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A novel of intense, flickering intelligence, Tell is structured as a series of interviews with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide. What might be a gloomy subject is instead alluring, lit from within by a lively deep knowledge of human nature: Buckley's eye for motivations brings to mind a Thomas Hardy for our atomized 21st-century. A thrilling novel of strange, intoxicating immediacy, Tell carries the pleasures of exciting new gossip enjoyed with a rare old cognac by a crackling fire. Calling his work "captivating," John Banville has asked: "Why isn't Jonathan Buckley better known?"

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2024FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRYPublished here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. As Carson writes: "Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them 'wrong.'"

Deep in a maze of musty, forgotten hallways, Mudito rummages through piles of old newspapers. The mute caretaker of the crumbling former abbey, he is hounded by a coven of ancient witches who are bent on transforming him, bit by bit, into the terrifying imbunche: a twisted monster with all of its orifices sewn up, buried alive in its own body. Once, Mudito walked upright and spoke clearly; once he was the personal assistant to one of Chile's most powerful politicians, Jerónimo de Azcoitía. Once, he ruled over a palace of monsters, built to shield Jeronimo's deformed son from any concept of beauty. Once, he plotted with the wise woman Peta Ponce to bed Inés, Jerónimo's wife. Mudito was Humberto, Jerónimo was strong, Inés was beautiful-once upon a time... Narrated in voices that shift and multiply, The Obscene Bird of Night frets the seams between master and slave, rich and poor, reality and nightmares, man and woman, self and other in a maniacal inquiry into the horrifying transformations that power can wreak on identity.Now, star translator Megan McDowell has revised and updated the classic translation, restoring nearly twenty pages of previously untranslated text that was mysteriously cut from the 1972 edition. Newly complete, with missing motifs restored, plots deepened, and characters more richly shaded, Donoso's pajarito (little bird), as he called it, returns to print to celebrate the centennial of its author's birth in full plumage, as brilliant as it is bizarre.

Carpentaria is an epic of the Gulf country of northwestern Queensland, Australia. Its portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centers on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight's renegade Eastend mob, on the one hand, and with the white officials of Uptown and the nearby rapacious, ecologically disastrous Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright's masterful novel teems with extraordinary characters-the outcast savior Elias Smith, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist Will Phantom, and above all, the rulers of the family, the queen of the garbage dump and the fish-embalming king of time: Angel Day and Normal Phantom-who stand like giants in a storm-swept world.Wright's storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. She has a narrative gift for remaking reality itself, altering along her way, as if casually, the perception of what a novel can do with the inside of the reader's mind. Carpentaria is "an epic, exhilarating, unsettling novel" (Wall Street Journal) that is not to be missed.

Self-seeding windis a wind of ever-replenishing breath.        -from "The Walk, or The Principle of Rapid Peering" The title of Sylvia Legris' melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behavior of certain birds. Rather than waiting passively for food to approach them, these birds live in a continuous mode of "rapid peering." Legris explores this rich theme of active observation through a spray of poems that together form a kind of almanac or naturalist's notebook in verse. Here is "where nature converges with words," as the poet walks through prairie habitats near her home in Saskatchewan, through lawless chronologies and mellifluous strophes of strobili and solstice. Moths appear frequently, as do birds and plants and larvae, all meticulously observed and documented with an oblique sense of the pandemic marking the seasons. Elements of weather, ornithology, entomology, and anatomy feed her condensed, inflective lines, making the heart bloom and the intellect dance.

Included areThe Song of SongsPoems (Sappho)The Cosmic Fragments (Herakleitos)Saying Poems (Yeshua the Messiah)Apocalypse (John of Patmos)Taoist and Buddhist Poems (Wang Wei)Allegorical Bestiary (Bishop Theobaldus)Mystical Poems (Mira Bai)Mystical Poems (St. John of the Cross)Sonnets to Orpheus (Rainer Maria Rilke)The poetry included here spans three thousand years and contains some of the most profound and inspiring writing of world literature: some following the way of fantastic realism while some is mysto-erotic. As Barnstone says: "[I]n the instance of our authors, the unsayable has been refashioned into the precision of poetry."

How splendid and impressive to have a complete, clear, and unobstructed view of Denise Levertov. Covering more than six decades and including, chronologically, every poem she ever published, Levertov's Collected Poems presents her marvelous, groundbreaking work in full.Born in England, Denise Levertov emigrated in 1948 to the United States, where she was acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times as "the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving." A staunch anti-war activist and environmentalist, and the winner of the Robert Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lannan Prize, Denise Levertov inspired generations of writers. New Directions is proud to publish this landmark collected poems of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets.

