New Directions Publishing

LARB on That Smell

2013-06-13T15:53:00Z

Critic Jeremy Lybarger has written an incredibly well-informed review of Ibrahim's autobiographical That Smell. Read it here.

Related Author: Sonallah Ibrahim
Related Book: That Smell & Notes from Prison

Poet of the Week: Pablo Neruda

2013-06-06T13:59:00Z

Gawker's Nitasha Tiku recently wrote a piece about Pablo Neruda's body being exhumed to (hopefully, finally) determine if he died of prostate cancer — as was reported at the time of his death, a mere twelve days after the CIA-backed coup that put Pinochet in power — or if, as many people have claimed over the years, he was murdered. The investigation into Neruda's death is part of a much larger one into hundreds of human rights atrocities carried out by Pinochet and his followers over the years.

It's a sad and infuriating story, for a lot of reasons, and it's been weighing on my mind since I read it a few days ago. So to change my mood, and to remind people why Pablo Neruda was so revered (astonishing fact: after delivering his Nobel acceptance speech in Stockholm, he returned to Santiago and read before a crowd of 70,000 people!), I looked back through our archives of New Directions Readers, the annuals that James Laughlin published for many years alongside the books. Neruda appears in New Directions 8, and though are too many to reproduce here, I did scan a few, along with the cover and flap copy, to present them as they were published, rather than re-typing anything. I hope you enjoy.

* All translations by Angel Flores

Related Author: Pablo Neruda

Patti Smith’s Introduction to ‘Astragal’ on Slate

2013-05-09T15:53:00Z

Head over to Slate to read the entirety of Patti Smith's wonderful introduction to Albertine Sarrazin's Asrtagal.

Related Author: Albertine Sarrazin | Patti Smith
Related Book: Astragal

Lustig on Display

2013-05-09T15:47:00Z

Just before the AIGA's "The Lustigs: A Cover Story" exhibition closed in February, the entire New Directions staff made the short walk to Broadway and spent some time marveling in the collected, properly displayed beauty of his work. There were, of course, lots of New Directions books on the walls, along with many other books from other (smart) publishers. But also included were some magazine and brochure covers that not too many of us even knew he'd done. So, without further ado, on to the pictures.

The playful window.

A wall of Lustig's covers for New Directions.

Love this cover.

Industrial Design magazine.

Girl Scouts of America… catalog?

More Girls Scouts. Love this, too.

Lastly, what the placard said was Lustig's first paying design job,
a motoring enthusiast publication, it seems, from 1933.

Related Author: Alvin Lustig
Related Book: Alvin Lustig for New Directions: 50 Postcards

Editor Michael Barron’s Interview with Elaine Lustig

2013-05-09T14:55:00Z

ND editor Michael Barron interviewed Elaine Lustig for Bomb's blog. Read it here.

Related Author: Alvin Lustig
Related Book: Alvin Lustig for New Directions: 50 Postcards

‘Satantango’ Wins Best Translated Book Award

2013-05-06T14:21:00Z

Friday evening, BTBA fiction judge Michael Orthofer — during a ceremony at the Washington Mews — announced that Satantango, by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai and translated by George Szirtes, won the 2013 Best Translated Book Award for fiction. Congratulations to both László and George, the book and the translation are truly masterpieces.

Related Author: László Krasznahorkai | George Szirtes
Related Book: Satantango

Bookforum on Astragal

2013-05-01T16:22:00Z

Writing for Bookforum, Elizabeth Schambelan discusses Albertine Sarrazin and her novel Astragal. Read it here.

Related Author: Albertine Sarrazin
Related Book: Astragal

Daily Beast on Miss Lonelyhearts

2013-04-29T18:41:00Z

Writing for the Daily Beast, novelist Nathaniel Rich says that Miss Lonelyhearts "has never felt more alive than today." Read his entire review here.

Related Author: Nathanael West

Roberto Bolaño in The New Yorker

2013-04-22T14:54:40Z

In this week's issue of The New Yorker, you can read an excerpt from The Unknown University entitled "Mexican Manifesto". Enjoy.

Related Author: Roberto Bolaño

LARB on Sorting Facts

2013-04-16T19:55:11Z

Rebecca Ariel Porte, in a beautiful essay written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, dicusses Susan Howe's Sorting Facts: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, addressing Chris Marker's films, as well. Definitely worth a read — here.

