Alexander Kluge Temple of the Scapegoat: Opera Stories

• Translated from the German by Isabel Cole and Donna Stonecipher • With photographs Revolving around the opera, these tales are an “archaeological excavation of the slag-heaps of our collective existence” (W. G. Sebald)

Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Al- exander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous PBK NDP 1395 operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought: Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative FICTION JANUARY notions. The titles of his stories suggest his many turns of mind: “Total Com- mitment,” “Freedom,” “Reality Outrivals Theater,” “The Correct Slowing-Down 5 X 8" 288pp 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),” ISBN 978-0-8112-2748-3 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 EBK 978-0-8112-2749-0 onstage, having literally sung his heart out. Kluge introduces a Tibetan scholar who realizes that opera “is about comprehension and passion. The two never 36 CQ TERRITORY W go together. Passion overwhelms comprehension. Comprehension kills pas- sion. This appears to be the essence of all operas, says Huang Tse-we: she US $18.95 CAN $24.95 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 ALSO BY ALEXANDER KLUGE: 1,143 tenors are a write-off).” CINEMA STORIES “Alexander Kluge, that most enlightened of writers.” –W. G. SEBALD 978-0-8112-1735-4 • $11.95

THE DEVIL’S BLINDSPOT “Alexander Kluge is a gigantic figure in the German cultural landscape. He 978-0-8112-1736-1 • $14.95 exemplifies—along with Pasolini—what is most vigorous and original in the European idea of the artist as intellectual, the intellectual as artist. Essential, brilliant.” –SUSAN SONTAG

ALEXANDER KLUGE, born in Germany in 1932, is a world-famous author and filmmaker (his twenty-three films includeYesterday Girl, The Female Patriot, The Can- didate), a lawyer, and a media magnate. He has won Germany’s highest literary award, the Georg Büchner Prize.

-1- WINTER 2018 Rainer Maria Rilke Poems from the Book of Hours

• Translated from the German by Babette Deutsch • Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin One of the most powerful poetry collections of the twentieth century, now in a beautiful new edition

Although The Book of Hours is the work of Rilke’s youth, it contains the germ of his mature convictions. Written as spontaneously received prayers, these PBK NDP 1396 poems celebrate a God who is not the Creator of the Universe but rather humanity itself and, above all, that most intensely conscious part of humanity, POETRY JANUARY the artist. Babette Deutsch’s classic translations—born from “the pure desire to sing what the poet sang” (Ursula K. Le Guin)—capture the rich harmony and 5 X 8" 64pp suggestive imagery of the originals, transporting the reader to new heights of inspiration and musicality. ISBN 978-0-8112-2758-2

“If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.” EBK 978-0-8112-2759-9 —STEPHEN SPENDER, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

48 CQ TERRITORY W “Rilke remade the sturdy sonnet, recast the sonorous song. He quickened the German language itself.” US $12.95 CAN $17.50 —RIKA LESSER, THE NATION

“Poets in English continue to line up for the inevitable failure of translating ALSO BY RAINER MARIA RILKE: Rilke’s short lyrics. The best translations I have seen are from Babette Deutsch.” —CLIVE JAMES WHERE SILENCE REIGNS 978-0-8112-0697-6 • $15.95

POSSIBILITY OF BEING 978-0-8112-0651-8 • $14.95

RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875–1926) was one of the greatest poets who ever wrote in the German language. His most famous works are Sonnets to Orpheus, The Duino Elegies, Letters to a Young Poet, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and The Book of Hours. Winner of the National Book Award, URSULA K. LE GUIN (b. 1929) has written over fifty books of prose and poetry. BABETTE DEUTSCH (1895–1982) was a poet, critic, and novelist, as well as a translator.