After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf Anna, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively orders clothes she can't afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she forces herself to read and write.My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms-fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters-to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature."Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn's book, you run through the whole gamut of human emotion, as though you too were a new mother: tears, laughter, anger, fear, pain, frustration. This is powerful writing that's hard to put down."-Politiken

A Leopard-Skin Hat may be the French writer Anne Serre's most moving novel yet. Hailed in Le Point as a "masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance," it is the story of an intense friendship between "the Narrator" and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator's loving and anguished attachment to her. Anne Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author's little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in Anne Serre's signature style.

"Only when a man becomes all naked do you know the shades of his life as an existential being," writes Tatsuhiko Ishii in his sensuous, exhilarating new collection of poetry Bathhouse and Other Tanka. For many decades now, Ishii has turned the classical poetic form of the tanka into its own innovative contemporary tradition. What was originally a five line 5-7-5-7-7-syllable verse form Ishii writes in one line, constructing his poems out of sequential one-line tankas, as if Basho and Lorca bathed together under the moon. In moving elegies to Yukio Mishima and Genji (the Shining Prince), tributes to Ezra Pound and Claude Lorrain, as well as to the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Mount Fuji, Ishii's poetry resonates with a mix of philosophical lyricism, inquisitive exuberance and homoerotic desire. "The ocean plane shines in the sun," he writes in one poem in the aftermath of 9/11. "From now on every place will be a battlefield, sure." In one sequence, we glimpse Proust through a photograph by Paul Nadar, in another clipping pubic hair and washing a horse become a rumination about real poetry. Ishii pens songs of momentary love and flames of lust, of mankind's self-destruction and the self mirrored in the seven deadly sins. No other poet today can write about sniffing a young man in Tokyo or Tasmanian oysters like Ishii does with such majesty. Hiroaki Sato, the bestselling author of On Haiku, has been translating Ishii for over thirty years and captures the rhythmic pulse and turn of his "Poetry ... harmful, a dream. Even the world, finally, due to poetry, liquefies ..."

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRYSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 LUCIEN STRYK ASIAN TRANSLATION PRIZEAn iconic figure in the emergence of feminist poetry in South Korea and now internationally renowned, Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic envelope into the farthest reaches of the lyric universe. In her new collection, Kim depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an "I-do-bird-sequence," where "Bird-human is the 'I.'" Her remarkable essay "Bird Rider" explains: "I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language. Bird language that flies to places I've never been." What unfolds is an epic sequence of bird ventriloquy exploring the relentless physical and existential struggles against power and gendered violence in "the eternal void of grief" (Victoria Chang, The New York Times Magazine). Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnes Varda, Francis Bacon's portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain.

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor-an attractive married woman and mother-while Polo dreams about quitting his grueling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society-with its racist, classist, hyper violent tendencies-and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

WINNER OF THE 2024 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZESelf-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, by the renowned Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, is a brilliant collection of poems written in and for the new century. Aridjis seeks spiritual transformation through encounters with mythical animals, family ghosts, migrant workers, Mexico's oppressed, female saints, other writers (such as Jorge Luis Borges and Philip Lamantia), and naked angels in the metro. We find tributes to Goya and Heraclitus, denunciations of drug traffickers and political figureheads, and unforgettable imaginary landscapes. As Aridjis himself writes: "a poem is like a door / we've never passed through..." And now past eighty, Aridjis reflects on the past and ponders the future. "Surrounded by light and the warbling of birds," he writes, "I live in a state of poetry, because for me, being and making poetry are the same."

The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River is Allen Grossman's first collection with New Directions. His voice is astonishingly contemporary, his often dissociated imagery bordering on the surreal--yet one hears in his verse classical and Biblical echoes and, on occasion, darker medieval undertones. The brilliance of his imagination works against a measured eloquence, setting up a fine-edged tension not unlike the prophetic verse of William Blake, the wild dithyrambs of David, or the more controlled metrics of Catullus and Villon.

John Allman's Clio's Children is a book of twenty-three narrative poems that, taken together, form a compelling history of modern times, seen through the eyes of exceptional people at key moments of their lives--moments of "historical epiphany" that serve to define an era. Fyodor Dostoevsky, in 1849, standing helpless and hopeless before the firing squad of Tzar Nicholas I; J. Robert Oppenheimer at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945, about to witness the first nuclear explosion--these two turning points in personal consciousness are chosen by the poet to mark the century that preceded, and prefigured, our troubled postindustrial world. In all the poems, Allman's dramatic settings point to the tension between the strength of the individual and the ever-encroaching power of the state. The personae he uses--from Dostoevsky to Oppenheimer, Frederick Douglass to Marcus Garvey, George Sand to Emma Goldman, to name just a few--are men and women of amazing gifts, whose greatness challenges our obsessions with the small and trivial, and whose human character is the reality of our history made flesh. These are the children of Clio, the muse of history, goddess of renown.

