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Ingeborg Bachmann Malina • Translated from the German by Philip Boehm • Introduction by Rachel Kushner Now a New Directions book, the legendary novel “equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett” (The New York Times Book Review) Malina invites the reader on a linguistic journey into a world stretched to the very limits of language with Wittgensteinian zeal and Joycean inventiveness, PBK NDP 1445 where Ingeborg Bachmann ventriloquizes—and in the process demolishes— Proust, Musil, and Balzac, while filtering everything through her own utterly FICTION MAY singular idiom. Since its original publication in 1971, Malina remains, quite simply, unlike anything else; it’s a masterpiece. 5 X 8" 256pp Malina uses the intertwined lives of three characters to explore the roots of society’s breakdown that led to fascism, and in Bachmann’s own words, ISBN 978-0-8112-2872-2 “it doesn’t start with the first bombs that are dropped; it doesn’t start with the terror that can be written about in every newspaper. It starts with relationships EBK 978-0-8112-2873-2 between people. Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman, and I attempted to say that here in this society there is always 36 CQ TERRITORY A war. There isn’t war and peace, there’s only war.” US $16.95 “It seems in Malina there is nothing Bachmann cannot do with words.” —LOS ANGELES TIMES “A masterpiece!” —NAJA MARIE AIDT, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY “The most intelligent and important woman writer our land has produced this century.” —THOMAS BERNHARD “A Viennese woman cooks dinner for her lover, waits by the telephone, delays embarking on a trip or writing the book she’s meant to write. And in that null- time, the abyss of twentieth-century trauma yawns wide open and engulfs her.” —TOM McCARTHY INGEBORG BACHMANN (1926–1973) is widely regarded as one of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century. Her poems, plays, stories, and only finished novel,Malina , have been championed by Paul Celan, Hannah Arendt, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Christa Wolf, and Elfriede Jelinek. PHILIP BOEHM is an American playwright, a theater director, and the translator of numerous books, including Christine Wunnicke’s The Fox and Dr. Shimamura. RACHEL KUSHNER is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, Telex from Cuba, and The Mars Room. -1- SPRING/SUMMER 2019 “I’ve said a thousand times that I always wanted to write just one book. Now, with Baron, I can close this story. With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book— Satantango, Melancholy, War and War, and Baron. This is my one book.” —László Krasznahorkai SATANTANGO (the Paris Review Interview) 978-0-8112-2089-7 THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE 978-0-8112-1504-6 “Krasznahorkai constantly pushes beyond the expected, escalating everything to the brink of deliriousness.” —IDRA NOVEY, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “László Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful.” —MARINA WARNER, ANNOUNCING THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE “Hungarian maestro László Krasznahorkai is laconic and shrewd, as practical as he is existential, capable of wresting huge laughs as well as immense profundity from the commonplace and the way in which we choose to respond to it.” —EILEEN BATTERSBY, THE IRISH TIMES WAR AND WAR 978-0-8112-1609-8 NEW DIRECTIONS -2- László Krasznahorkai Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming • Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet At last, the capstone to Krasznahorkai’s four-part masterwork Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Bela Wenckheim, who decides to re- CLOTH turn at the end of his life to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in FICTION MAY exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly 5 X 8" 720pp evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. All along, the Professor—a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a ISBN 978-0-8112-2664-6 bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town—offers long rants and disquisitions on his own attempts to immunize himself from thought. Spectacu- EBK 978-0-8112-2665-3 lar actions are staged, death and the abyss loom, until finally doom is brought down on the unsuspecting residents of the town. 24 CQ TERRITORY C “The universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls US $29.95 and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.” —W. G. SEBALD “One of the most mysterious artists now at work.” —COLM TÓIBÍN “His work tends to get passed