NEW DIRECTIONS -2- New Directions Cat Poems

• Edited by Tynan Kogane A gorgeous gift edition, dedicated to the mystery, grace, and charm of the cat

Across the ages, cats have provided their adopted humans with companion- ship, affection, mystery, and innumerable metaphors; cats cast a mirror on PBK W/FLAPS NDP 1397 their beholders; cats endlessly captivate and hypnotize, frustrate and delight. And to poets, in particular, these enigmatic creatures are the most delightful POETRY FEBRUARY and beguiling of muses (Charles Baudelaire: “the sole source of amusement in one’s lodgings”) as they go about purring, prowling, hunting, playing, meow- 5 X 7" 112pp ing, and napping, often oblivious to their so-called masters (Jorge Luis Borges: “you live in other time, lord of your realm—a world as closed and separate as ISBN 978-0-8112-2750-6 a dream”). Cat Poems offers a litter of odes to our beloved felines by Charles Baude- EBK 978-0-8112-2751-3 laire, Stevie Smith, Christopher Smart, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Muriel Spark, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and 48 CQ TERRITORY W many others.

US $11.95 CAN $15.95 “If I were not a Christian, I would worship the cat.” —MURIEL SPARK

“There are too many poems ASLO GREAT FOR GIFTS: About cats. Beware of cat Lovers, they have a hidden THE LOVE POEMS OF PABLO NERUDA Frustration somewhere and will 978-0-8112-1729-3 • $11.95 Stick you with it if they can.” FRENCH LOVE POEMS —KENNETH REXROTH, “CAT” 978-0-8112-2559-5 • $11.95

“I stumbled on the fact that Ezra Pound sees himself as a cat man.” —CHARLES OLSON

TYNAN KOGANE is an editor at New Directions.

-3- WINTER 2018 Muriel Spark The Informed Air: Essays

• With a preface by Penelope Jardine Now in paperback, here are the sparkling essays of Muriel Spark, author of “the best sentences in English” (The New Yorker)

A fantastic essayist, the inimitable Muriel Spark addresses here the writing life, cats, favorite writers (the Brontës, T. S. Eliot, Robert Burns, Mary Shelley), love, PBK NDP 1398 Piero della Francesca, life in wartime London and in glamorous “Hollywood- on-the-Tiber” 1960s Rome, faith, and parties (on her first New Year’s Eve, as ESSAYS FEBRUARY a baby sipping her mother’s sherry: “I always loved a party”).

No one was as “fearless and original” (TLS) as Muriel Spark, who believed 5½ X 8½" 304pp that “art is an act of daring.” Here she glides from the mysteries of Job’s suf- ferings to Dame Edith Sitwell’s cocktail advice about how to handle a nasty ISBN 978-0-8112-2767-4 publisher: “‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you must acquire a pair of lorgnettes, make an occasion to see that man again, focus the glasses on him and sit looking at EBK 978-0-8112-2400-0 him through them as if he was an insect. Just look and look.’”

36 CQ TERRITORY A “Witty, exacting, and wholly original. Muriel Spark’s writing is sui generis, her influence unquantifiable. These essays reveal in diamond-cut fragments the things that most amused and most touched her, each facet reflecting some US $18.95 CAN $24.95 new, surprising aspect of the deep inner workings of her mind.” —MAUD NEWTON, SALON CLOTH EDITION 978-0-8112-2159-7 • $24.95 “Muriel’s sparky prose is the best way to start your day. Reading a blast of her prose every morning is a far more restorative way to start a day than a shot of espresso.” —THE TELEGRAPH (LONDON)

MURIEL SPARK (1918–2006) was the author of dozens of novels, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, A Far Cry from Kensington, The Girls of Slender Means, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Driver’s Seat, and many more. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.

NEW DIRECTIONS -4- A Good Comb: The Sayings of Muriel Spark

Celebrate the immortal Muriel Spark’s hundredth birthday by imbibing a delicious glass of her bubbly wit

A Good Comb, a small gift edition of Muriel Spark’s brilliant asides, sayings, and aphorisms, is a book for sheer enjoyment. No writer offers such lively, PBK NDP 1399 pointed, puckish insights: “Neurotics are awfully quick to notice other people’s mentalities.” “It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but LITERATURE FEBRUARY smiles.” “The sacrifice of pleasure is of course itself a pleasure.” “It is impos- sible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist.” “She wasn’t a person to 5 X 7" 96pp whom things happen.” “You look for one thing and you find another.” “It calms you down, a good comb.” ISBN 978-0-8112-2760-5 Her scope is great and her striking insights are precise and unforgettable. This book will entertain you—it will even help you live your life. Drink in the EBK 978-0-8112-2761-2 pleasures of this little volume along with the benefits of taking up such advice as “Never make excuses but if you must, never make more than one—it gives 48 CQ TERRITORY A the appearance of insincerity.”