Since 1947, when his work first began to appear, Philippe Jaccottet has published six volumes of poetry, two of criticism, three of prose-poetry, and several translations from the German. Seedtime (''La Semaison'')--the title he has given to his notebook journals written from 1954 through 1967--is an especially good introduction to this leading post-war French author, containing as it does passages in both prose and verse. In explaining the word semaison, Jaccottet has drawn a parallel between his sense of the yearly scattering of seed--the sacredness of the act, the uncertainty of its results--and the sense he has of poetry and the written word. Him, his own description on the jacket of the original French edition (Gallimard, 1971): "The despairing happiness of words, the despairing defense of the impossible, everything which contradicts, denies, mimicks or blasts. At each instant it is like the first and last word, the first and last poem, embarrassed, solemn, without probability and without force, stubborn fragility, an enduring fountain; and again, in the evening, its sound against death, flabbiness, stupidity; again, its freshness, its limpidity against drivel. Again, the star out of the scabbard."

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

Like Montaigne before him, Mandel examines the antic mind of his fellowmen, vain, various, and ever-changing, and its peculiar manifestations in an age that embraces ugliness and irrationality. The sixteen pieces in the collection are, literally, 'elaborations'-discursive, associative, meditative-of the author's earlier lyric poems and epigrams, arranged by him to move in an easy way from the autobiographical to matters more general and abstract.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

This anthology series draws on authors fromcountries across the world and features selections of the finest new prose and poetry.

Ranging from the humorous and scathing to the evocative and strange, this 9th century collection of list poems by the late Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin documents one poet's scrutiny of his riotous times. Li gives a glimpse into the mundane experiences of the waning years of Chinese poetry's golden age, while providing an uncanny reflection of the minutiae of our own contemporary lives, loves, and irritations.Besieged by a drunk person, no escape.Beautiful concubine, jealous wife.

Time of Grief is an anthology of poems divided into forty-nine days of mourning: "forty-nine days of mourning: reflecting a period of grieving as observed in Buddhist and Judaic traditions. Each day's reading consists of one or more poems by some of the world's most celebrated poets from diverse cultures and centuries, from classical times to today. Seventy-five writers from over twenty countries confront illness, loss, love lost, death and mortality, through moving requiems and lamentations, elegies and eulogies. Reaffirming poetry's ancient and intimate link with ritual, this collection opens up a calendrical, spiritual space for readers to experience bereavement as a means toward transformation.

Translations of substantial works by three important European poets-Erik Lindegren (Sweden), Cesare Pavese (Italy) and Roberto Sanesi (Italy)-are among the highlights of this 1969 New Directions Annual.Also, there appear works by other well known poets such as William Bronk, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anselm Hollo (England), W. S. Merwin, Edouard Roditi, and Mark Strand.Emmett Jarrett, whose long poem, Design for the City of Man: A Vision, is an exciting discovery.The prose section includes Thomas Merton's satire on Negro segregation, Plessy vs. Ferguson: Theme and Variations, and a group of stories by Sanford Chernoff, Marvin Cohen, James B. Hall, James Purdy, Mia Raffel and Margaret Randall, which illustrate the rich diversity, both in technique and subject matter, of the short story form from the late sixties. There is also, in translation from the Flemish, the work of an important but too-little-known precursor of the modern movement, Paul van Ostaijen's Ika Loch's Brothel.Trim Bissel: THE REUNION Besmilr Brigham: SONGS FROM THE THIRTEENTH MASK William Bronk: SIX POEMS Sanford Chernoff: NOT MY ANIMAL Marvin Cohen: LOVE BY PROXY OF SOLITUDE Lawrence Ferlinghetti: THE THIRD WORLD Mitchell Goodman: EIGHT POEMS James B. Hall: TRIUMPH OF THE OMOPHAGISTS Walter Hamady: PLUM-FOOT POEMS Anselm Hollo: THE COHERENCES Emmet Jarret: DESIGN: A VISION Erik Lindegren: THE MAN WITHOUT A WAY Thomas Merton: PLESSY VS. FERGUSON: THEME AND VARIATION W. S. Mervin: TWO POEMS Paul van Ostaijen: IKA LOCH'S BROTHEL Cesare Pavese: DEATH WILL COME AND WILL HAVE YOUR EYES James Purdy: MR. EVENING Mia Raffel: SNAILSFEET Margaret Randall: THE IMPOSSIBLE FILM STRIP OR, HISTORY OF MARRIAGE Edouard Roditi: MEDITATION ON BOOKS Roberto Sanesi: INFORMATION REPORT Mark Strand: THE WAY IT IS