Related Author: Susan Howe
Related Book: Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker

NYRB on Sonallah Ibrahim

2013-04-16T19:39:11Z

Calling it "breathatkingly subversive" in a review for the New York Review of Books, Yasmine El Rashidi discusses That Smell's English debut. Read it here.

Related Author: Sonallah Ibrahim
Related Book: That Smell & Notes from Prison

Lorca in New York

2013-03-28T19:59:00Z

Beginning on April 5 — when an exhibition entitled Back Tomorrow: Federico García Lorca / Poet in New York opens at the New York Public Library — our fair city is hosting a celebration of the famed poet, who spent nine months here in 1929, time that changed his perceptions of poetry, the role of the artist in society, and of the world in general.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the manuscript for Lorca's Poet in New York, which has a fascinating, if heartbreaking, story of its own:

Lorca came to New York to study English but devoted himself instead to writing Poet in New York, a howl of protest against racial bigotry, mindless consumption, and the adoration of technology. “What we call civilization, he called slime and wire,” the critic V. S. Pritchett once wrote. But Lorca’s book reaches beyond New York — “this maddening, boisterous Babel”—into the depths of the psyche, in a search for wholeness and redemption.

In 1936, the poet left the manuscript of Poet in New York on the desk of his Madrid publisher with a note saying he would be “back tomorrow,” probably to discuss final details. He never returned. Weeks later, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was brutally murdered by fascist elements in Granada, his body thrown into an unmarked mass grave. The book was published posthumously in 1940, but the manuscript mysteriously disappeared, lost to scholars for decades. The Fundación Federico García Lorca in Madrid and The New York Public Library exhibit it now for the first time, together with drawings, photographs, letters, and mementos — traces of a Poet in New York . . . and of New York in a poet.

Over on the "Lorca in NY" website, you'll find a program providing details on over twenty events, such as:

• A "musical, theatrical, spoken word celebration and interpretation of Lorca’s writings and favorite Flamenco, Sevillana and Tango songs performed by some of American’s leading spoken word artists" at the Bowery Poetry Club on April 7.

• A tribute concert by Patti Smith and friends at the Bowery Ballroom on June 5.

• A Lorca walking tour in the Columbia University area, also on June 5.

Related Author: Federico García Lorca

Dunya Mikhail on NPR’s “Morning Edition”

2013-03-21T19:49:17Z

Click here to list to Mikhail discuss Iraq, poetry, and her journey in a segment called "Revisiting Iraq Through The Eyes Of An Exiled Poet."

Related Author: Dunya Mikhail
Related Book: Diary Of A Wave Outside The Sea | The War Works Hard

Anne Carson profile in the New York Times Magazine

2013-03-14T19:25:17Z

The title of the New York Times Magazine profile by Sam Anderson says it all. Read it here.

Related Author: Anne Carson
Related Book: Antigonick | Nox | Glass, Irony, And God

Fun with Alvin Lustig’s Designs

2013-03-14T14:46:00Z

Fans of our books know that we're very proud of our association with the great modernist designer Alvin Lustig, who created over seventy covers for New Directions between 1941-1952. Several prints of his iconic designs decorate our office walls, and lately we've been rejacketing backlist titles with their original Lustig covers.

In May you'll be able to buy reprints of fifty of his designs for New Directions in postcard form. If you can bear to part with them — you might just want to plaster your wall with them — you can go ahead and throw away your existing stationary and instead use Lustig covers for all of your written correspondence.

As I was looking through the covers that we chose for the boxed set of fifty, I couldn't help but fixate on the way he treated each author's name. These are, after all, like any book, meant to convey a certain amount of information about the written words contained within the covers, so in addition to be aesthetically pleasing, they had to be thematically appropriate, and considering the experimental nature of many of the authors and books, it wasn't always easy to nail the design. But he did. Over and over again.

Anyway, back to the names. Because of my fixation, I decided to make this:

I love the variety in how he styled Tennessee Williams's name, or William Carlos Williams's. Lorca written in sand is just amazing. But my favorite is Nathanael West's name on two different stage-set building facades, from the cover of The Day of the Locust:

Have a favorite Lustig design? Let us know over on twitter.

Oh, and I ended up making bookmarks out of the design above. So if you're a bookseller and want a stack for your store, let me know: publicity@ndbooks.com.

Related Author: Alvin Lustig
Related Book: Alvin Lustig for New Directions: 50 Postcards