US $11.95 CAN $15.95 “A wonderful writer.” —JAMES WOOD

“The most original and innovative British novelist.” ALSO BY MURIEL SPARK: —THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS THE DRIVER’S SEAT “Spark is an enduring literary influence.” —VOGUE 978-0-8112-2301-0 • $14.95

MEMENTO MORI “Surely the most engaging, tantalizing writer we have.” 978-0-8112-2304-1 • $15.95 —FRANK KERMODE, THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON “A major twentieth-century writer and an extraordinary and unique talent: her 978-0-8112-2302-7 • $15.95 gifts were unusual—a piercing eye; an acute ear; an incisive, often caustic wit; a voice so distinctive; and a style so inimitable.” —THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

-5- WINTER 2018 Octavio Paz The Poems of Octavio Paz

• Edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger • With additional translations by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Tomlinson Now in paperback, the definitive, life-spanning, bilingual edition of the poems by the Nobel Prize laureate

The Poems of Octavio Paz is the first retrospective collection of Paz’s poetry to span his entire writing career from his first published poem, at age seven- PBK NDP 1400 teen, to his magnificent last poem. This landmark bilingual edition contains many poems that have never been translated into English before, plus new POETRY FEBRUARY translations based on Paz’s final revisions. Assiduously edited by Eliot Wein- berger—who has been translating Paz for over forty years—The Poems of Oc- 6 X 9" 624pp tavio Paz also includes translations by the poet-luminaries Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Charles Tomlinson. ISBN 978-0-8112-2756-8 Readers will find Weinberger’s capsule biography of Paz, as well as notes on many poems in Paz’s own words, taken from various interviews he gave EBK 978-0-8112-2757-5 throughout his long and singular life. 24 CQ TERRITORY A “The living conscience of his age” —MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

US $26.95 CAN $35.95 “The question of who or what writes a poem, which agency creates which pieces, even if none of the players is exactly automatic, takes us a long way into Paz’s work, handsomely represented in this new collection.” CLOTH EDITION —LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 978-0-8112-2043-9 • $39.95

“Readers will marvel at Paz’s variety: haiku-like miniatures; the tempestuous ALSO BY OCTAVIO PAZ: book-length poem ‘Sunstone’; fast-moving prose poems; abstract odes; ex- SELECTED POEMS OF OCTAVIO PAZ tended descriptions of places in Mexico, India, Afghanistan, and Japan.” 978-0-8112-0899-4 • $15.95 —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY SUNSTONE 978-0-8112-1195-6 • $11.95

OCTAVIO PAZ (1914–1998) was born in Mexico City. He wrote many volumes of poetry, as well as a prolific body of nonfiction on subjects as varied as poetics, literary and art criticism, politics, culture, and Mexican history. He was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1977, the Cervantes Prize in 1981, the Neustadt Prize in 1982, and finally the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. ELIOT WEINBERGER is an essayist, editor, and translator. He lives in New York City.

NEW DIRECTIONS -6- Dunya Mikhail The Beekeeper: Saving the Stolen Women of Iraq

• Translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss and Dunya Mikhail The true story of a beekeeper who risks his life to rescue enslaved women from Daesh

Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslav- PBK NDP 1401 ing young girls and women. The Beekeeper, by the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, NONFICTION MARCH tells the harrowing stories of several women who managed to escape the clutches of Daesh. Mikhail extensively interviews these women—who’ve lost 5 X 8" 240pp their families and loved ones, who’ve been repeatedly sold, raped, psychologi- cally tortured, and forced to manufacture chemical weapons—and as their tales ISBN 978-0-8112-2612-7 unfold, an unlikely hero emerges: a beekeeper, who uses his knowledge of the local terrain, along with a wide network of transporters, helpers, and former EBK 978-0-8112-2613-4 cigarette smugglers, to bring these women, one by one, through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, back into safety. 48 CQ TERRITORY A In the face of inhuman suffering, this powerful work of nonfiction offers a counterpoint to Daesh’s genocidal extremism: hope, as ordinary people risk their lives to save those of others. US $16.95 CAN $22.95

