N D SpriNg | Summer 2013 APRIL MAY JUNE June & July 2013 titles continue on inside back cover JUNE (CONTINUED) CONTENTS Aira, César The Hare..........................................15 Auster, Paul The Red Notebook..............................21 Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei Hello, the Roses...................................4 Bodor, Ádám The Sinistra Zone................................12 Bolaño, Roberto The Insufferable Gaucho.........................6 The Unknown University..........................7 Borges, Jorge Luis Professor Borges..................................9 Doestoevsky, Fyodor Two Crocodiles...................................20 H. D. Vale Ave............................................16 Gander, Forrest Eiko & Koma......................................17 Hernández, Felisberto Two Crocodiles...................................20 Isherwood, Christopher Mr Norris Changes Trains .......................2 Jaber, Rabee JULY The Mehlis Report................................14 Krasznahorkai, László Seiobo There Below............................13 Lustig, Alvin Postcards..........................................11 Pizarnik, Alejandra A Musical Hell....................................17 Roth, Joseph The Emperor’s Tomb.............................5 Sarrazin, Albertine Astragal............................................1 Tarn, Nathaniel Beautiful Contradictions.......................16 Thomas, Dylan Under Milk Wood...............................18 Walser, Robert A Little Ramble....................................3 West, Nathanael Miss Lonelyhearts...............................19 Albertine Sarrazin Astragal • Translated from the French by Patsy Southgate • Introduction by Patti Smith As alive as a Godard movie, this lost classic of ’60s French literature is back As if the reader were riding shotgun, this intensely vivid novel captures a life on PBK FRENCH FLAPS (NDP 1250) the lam. “L’astragale” is the French word for the ankle bone Albertine Sarrazin’s heroine Anne breaks as she leaps from her jail cell to freedom. As she drags FIT C ION ApriL herself down the road, away from the prison walls, she is rescued by Julien, himself a small-time criminal, who keeps her hidden. They fall in love. Fear of 5" X 8" 192 PP capture, memories of her prison cell, claustrophobia in her hideaways: every detail is fiercely felt. ISBN 978-0-8112-2073-6 Astragal burst onto the French literary scene in 1965; its fiery and vivacious style was entirely new, and Sarrazin became a celebrity overnight. But as fate EBOOK 978-0-8112-2074-3 would have it, Sarrazin herself kept running into trouble with the law, even as she became a star. She died from a botched surgery at the height of her fame. 48 CQ TERRITORY A Sarrazin’s life and work (her novels are semi-autobiographical) have been US $15.95 CAN $17.00 the subject of intense fascination in France; a new adaptation of Astragal is currently being filmed. Patti Smith, who brought Astragal to the attention of New Directions, contributes an enthusiastic introduction to one of her favorite writers. “Sarrazin has a magnificent tone and an arresting style.” —O SIM NE DE BEAUVOir “A precocious orphan who moved seamlessly between literature and crime.” — PATTI SMITH ALBERTINE SARRAZIN (1937–1967) was a French-Algerian writer. At an early age she abandoned her studies and turned to a life of crime and prostitution. She wrote her first two novels in prison and died at twenty-nine. PATSY SOUTHGATE (1928–1998) was an integral figure of both the 1950s Parisian literary scene and the New York School. PATTI SMITH received the National Book Award for Just Kids. -1- SPRING | SUMMER 2013 Christopher Isherwood Mr Norris Changes Trains Two Englishmen meeting on a train to Berlin in 1930 kick off one of Isherwood’s most enduring novels On a train to Berlin in late 1930, William Bradshaw locks eyes with Arthur PBK (NDP 1251) Norris, an irresistibly comical fellow Englishman wearing a rather obvious wig and nervous about producing his passport at the frontier. So begins a FICTION ApriL friendship conducted in the seedier quarters of the city, where Norris runs a dubious import-export business and lives in excited fear of his bullying secretary, 5" X 8" 224 PP his creditors, and his dominatrix girlfriend, Anni. As the worldwide economic Depression strangles the masses and the Communists make a desperate stand ISBN 978-0-8112-2026-2 against Fascism and war, Norris sells himself as political orator, spy, and double agent. He also sells his friends. Like its companion novel, Goodbye to Berlin, Mr EBOOK 978-0-8112-2027-9 Norris Changes Trains offers unforgettable characters struggling in the vortex as the Nazis rise to power. 