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English
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Judicially condemned in 1857 as offensive to public morality, The Flowers of Evil is now regarded as the most influential volume of poetry published in the nineteenth century. Torn between intense sensuality and profound spiritual yearning, racked by debt and disease, Baudelaire transformed his own experience of Parisian life into a work of universal significance. With his unflinching examination of the dark aspects and unconventional manifestations...
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 357
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"Dazai's brand of egoistic pessimism dovetails organically with the emo chic of this cultural moment and with the inner lives of teenagers of all eras." --Andrew Martin, The New York Times
"A journey to hell with Osamu Dazai, Japan's ultimate bad boy novelist" --Damian Flanagan, The Japan Times
A completely new translation of Osamu Dazai's great masterpiece by award-winning translator Juliet Winters Carpenter. No Longer Human is the story of Yozo...
3) Siddhartha
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life-- the beginning of suffering, rejection, peace, and, finally, wisdom.
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1287
Language
English
Description
Mrs. Hawkins, a buxom young war widow, spends her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher ("of very good books") and her nights dispensing advice at her small South Kensington rooming-house. At work and at home Mrs. Hawkins soon uncovers evil-- shady literary doings and a deadly enemy, anonymous letters, blackmail, and suicide. Mrs. Hawkins confidently sets about putting things to order, little imagining the mayhem which would ensue. Now decades...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Tennessee Williams's landmark play exposes the emotional lies governing relationships in the family of a wealthy Southern planter of humble origins. The patriarch, Big Daddy, is about to celebrate his 65th birthday. His two married sons, Gooper (Brother Man) and Brick, have returned for the occasion, the former with his pregnant wife and five children, the latter with his wife Margaret (Maggie). Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a brutally honest examination...
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1340
Language
English
Formats
Description
Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J.S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo's...
7) The factory
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1460
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Formats
Description
In an unnamed Japanese city, three seemingly normal and unrelated characters find work at a sprawling industrial factory. They each focus intently on their specific jobs: one studies moss, one shreds paper, and the other proofreads incomprehensible documents. Life in the factory has its own logic and momentum, and, eventually, the factory slowly expands and begins to take over everything, enveloping these poor workers. The very margins of reality...
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1313
Publisher
New Directions
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The English-language debut of Indonesia's greatest young novelist, Eka Kurniawan: "without a doubt the most original, imaginatively profound, and elegant writer of fiction in Indonesia today: its brightest and most unexpected meteorite" (Benedict Anderson). One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. So begins Beauty Is a Wound, an epic, sweeping, compulsively readable novel, combining history,...
10) Mild vertigo
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1562
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"The apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends, and gossips with neighbors. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae...
12) The divorce
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1501
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The Divorce tells about a recently divorced man on vacation in Buenos Aires. One afternoon he encounters a series of the most magical coincidences. While sitting at an outdoor café, absorbed in conversation with a talented video artist, he sees a young man riding by on a bicycle get thoroughly drenched by a downpour of water-seemingly from rain caught the night before in the overhead awning. The video artist knows the cyclist, who knew a mad hermetic...
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1523
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language." As she searches...
14) The wall
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1537
Language
English
Formats
Description
"While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness. Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman...
15) The emigrants
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1358
Publisher
New Directions
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
The road to exile of four men. One is a teacher, fired by the Nazis from his job for having a Jewish ancestor, then inducted into the German army. Of the others, all Jews, one is a surgeon who commits suicide as he is unable to assimilate into British society, a second is an artist, a third becomes a butler in New York.
16) Oreo
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1309
Language
English
Formats
Description
Oreo, a biracial black girl from Philadelphia, searches for her Jewish father in New York City, navigating the labyrinth of sound studios, brothels, and subway tunnels of Manhattan in a journey of self-discovery.
17) Artforum
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1472
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Artforum is certainly one of César Aira's most charming, quirky, and funny books to date. Consisting of a series of interrelated stories about his compulsion to collect Artforum magazine, this is not about art so much as it is about passionate obsession. At first we follow our hapless collector from magazine shops to used bookstores hunting for copies of Artforum. A friend alerts him to a copy somewhere and he obsesses about actually going to get...
18) Paris spleen
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 294
Language
English
Formats
Description
Baudelaire composed the series of prose poems known as Paris Spleen between 1855 and his death in 1867. He attached great importance to his work in this then unusual form, asking, "Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?"...
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 843
Publisher
New Directions
Language
English
Formats
Description
As Denise Levertov comments in her brief foreword to The Life Around Us, she has "shared with most poets in every time and place an ardent love of what my eyes and other senses revealed to me in the world we call 'nature'." Yet in this selection of sixty-two poems chosen by the author "celebration and fear of loss are necessarily conjoined." The Life Around Us shows us both the eternal renewal of the natural world and its imperilment.
20) Memoirs
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1048
Language
English
Formats
Description
When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media-though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams's candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself. As it turns out, Williams's look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a "starving artist," the "overnight"...
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