Praise for Dunya Mikhail: ALSO BY DUNYA MIKHAIL:

“Remarkable. A child’s perspective mingles freely with the poet’s mature voice, THE IRAQI NIGHTS both baffled by the paradoxes of so much beauty and so much destruction.” 978-0-8112-2286-0 • $15.95 —RON CHARLES, THE WASHINGTON POST DIARY OF A WAVE OUTSIDE THE SEA 978-0-8112-1831-3 • $16.95 “Shakespeare would have enjoyed the poetry of Dunya Mikhail, who has spo- ken of love as a response to a war-torn world–an aesthetic, a value, and a THE WAR WORKS HARD practice.” —ELIZABETH TOOHEY, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR 978-0-8112-1621-0 • $15.95

DUNYA MIKHAIL was born in Iraq in 1965. While working as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer, she faced increasing threats from the authorities and fled to the United States in the mid 1990s. Her first poetry book in English, The War Works Hard, was named one of twenty-five Books to Remember by the New York Public Library and Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea won the 2010 Arab American Book Award for poetry. MAX WEISS is an Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism, and the translator of Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire and Nihad Sirees’s The Silence and the Roar.

-7- WINTER 2018 Harry Mathews The Solitary Twin

• Introduction by John Ashbery Harry Mathews’s last novel is his most accessible— and perhaps his best

John and Paul were also visitors to the town. They were twins, as identical as can be. They wore the same clothes, chino trousers and open-neck sweaters, PBK NDP 1402 in John’s case adorned with a faded maroon neckerchief. Both were addicted to the shellfish harvested year-round from the rocks and sands of the coast: FICTION MARCH little clams, winkles, cockles, crabs, and above all sea urchins–their dessert, as both said. They drank only McEwan’s India pale ale and smoked the same 5 X 8" 160pp thin black Brazilian cigars … ISBN 978-0-8112-2754-4 So begins the great writer Harry Mathews’s final novel, The Solitary Twin, a rollicking yet incredibly moving story of two young men who come to a EBK 978-0-8112-2755-1 picturesque beach town. Seen prismatically through the viewpoints of the towns’ residents, they offer a variety of worldviews. Yet are they really twins 48 CQ TERRITORY A or a single person? Harry Mathews, the first American member of the French avant-garde lit- US $15.95 CAN $21.95 erary society Oulipo, and long associated with the New York School of Poets, passed away this year, and The Solitary Twin is his last novel. “I believe this novel is his finest,” his friend John Ashbery has declared.

“An imagination and an ingenuity that are often just astonishing.” —HARPER’S

“Like Roubaud and Perec, Mathews engineers a funhouse labyrinth in which guise disfigures guise and the logic that reigns is that of representation.” —VILLAGE VOICE

“Comic extravaganza that plays mockingly with every device of fiction.” —WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

HARRY MATHEWS (1913–2017) was born in New York. A founding editor of the literary journal Locus Solus, he wrote novels, poetry, short fiction, essays, and translations from the French. His many books include Cigarettes (1987), The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1999), and The Human Country (2002).

NEW DIRECTIONS -8- Clarice Lispector The Chandelier

• Translated from the Portuguese by Magdalena Edwards Now, for the first time in English we have Clarice Lispector’s second novel—a radical part of what made her a Brazilian legend

Fresh from the enormous success of her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, Hurricane Clarice let loose something stormier with The Chandelier. In a body CLOTH of work renowned for its potent idiosyncratic genius, The Chandelier in many ways has pride of place. “It stands out,” her biographer Benjamin Moser noted, FICTION MARCH “in a strange and difficult body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book.” Of glacial intensity, consisting almost entirely of interior mono- 5 X 8" 144pp logues—interrupted by odd and jarring fragments of dialogue and action—the novel moves in slow waves that crest in moments of revelation. As Virginia ISBN 978-0-8112-2313-3 seeks freedom via creation, the drama of her isolated life is almost entirely internal: from childhood, she sculpts clay figurines with “the best clay one EBK 978-0-8112-2670-7 could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold. She got a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world. How, how to explain the miracle …” 48 CQ TERRITORY A While on one level simply the story of a woman’s life, The Chandelier’s real drama lies in Lispector’s attempt “to find the nucleus made of a single instant US $21.95 CAN $28.95 … the tenuous triumph and the defeat, perhaps nothing more than breathing.” The Chandelier pushes Lispector’s lifelong quest for that nucleus into deeper territories than any of her other amazing works. ALSO BY CLARICE LISPECTOR:

