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Three mini-plays by the German wunderkind and asylum-dweller.

The first full-length collection in English by one of Latin America's most significant twentieth-century poets.

Considered the greatest long poem in 20th century Brazilian poetry, Ferreira's Gullar's Dirty Poem was written as a response to the Brazilian dictatorship that put him in exile and murdered thousands.

A high-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home to El Salvador.

A novel about a mysterious love triangle and the almost mythological power-and potentially lethal danger-of eros.

A selection of poems by the ancient Chinese poet and statesman Wang Ah-Shih, translated by David Hinton.

A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of microfiction, César Aira-the author of at least eighty novels, most of them barely one hundred pages long-The Musical Brain & Other Stories comprises twenty tales about oddballs, freaks, and loonies. Aira, with his fuga hacia adelante or "flight forward" into the unknown, gives us imponderables to ponder and bizarre and seemingly out-of-context plot lines, as well as thoughtful and passionate takes on everyday reality. The title story, first published in the New Yorker, is the creme de la creme of this exhilarating collection.

Often called "the Kafka of Romania," Max Blecher died young but not before creating this incandescent novel.

Set in the turbulent years before the 1952 revolution that would overthrow King Farouk and bring Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, Stealth - by Sonallah Ibrahim, one of Egypt's most respected and uncompromising novelists - is a gripping story seen through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy. A young Egyptian's coming of age proves halting and uncertain as he fails to outgrow dependence on his aging father and tries to come to terms with the absence of his mother. Through the boy's memories, fantasies, and blunt observations, we experience his attempts at furtively spying on the world of Egyptian adults. His adventures portray a Cairo full of movie stars, royalty, revolutionaries, and ordinary people trying to survive in the decaying city.

In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone reminds each: Remember you must die. Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled, and many an old unsavory secret is dusted off.

First found contentedly chatting in their London clubs, the cozy bachelors (as any Spark reader might guess) are not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously tormented - defrauded or stolen from, blackmailed or pressed to attend horrid séances - and then plunged into the nastiest of lawsuits.

The Iraqi Nights is the third collection by the acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. Taking The One Thousand and One Nights as her central theme, Mikhail personifies the role of Scheherazade the storyteller, saving herself through her tales. The nights are endless, seemingly as dark as war in this haunting collection, seemingly as endless as war. Yet the poet cannot stop dreaming of a future beyond the violence of a place where "every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun." Unlike Scheherazade, however, Mikhail is writing, not to escape death, but to summon the strength to endure. Inhabiting the emotive spaces between Iraq and the U.S., Mikhail infuses those harsh realms with a deep poetic intimacy. The author's vivid illustrations - inspired by Sumerian tablets - are threaded throughout this powerful book.

Daily conversations in outdoor cafés with cultured friends can help make reality a little more real. Unfortunately, however, during one such conversation, one man spots a gold Rolex watch on a TV soap opera's goatherd. This seemingly small absurdity sets off alarms: strange sensations of deception, distress, and incipient madness. The two men's uneasiness soon becomes a nightmare as the TV adventure advances with a real-life plot - involving a mutant strain of killer algae - to take over the world! The Conversations, a reality within a fiction within a parallel reality, is hilariously funny and surprisingly touching.

Now available for the first time as a paperbook, Quetzalcoatl is D.H. Lawrence's last "unpublished manuscript" and the early version of his great Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent. Kate Burns is the widow of a failed Irish patriot, strong-minded and independent, who unlike the heroine of The Plumed Serpent, refuses to simply join the Mexican revolutionary movement based on a revival of the Aztec gods. Quetzalcoatl is arguably one of Lawrence's most feminist works: the rise of a revolution filtered through the consciousness of a woman of tremendous individuality. Quetzalcoatl, a more cohesive novel than The Plumed Serpent, is classic D. H. Lawrence-- for its vivid evocation of the Mexican culture and mythology, and its intensity of feeling and psychological insight. This edition includes an illuminating introduction and textual commentary by Sterling Professor of English at Yale, Louis Martz. "The Plumed Serpent," Martz says, "may be judged a success within its own mode of existence. For a different sort of novel, we may turn now to Quetzalcoatl."