around like rare currency. One of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have had as a reader.” —JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORKER “A vision of painstaking beauty.” —NPR “The Hungarian master of the apocalypse.” —SUSAN SONTAG Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI was born in Gyula, Hungary. In the New York Review of Books, Adam Thirlwell pro- claimed that “Krasznahorkai has come up with his own original forms—there is nothing else like them in contemporary literature.” OTTILIE MULZET received the Best Translated Book Award in 2014 for her translation of Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below. -3- SPRING/SUMMER 2019 Clarice Lispector The Chandelier • Translated by Magdalena Edwards and Benjamin Moser Now in paperback, Clarice Lispector’s explosive and surprising second novel The Chandelier, written when Lispector was only twenty-three, reveals a very different author from the college student whose debut novel, Near to the Wild PBK NDP 1446 Heart, announced the landfall of “Hurricane Clarice.” Virgínia and her cruel, beautiful brother, Daniel, grow up in a decaying FICTION MAY country mansion. They leave for the city, but the change of locale leaves Vir- gínia’s internal life unperturbed. In intensely poetic language, Lispector con- 5 X 8" 320pp ducts a stratigraphic excavation of Virgínia’s thoughts, revealing the drama of Clarice’s lifelong quest to discover “the nucleus made of a single instant”—and ISBN 978-0-8112-2871-8 displaying a new face of this great writer, blazing with the vitality of youth. EBK 978-0-8112-2670-7 “Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispec- tor has been one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century. The 36 CQ TERRITORY A Chandelier conveys a special charge, an undeniable quantity of genius. A vulnerable and moving performance—with a heart-stopping payoff.” US $16.95 —PARUL SEHGAL, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “The Brazilian literary titan Lispector expands on themes familiar to fans of ALSO BY CLARICE LISPECTOR: her dense, rich, inimitable style in this, her second novel, now translated into English for the first time. Lispector’s signature brilliance lies in the minutely ob- COMPLETE STORIES served gradations of her characters’ feelings and of their elusive, half-formed 978-0-8112-2793-3 • $21.95 thoughts.” —KIRKUS (STARRED REVIEW) THE HOUR OF THE STAR 978-0-8112-1949-5 • $12.95 “A breathless, dizzying, and multisensory dive into the mind.” —THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H. 978-0-8112-1968-6 • $15.95 “Every page vibrates with feeling. It’s not enough to say that Lispector bends language or uses words in new ways. Plenty of modernists do that. No one else writes prose this rich.” —LILY MEYER, NPR 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 “better than Borges” (Elizabeth Bishop). MAGDA- LENA EDWARDS is a writer, translator, and actor. BENJAMIN MOSER, the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, is the editor of ND’s translation series of Lispector’s work. NEW DIRECTIONS -4- Mourning Songs: Poems of Sorrow and Beauty • Edited by Grace Schulman A beautiful, compact gift edition of some of the world’s greatest poems about loss and death, to ease the heart of the bereaved Who has not suffered grief? In Mourning Songs, the brilliant poet and editor Grace Schulman has gathered together the most moving poems about sorrow PBK W/FLAPS NDP 1447 by the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, Neruda, Catullus, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, POETRY MAY W. S. Merwin, Lorca, Denise Levertov, Keats, Hart Crane, Michael Palmer, Robert Frost, Hopkins, Hardy, Bei Dao, and Czeslaw Milosz—to name only 4 X 6” 96pp some of the masters in this slim volume. “The poems in this collection,” as Schulman notes in her introduction, ISBN 978-0-8112-2866-4 “sing of grief as they praise life.” She notes: “As any bereaved survivor knows, there is no consolation. ‘Time doesn’t heal grief; it emphasizes it,’ wrote Mari- EBK 978-0-8112-2867-1 anne Moore. The loss of a loved one never leaves us. We don’t want it to. In grief, one remembers the beloved. But running beside it, parallel to it, is the 48 CQ TERRITORY A joy of existence, the love that causes pain of loss, the loss that enlarges us with the wonder of existence.” US $10.95 Winner of the Poetry Society of America’s highest award, the Frost Medal, GRACE SCHULMAN is the author of seven poetry volumes, a book of essays, and a new memoir, Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage, about life with her beloved husband Jerome, who recently passed away.