“One of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers.” —ORHAN PAMUK THE COMPLETE STORIES 978-0-8112-1963-1 • $28.95 “Better than Borges.” —ELIZABETH BISHOP THE HOUR OF THE STAR

978-0-8112-1949-5 • $12.95 “Utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.” —COLM TÓIBÍN THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H. 978-0-8112-1968-6 • $15.95

CLARICE LISPECTOR (1920–1977), the greatest Brazilian writer of the twenti- eth century, has been called “astounding” (Rachel Kushner), “a penetrating genius” (Donna Seaman, Booklist), and “a truly remarkable writer” (Jonathan Franzen). “Her images dazzle even when her meaning is most obscure,” noted the Times Literary Supplement, “and when she is writing of what she despises, she is lucidity itself.” MAGDALENA EDWARDS is a writer, translator, and actor. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Millions.

-9- WINTER 2018 Mathias Énard Compass

• Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell Winner of the Prix Goncourt and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, Compass is an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his bed with an unspecified illness. He spends a restless night drifting between PBK NDP 1405 dreams and memories, revisiting an ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well FICTION MARCH as—over the centuries—the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, translators, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center 5 X 8" 448pp of these reveries is Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. ISBN 978-0-8112-2747-6 With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources—from Balzac and Proust, from EBK 978-0-8112-2663-9 Thomas Mann and Sadegh Hedayat—and binds them together in a hypnotic, magical way. 24 CQ TERRITORY A “Mesmerizing. Énard is constructing an intricate, history-rich vision of a persis- US $18.95 CAN $24.95 tently misunderstood part of the world.” —THE NEW YORKER

“A swirling, hypnotic stream-of-consciousness narration. This sad yet invigorat- CLOTH EDITION: ing novel is both a love letter to a vanishing discipline and an elegy.” 978-0-8112-2662-2 • $26.95 —SAM SACKS, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“Énard has written a masterful novel.” —THE WASHINGTON POST

“A novelist like Énard feels particularly necessary right now, though to say this may actually be to undersell his work. He is not a polemicist but an artist, one whose novels will always have something to say to us.” —CHRISTOPHER BEHA, HARPER’S MAGAZINE

MATHIAS ÉNARD is the award-winning author of Zone and Street of Thieves and a translator from Persian and Arabic. He won the Prix Goncourt in 2015 for Compass. CHARLOTTE MANDELL has translated works by a number of important French authors, including Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, and Blanchot.

NEW DIRECTIONS -10- César Aira The Linden Tree

• Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews A delightful fictional memoir about the small town César Aira grew up in—not so long ago

In The Linden Tree the narrator—born the same year, in the same provincial town, and now living in the same great city (Buenos Aires) as César Aira— PBK NDP 1404 could be the author himself. Nothing, however, is guaranteed once you plunge into any of his books. FICTION APRIL In any case, beginning with an enigmatically beautiful black father who gathered linden flowers to make a sleep-inducing tea, and his irrational, physi- 5 X 7" 128pp cally deformed mother of European descent, the narrator continues to catalog his best childhood friends and the many gossiping neighbors. Aira creates a ISBN 978-0-8112-1908-2 colorful mosaic of an epoch in Argentina when the poor, under the guiding hand of Eva Perón, aspired to a newfound middleclass. EBK 978-0-8112-2746-9 Moving from anecdote to anecdote, alternating between touching, funny, and sometimes surreal, this is a charming short novella that invites the reader 48 CQ TERRITORY A to visit the source of Aira’s own extraordinary imagination.

