tail-eating snake—quietly consumes itself." Read it on their blog.

Related Author: Clarice Lispector | Benjamin Moser | Idra Novey

Awesome Author Photos: Clarice Lispector

2011-12-02T20:58:43Z

One of the great unexpected pleasures of redesigning our website came as we uploaded author photos. Many of them are incomparably wonderful, and in what I hope will be a semi-regular feature on the blog, we'll point them out to you.

With this installment of Awesome Author Photos, we present Clarice Lispector. New Directions recently published a new edition of her most famous novel, The Hour of the Star, in a new translation by biographer Benjamin Moser, who is also overseeing the publication of four new editions of Lispector's work in May of next year (more on that below). And with today's Vogue.com endorsement of The Hour of the Star, it seems apt to share the author photo to the right (perfectly suitable for Vogue's glossy pages) along with a much-quoted line from the translator Gregory Rabassa, who once said that, when he met Lispector, he was "flabbergasted" to meet "that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf."

Corroboration for the first half of the comparison is obvious in the photograph to the right. In fact, the same photo inspired designer Paul Sahre when we asked him to design the covers for the four forthcoming titles. Have a look:

And as for the second half, superlative praise from the likes of Colm Tóibín, Orhan Pamuk, Jonathan Franzen, and Edmund White abounds. Or you can take our word for it that she's a genius, and that you should definitely covet her writing.

Related Author: Clarice Lispector | Benjamin Moser
Related Book: The Hour of The Star

Poet of the Week: Dylan Thomas

2012-02-16T18:27:04Z

Due to popular demand, and as a concession to common sense, we've decided to put poems here on our website — one poet per week.

Now that Valentine's Day has passed, and now that it's turned cold and rainy, at least here in New York, why not hunker down with some poetry by Dylan Thomas.

Literary haunts, real and fictional, are everywhere in New York. I think of DeLillo when I pass Great Jones Street; Millay when I pass what used to be St. Vincent's hospital; Selby whenever I'm in Red Hook or near the Navy Yard; Pynchon whenever fleet week comes around; and so on and so forth. But the closest "landmark" is the White Horse Tavern, which sits only a few blocks from our offices at the intersection of the West Village, Chelsea, and the Meatpacking District. And each and every time I pass it I try to envision Dylan Thomas sitting at the bar, sipping a drink, alone, his eyes narrowing as the night wears on. I'm perhaps guilty or romanticizing the notion of the tortured, drunken writer, but the legend is simply too powerful. I also, every time, think of a verse by Tom Waits, in the song "Lucinda": "I was standing outside the White Hourse, but I was afraid to go in." Is he referring to the White Horse on Hudson Street in New York, or some other bar, somewhere else, somewhere imaginary. Does it matter, really?

The entry in The Way It Wasn't — a collection of memories and memorabilia — on Dylan Thomas includes a heartbreaking memory from New Directions founder James Laughlin. He explains that when Thomas died, Laughlin and John Brinnin, Thomas' American tour agent, flipped a coin to determine who would have to go to Bellevue to identify the body. Laughlin lost, identified the body, and then answered questions for a form. They wanted to know his profession, and so Laughlin told the young woman ("She was about four feet high, and I don't think she had even finished high school yet.") that he was a poet, to which she replied, "What's that?"

"He wrote poetry," he replied. The form ended up saying "Dylan Thomas. He wrote poetry."

So, yes. I associate the White Horse Tavern with Dylan Thomas, with alcohol as the overarching theme. It's how he's remembered, sadly, but we bother to remember it because we still love his poetry. And it endures; gets me every time I read it. Take the two poems below, for example. The first is as spare as he gets, and yet the imagery of the poet at work, and of life going on around him while he works, is remarkably poignant without being even remotely saccharine or self-indulgent. And the second, which is about half of an unfinished poem given the title "Elegy" (printed in The Collected Poems), evokes those quintessentially Thomas themes: unflagging humanism, strength in the face of loss and defeat, confusion at the inability to live forever.

"In My Craft or Sullen Art"

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

* * *

From "Elegy," an unfinished poem

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the light of the lording sky
An old blind man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son’s eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres’

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. Oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.

Related Author: Dylan Thomas
Related Book: Collected Poems: The Original

Awesome Author Photos: Nicanor Parra

2012-02-09T21:34:16Z

Nicanor Parra. Theoretical physicist, cosmologist, anti-poet. Beloved by Roberto Bolaño as the antidote to Pablo Neruda, and the reason he's on my mind lately (he's mentioned repeatedly in Between Parentheses).

I'm not exactly sure what I envisioned when I looked up his photograph, but I think it was something a bit more... revolutionary. Perhaps South American hipster, if such a thing exists. A mix of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's guerrilla chic and Ernesto Cardenal's socialist roguishness. Whatever it was that I'd expected, it wasn't the photo you see to the right.

He's downright debonair. The shirt/sweater/ascot combination suggests a man who is very thoughtful about his wardrobe, very precise, and yet the slightly long, windblown hair suggests a man of the world, a man who enjoys a drink and a cigar at three in the morning - like the inspiration for XX's "Most Interesting Man in the World." And the eyes... whatever it is he's looking at, he's understanding it quickly and thoroughly — and also slightly dismissively.

In retrospect, this is exactly how I should have pictured him: knowing, exacting, and daring.

Related Author: Nicanor Parra
Related Book: Antipoems: How To Look Better & Feel Great

Rodrigo Corral: Novelist

2012-02-02T21:25:09Z

We aren't typically keen on bringing your attention to books published by other publishers, but we do make certain exceptions, and this certainly qualifies as one.