48 CQ TERRITORY B “The best prose writer in English.” US $14.95 — GORE VIDAL “In Isherwood’s work, a magic potion of history and invention, the ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER isheRWOOD: voice is clear, and, no matter how many times we hear it, it always seems to be speaking for the first time.” Goodbye to BERlin —AR HOW D MOss, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 978-0-8112-2024-8 • $14.95 CHRIO ST PHER ISHERWOOD (1904–1986), perhaps the first openly gay writer to be read by a wide audience, was one of the most distinguished authors of the twentieth century. His friends included W. H. Auden, Truman Capote, E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Stephen Spender, and Tennessee Williams. N EW DIRECTIONS -2- A Little Ramble In the Spirit of Robert Walser • A New Directions/Christine Burgin co-publication • Translated from the German by Christopher Middleton, Susan Bernofsky, and Tom Whalen • Preface by Donald Young; afterword by Lynne Cooke • Original artworks by Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Thomas Schütte, Moyra Davey, Tacita Dean, Mark Wallinger, Rodney Graham, Rosemarie Trockel, and Josiah McElheny Over 50 original full-color artworks address newly translated writings of Robert Walser * This special edition is limited to 1,000 copies * Yes, this is the cover. A Little Ramble: In the Spirit of Robert Walser is a project initiated by the CLOTH w/ COLOR ILLUSTRATIOns gallerist Donald Young, who saw in Walser an exemplary figure through whom connections between art and literature could be discussed anew. He invited FIT C ION ApriL a group of artists to respond to Walser’s writing. A Little Ramble is a result of that collaboration. 6½" X 9" 176 PP The artists have chosen stories by Robert Walser as well as excerpts from ISBN 978-0-8112-2099-6 Walks with Robert Walser, conversations with the writer recorded by his guardian Carl Seelig. Much of this material appears in English for the first time. 48 CQ TERRITORY C Accompanying these pieces are over fifty color artworks created specifically for this project, a preface by Donald Young, and an afterword by Lynne Cooke. US $35.00 CAN $37.00 I walked through the mountains today. The weather was damp, and the entire region was gray.… I encountered a few carts, otherwise nothing, and I had seen some children on the highway. We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much. ALSO BY — ROBERT WALSER, “A LITTLE RAMBle” ROBERT WALSER: THE micROSCRIPTS (CpapeRBA K) 978-0-8112-2033-0 • $19.95 “A clairvoyant of the small.” – W. G. SEBALD THIRTY poems 978-0-8112-1719-4 • $20.95 “He is most at home in the mode of short fiction [which shows] him at his dazzling best.” – J. M. COETZEE, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS ROBERT WaLSER (1878–1956) was described by Walter Benjamin as “one of the profoundest products of modern literature.” He wrote seven novels and more than a thousand stories before being forcibly hospitalized in 1933. He spent the final twenty- three years of his life in an institution. -3- SPRING | SUMMER 2013 Mei-mei Berssenbrugge Hello, the Roses American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge makes her New Directions debut with this breathtaking new collection A poet of “epic perception” and “subtle music,” Mei-mei Berssenbrugge opens PBK OriginaL (NDP 1252) form into long, shimmering lines of profound emotional intensity and multivalent voices, splintered with space, silence, and desert light. Her new collection of POETry ApriL poems, Hello, the Roses, is composed of three parts. The opening poems delve into an array of unities, of myth and landscape, fashion and culture, experience 6" X 9" 112 PP and forgetting, boys and ravens. The central poems explore an invisible world where plants, animals, and the self communicate and coexist. The final part ISBN 978-0-8112-2091-0 contemplates the individual’s relationship to night, weather, and cosmological time as Berssenbrugge limns a karmic temporal continuum, a mandala of 48 CQ TERRITORY W perception. Throughout are the roses, transforming slowly, almost imperceptibly, deepening awareness, creating fields: a rosette of civilization — a wild rose, a US $16.95 CAN $18.00 Delphic rose, imagined roses, white cabbage roses, an Apache rose, a Bourbon rose, our sacred mortality “saturated with being” in pink petals and gray-green leaves. Hello, the Roses is poetry enraptured with the phenomenal fullness of the world. “Berssenbrugge’s line lets out a translucent strand to the horizon, sometimes stretched taut and sometimes meandering as one of the hundreds of nameless arroyos. The long line sustains the visual tone — disinterested, capacious, extending. This doesn’t begin to contend with the oracular quality of her sentencing which is ahistorical, unaccentuated, suspended as if by light alone.” — C. D. WrigHT “Berssenbrugge is a poet who favors the horizontality of long lines, the breathing room of white space, and prose-like cadences….