Paterson is both a place-the New Jersey city in whom the person (the poet's own life) and the public (the history of the region) are combined. Originally four books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams' words) "follows the course of teh Passaic River" from above the great falls to its entrance into the sea. The unexpected Book Five, published in 1958, affirms the triumphant life of the imagination, in spite of age and death. This revised edition has been meticulously re-edited by Christopher MacGowan, who has supplied a wealth of notes and explanatory material.

Rimbaud-a mythic name-his life as extraordinary as his work was influential in redirecting the course, first of French, and then of world poetry. He is, indeed, the very symbol of what we now call "modern" literature; nearly a hundred years before the arrival of the "mind-expanding" drugs, Rimbaud understood that the borders of the writer's consciousness must be extended and made the deliberate attempt to use hallucination as a creative method.Dr. Starkie, a lecturer in French literature at Oxford, has devoted many years of research to Rimbaud, revising her biography three times as new manuscript material and information about him has come to light.

The second set of New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series, which includes Vale Ave by H. D.; Eiko & Koma by Forrest Gander; A Musical Hell by Alejandra Pizarnik; The Beautiful Contradictions by Nathaniel Tarn.

The words of a genius: Borges at Eighty transcends our expectations of ordinary conversation. In these interviews with Barnstone, Dick Cavett, and Alastair Reid, Borges touches on favorite writers (Whitman, Poe, Emerson) and familiar themes - labyrinths, mystic experiences, and death - and always with great, throw-away humor. For example, discussing nightmares, he concludes,"When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself."

Vale Ave - Latin for "Farewell, Hail" - is a hymn to Eros that unfolds as a gorgeous palimpsest of eternal recurrence and reincarnation, charting the course of two lovers who each seek the other across cultures, myths, and centuries. Vale Ave is alchemical - "mystery and portent, yes, but at the same time," as H. D. writes, "there is Resurrection and the hope of Paradise."

The New Directions Pearls series features a growing list of great authors' short masterpieces. From César Aira's offbeat and entrancing Literary Conference to F. Scott Fitzgerald's On Booze - a collection of the famous writer's best musings on alcohol - the series offers these accomplished writers' greatest short works in pocket-sized editions designed by Rodrigo Corral.Now that we've published fifteen Pearls - with two more appearing this season - we're offering booksellers the opportunity to display the books together in a custom display case. At 151" wide x 81" high (with books)x 51" deep, the display takes up very little counter space and fits into most bookshelves, and comes fully loaded with 25 Pearls.ON BOOZE F. Scott Fitzgerald 5 Copies . 978-0-8112-1926-6ANTWERP Roberto Bolano 3 Copies . 978-0-8112-1991-4THE WALK Robert Walser 2 Copies . 978-0-8112-1992-1THE LITERARY CONFERENCE César Aira 2 Copies . 978-0-8112-1878-8BAD NATURE:OR WITH ELVIS IN MEXICO Javier Marías 2 Copies . 978-0-8112-1858-0EVERYTHING AND NOTHING Jorge Luis Borges 2 Copies . 978-0-8112-1883-2TALES OF DESIRE Tennessee Williams 1 Copies . 978-0-8112-1856-6URN BURIAL Sir Thomas Browne 1 Copy . 978-0-8112-1892-4IN SEARCH OF DUENDE Federico García Lorca 1 Copy . 978-0-8112-1855-9THE HALL OF THE SINGING CARYATIDS Victor Pelevin 1 Copy . 978-0-8112-1942-6PLACES OF MY INFANCY Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 1 Copy . 978-0-8112-2038-5THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS Nikolai Gogol 1 Copy . 978-0-8112-1947-1PATRIOTISM Yukio Mishima 1 Copy . 978-0-8112-1854-2THE LEVIATHAN Joseph Roth 1 Copy . 978-0-8112-1925-9THE BRIDEGROOM WAS A DOG Yoko Tawada 1 Copy . 978-0-8112-2037-8

In a small, exquisite clothbound format resembling the early Swiss and German editions of Walser's work, Thirty Poems collects famed translator Christopher Middleton's favorite poems from the more than five hundred Walser wrote. The illustrations range from an early poem in perfect copperplate handwriting, to one from a 1927 Czech-German newspaper, to a microscript.