US $13.95 CAN $18.95 “South America’s answer to Haruki Murakami.” —ANDREW IRVIN, THE MIAMI HERALD ALSO BY CÉSAR AIRA: “Hail César!” —PATTI SMITH, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW THE LITTLE BUDDHIST MONK & “Once you start reading Aira, you don’t want to stop.” THE PROOF 978-0-8112-2112-2 • $14.95 —ROBERTO BOLAÑO

THE MUSICAL BRAIN 978-0-8112-2029-3 • $29.95

EMA THE CAPTIVE 978-0-8112-1910-5 • $14.95

Nominated for a Neustadt Award and the Man Booker International Prize, CÉSAR AIRA was born in Coronel Pringles, Argentina, in 1949. He has published at least eighty books and was most recently the creator of a limited edition, “Valise,” for the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. The poet CHRIS ANDREWS teaches at the University of Western Sydney, Aus- tralia, where he is a member of the Writing and Society Research Center. He has translated books by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira for New Directions.

-11- WINTER 2018 Yoko Tawada The Emissary

• Translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani Yoko Tawada’s new novel is a breathtakingly light- hearted meditation on mortality and fully displays what Rivka Galchen has called her “brilliant, shimmering, magnificent strangeness”

Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people PBK NDP 1403 with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could FICTION APRIL be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient—frail

and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be en- 5 X 8" 128pp feebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self- pity and pessimism. Yoshiro concentrates on nourishing Mumei, a strangely ISBN 978-0-8112-2762-9 wonderful boy who offers “the beauty of the time that is yet to come.” A delightful, irrepressibly funny book, The Emissary is filled with light. Yoko EBK 978-0-8112-2763-6 Tawada, deftly turning inside-out “the curse,” defies gravity and creates a play- ful joyous novel out of a dystopian one, with a legerdemain uniquely her own. 48 CQ TERRITORY A Praise for Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear: US $14.95 CAN $19.95 “Persistent mystery is what is so enchanting about Tawada’s writing. Her pen- etrating irony and deadpan surrealism fray our notions of home and combine ALSO BY YOKO TAWADA: to deliver another offbeat tale. An absorbing work from a fascinating mind.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW) MEMOIRS OF A POLAR BEAR 978-0-8112-2578-6 • $16.95 “Wonderful—what is truly affecting is Tawada’s language, which jumps off THE BRIDEGROOM WAS A DOG the page and practically sings.” —NPR, NAMING MEMOIRS OF A POLAR 978-0-8112-2037-8 • $10.95 BEAR ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST FIVE BOOKS IN TRANSLATION

YOKO TAWADA—“strange, exquisite” (The New Yorker )—was born in Tokyo in 1960 and moved to Germany when she was twenty-two. She writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the Tanizaki Prize. MARGARET MITSUTANI has also translated Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburo Oe.

NEW DIRECTIONS -12- Jorge Barón Biza The Desert and Its Seed

• Translated from the Spanish by Camilo Ramirez Only now discovered in English, a modern Argentinian classic based on the tragic lives of the notorious writer (and wealthy politician) Raúl Barón Biza and his tragic wife

The Desert and Its Seed opens with a taxi ride to the hospital: a recently- separated wife’s face is disintegrating from acid thrown by her ex-husband PBK NDP 1406 while they signed divorce papers. Mario, their son, tries to wipe the acid from his mother’s cheeks but his own fingers burn. FICTION APRIL What follows is a fruitless attempt to reconstruct her face—first in Buenos Aires, thereafter in Milan. Mario, the narrator, becomes the shadow and wit- 5 X 8" 240pp ness 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 ISBN 978-0-8112-2580-9 are bound to an Argentina he sees disintegrating around him. Based on his own true, tragic family story, Jorge Barón Biza’s The Desert EBK 978-0-8112-2581-6 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 48 CQ TERRITORY A 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 US $15.95 CAN $21.95 Spanish-speaking world and translated into many languages and now, for the first time, into English.

“A cult masterpiece. The author has been compared to Joyce and Proust.” —ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS

“Grips and perturbs the reader simultaneously.” —LES MONDE DES LIVRES

“A great novel.” —ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA

“A sublime explosion that results from an unpredictable art.” —EL PAIS

“An Argentinian masterpiece.” —LA STAMPA

JORGE BARÓN BIZA (1942–2001) was a journalist and professor, who also worked for various Argentinian publishing houses. His family’s tragic lives are docu- mented in several books, including The Desert and Its Seed. CAMILO RAMIREZ is a Colombian literary translator, editor, and media strategist based in New York City.