If you ever turned over a New Directions book — after admiring the cover — to look for the design credit, then you know who Rodrigo Corral is. As our creative director at-large, he’s been responsible for over two dozen beautiful covers over the past five years, including the new edition of Berlin Stories, last year's Between Parentheses, and the entire Pearl series, just to name a few.

But Rodrigo is also a writer, and — along with co-author Jessica Anthony — has just published his first novel, Chopsticks. At the center of the novel is a young piano prodigy named Glory, who mysteriously goes missing one day. Through a variety of new and old forms of media (newspaper clippings, instant messages, videos, etc.) that are embedded in the novel (and brought to life in the iPad and iPhone versions) the reader develops a sense of what happened to Glory in the eighteen months prior to her disappearance from a mental hospital, where she’d been committed for obsessively playing “chopsticks.”

We don’t want to give too much away; you’ll have to experience it for yourself.

On behalf of everyone at New Directions, we’d like to say one simple thing to Rodrigo: Congratulations!

L Magazine on Cossery

2012-02-01T15:49:36Z

And praises the Egyptian author as "a keen observer of codes." Read the complete review here.

Related Author: Albert Cossery
Related Book: The Colors of Infamy

A Sneak Peek at Anne Carson’s New Book: ‘Antigonick’

2012-01-26T16:49:43Z

It's official: Anne Carson's new book, a new translation of Sophokles' Antigone called Antigonick (the title makes sense in the context of the new translation, I swear) is off at the printer, and should be landing on our fair shores sometime in late April. Similar to Nox, this is a lovingly crafted and produced book. This time around, Carson has hand-lettered the text on the pages (see below), and artist Bianca Stone (a former student of Carson's) has provided color illustrations (also below), which are being printed on translucent vellum pages. The end result being that the two will work together, the ghostly presentiment of the text-to-come enhancing the illustrations.

The translation itself is simply beautiful. She's playful with the language and the plot (the chorus has a decidedly sarcastic tone; Kreon enters on a motorboat), and yet it's still the fundamentally human story about death and honor, ethics and the law. It is, essentially what it was when it was written about 2500 years ago: a timeless classic.

First, an example of the text alongside an illustration.

* * *

More sample illustrations.

Related Author: Anne Carson

Tennessee Williams’ New Orleans’ Haunts

2012-01-25T20:00:43Z

Last week, editor Barbara Epler and I were in New Orleans, where we were meeting (and wining and dining) booksellers at the American Booksellers Association's Winter Institute — sort of like Book Expo America minus all the glitz and carnival barking. While we were there, we took some time to find Faulkner House Books, a store in the heart of the French Quarter (with a very cool Pirate's Alley address) where owner Joe DeSalvo, along with his wife Rosemary, specializes in all things literarily New Orleans. Faulkner wrote his first novel in the same building, hence the name, but Joe also knows plenty about Walker Percy and our favorite former New Orleans resident — Tennessee Williams. In addition to new and rare editions of our books, they also possess some correspondence between Tennessee and various friends, directors, actors, and our founder James Laughlin, along with the wonderful framed photograph you see below, which sits nestled between shelves of poetry.

After we chatted with Joe and Rosemary for a while, Joe brought us around the corner to show us the building where Tennessee lived while he wrote A Streetcar Named Desire. In the picture below, it's the large loft room on the top floor, and Joe told us that a restaurant used to occupy the second floor, and they gave him all of his meals. It being New Orleans, there's a plaque on the building (also pictured).

I couldn't resist asking Joe if he knew where Tennessee had liked to do his drinking. Although one locale is now gone forever, he did point us to the Napolean House a few blocks away from the store on Chartres. The bar's name, in case you're wondering, comes from the original owner's offer to house Napolean there if he ended up in exile in the Americas. Their house speciality is a Pimm's Cup, which you see below sitting on their bar. A delicious drink. Alas, no one-armed hustler to be found.

* * *

We also stopped in a wonderful used and antique bookstore called Crescent City Books. Not only did I find a rare copy of one of our New Directions quarterlies, I found this playbill for a Hanna Theater production of A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Elia Kazan and starring Anthony Quinn!

* * *

And then, on the way back to the hotel and all of the hubbub, I passed this little store, and couldn't resist taking a picture. Tennessee's legacy knows no boundaries.

Related Author: Tennessee Williams
Related Book: Memoirs

NBCC Finalists: Congratulations to Forrest Gander!

2012-01-22T00:39:03Z

The National Book Critics Circle Awards finalists for 2011 were announced on January 21, and among the five poetry collections was Forrest Gander's Core Samples from the World. We couldn't be more honored, and want to offer him our heartiest congratulations. The full press release is here.

Related Author: Forrest Gander
Related Book: Core Samples from the World

Woolgathering Pop Candy

2012-01-20T15:45:15Z

Click here to read this week's list of pop culture's greatest hits.

Related Author: Patti Smith
Related Book: Woolgathering

Barbara Epler Talks to the New Yorker

2012-01-16T16:00:03Z

Over at The New Yorker's blog "The Book Bench," ND editor and publisher Barbara Epler discusses all things Roberto Bolaño. And don't miss the story "Labyrinth" from the January 23 issue, pulled from the forthcoming collection http://ndbooks.com/book/the-secret-of-evilThe Secret of Evil.

Related Author: Roberto Bolaño