Merton's biographer, George Woodcock, once wrote that "almost from the beginning of his monastic career, Thomas Merton tentatively began to discover the great Asian religions of Buddhism and Taoism." Merton, a longtime social justice advocate, first approached Eastern theology as an admirer of Gandhi's beliefs on non-violence. Through Gandhi, Merton came to know the great Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita and in time came to have dialogues with the Dalai Lama and Taoist leader D. T. Suzuki. Merton then became deeply interested in Chuang Tzu and Zen thought. On Eastern Meditation, edited by Bonnie Thurston (author of Merton and Buddhism), gathers the best of his Eastern theological writings into a gorgeously designed gift book edition.

After auditioning for the part as a singing geisha at a dubious bar, Lena and eleven other "lucky" girls are sent to work at a posh underground nightclub reserved exclusively for Russia's upper-crust elite. They are to be a sideshow attraction to the rest of the club's entertainment, and are billed as the "famous singing caryatids." Things only get weirder from there. Secret ointments, praying mantises, sexual escapades, and grotesque murder are quickly ushered into the plot. The Russian literary master Victor Pelevin holds nothing back, and The Hall of the Singing Caryatids, his most recent story to be translated into English, is sure to make you squirm in your seat with utter delight.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) produced a startling number of translations of both Spanish and Latin American poetry starting during WWI and continuing through the late fifties. Williams grew up in a Spanish-speaking home and sometimes described himself as half-Spanish. His mother was Puerto Rican and his father spoke Spanish fluently. "Spanish is not, in the sense to which I refer, a literary language," Williams wrote in his Autobiography. "It has a place of its own, an independent place very sympathetic to the New World."Williams approached translation as a way not only to present the work of unknown Spanish poets, but also to extend the range and capacity of American poetry, to use language "with unlimited freshness." Included in this bilingual edition are beautifully rendered translations of poets well-known - Neruda, Paz, and Parra - and lesser-known: Rafael Are¿valo Marti¿nez (from Guatemala), Rafael Belträn Logron~o (from Spain), and Eunice Odio (from Costa Rica).

Anew, sun, to fire summer     leaves move toward the air     from the stems of the branches           fire summer fire summer                  -from AnewHere is the complete music-filled arc of Louis Zukofsky's shorter verse collected in one volume: lyrical love poems written to his wife Celia and son Paul; the groundbreaking "Poem Beginning 'The,' " "which sends up 'The Waste Land' and its cultural vision in a cloud of bricolage, a hilarious pastiche of quotes, canon and kitsch, high and low hopelessly intertwined" (Michael Palmer); the boisterous, riotous translations of Catullus; spare, brilliant nature poems as if written by an ancient hokku master; his genius " 'Mantis' " sestina; the enigmatic, spiraling, and beautiful last poems, "80 Flowers." Anew: Complete Shorter Poetry is a book of blessings and gifts for any poetry lover.

A winter's night; a luxurious mansion near Geneva; a lucrative scandal. The first to arrive is the secretary dressed in furs with a bundle of cash, then the Baron, and finally the Baroness. They lock themselves in the library with specific instructions not to be disturbed for any reason. Soon, shouts and screams emerge from the library; the Baron's lunatic brother starts madly howling in the attic; two of the secretary's friends are left waiting in a car; a reverend's services are needed for an impromptu wedding-and despite all that the servants obey their orders as they pass the time playing records, preparing dinner, and documenting false testimonies while a twisted murder plot unfolds upstairs.

"I cannot write any sort of story," said Tennessee [to Gore Vidal] "unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire." These transgressive Tales of Desire, including "One Arm," "Desire and the Black Masseur," "Hard Candy," and "The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen," show the iconic playwright at his outrageous best.

By now, Yukio Mishima's (1925-1970) dramatic demise through an act of seppuku after an inflammatory public speech has become the stuff of literary legend. With Patriotism, Mishima was able to give his heartwrenching patriotic idealism an immortal vessel.  A lieutenant in the Japanese army comes home to his wife and informs her that his closest friends have become mutineers. He and his beautiful loyal wife decide to end their lives together. In unwavering detail Mishima describes Shinji and Reiko making love for the last time and the couple's seppuku that follows.