-13- WINTER 2018 Luljeta Lleshanaku Negative Space

• Translated from the Albanian by Ani Gjika Lleshanaku’s poems are “full of objects and souls, transformed and given wings in Chagall-like metaphor” (Sasha Dugdale, Poetry Nation Review)

“Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new PBK NDP 1407 collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictator- POETRY APRIL ship of the poet’s native Albania. For Lleshanaku, the “unsaid, gestures” make up the negative space that “gives form to the woods / and to the mad woman— 5 X 8" 112pp the silhouette of goddess Athena / wearing a pair of flip-flops / and an owl atop her shoulder.” It is the negative space “that sketched my onomatopoeic profile ISBN 978-0-8112-2752-0 / of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.” Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places—gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town EBK 978-0-8112-2753-7 train stations—with subtle humor and profound insight, much as a child might discover a world in a grain of sand. 48 CQ TERRITORY A “Twilit melancholy suffuses her Albania, where ‘Soft rain falls like apostrophes in a conversation between two worlds,’ family trees are ‘struck down by a US $16.95 CAN $22.95 bolt of lightning,’ and most days echo with ‘a gray metallic loneliness.’ These details coalesce to paint the Albania of her internal exile and, in the end, we ALSO BY LULJETA LLESHANAKU: feel blessed that Ms. Lleshanaku has invited us to ‘the takeoffs and landings / on the runway of her soul.’” —DANA JENNINGS, THE NEW YORK TIMES FRESCO 978-0-8112-1511-4 • $12.95 “Hers are certainly poems about history, politics, and power. But Lleshanaku CHILD OF NATURE is also original. When she turns her attention to love, the sense of human 978-0-8112-1847-4 • $13.95 fate is unsparing. The tyrant’s insistence that there is no private realm has the unintended effect of making it necessary to write powerful and durable poems.” —SEAN O’BRIEN, THE GUARDIAN

The author of seven poetry collections, LULJETA LLESHANAKU was born in Elbasan, Albania, in 1968, and grew up under house arrest during Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist regime. She has worked as a teacher, literary magazine editor, journalist, screenwriter, and currently is the research director at the Institute of Studies of Com- munist Genocide in Albania. ANI GJIKA is an Albanian-born writer, a literary translator, and the author of Bread on Running Waters (2013), a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize.

NEW DIRECTIONS -14- Recent Highlights

BEAUTY IS A WOUND ENVELOPE POEMS FRENCH LOVE POEMS Eka Kurniawan Emily Dickinson 978-0-8112-2559-5 978-0-8112-2363-8 978-0-8112-2582-3

COUNTERNARRATIVES THE COMPLETE STORIES GO, WENT, GONE John Keene Clarice Lispector Jenny Erpenbeck 978-0-8112-2552-6 978-0-8112-1963-1 978-0-8112-2594-6

MEMOIRS OF A POLAR BEAR LOVE POEMS OREO Yoko Tawada Pablo Neruda Fran Ross 978-0-8112-2578-6 978-0-8112-1729-3 978-0-8112-2322-5

-15- SPRING / SUMMER 2017 Foreign Rights Information

César Aira, THE LINDEN TREE • British and Translation rights: Harry Mathews, THE SOLITARY TWIN • British and Translation rights: Literarische Michael Gaeb, Chodowieckistrasse 26, 10405 Berlin, Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC, 41 W. 72nd Street, #3F, New York, NY Germany • Territory: A 10023 • Territory: A

Jorge Barón Biza, THE DESERT AND ITS SEED • British rights: New Dunya Mikhail, THE BEEKEEPER • British and Translation rights: New Directions • Translation rights: SalmaiaLit, PO Box 65, 46340 Spain • Directions • Territory: A Territory: A Octavio Paz, THE POEMS OF OCTAVIO PAZ • British rights: Carcanet Mathias Énard, COMPASS • British rights: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 243 Press, Alliance House, 4th Floor, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ, Knightsbridge, London SW7 1DN, England • Territory: A England • Territory: A

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Luljeta Lleshanaku, NEGATIVE SPACE • British rights: Bloodaxe Editions, Eastburn, South Park, Hexham, Northumberland NE46 1BS, UK • Translation rights: Author, c/o New Directions • Territory: A

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