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in the mirror there is always this momentthis moment leads to the door of rebirththe door opens to the seathe rose of time             -Bei DaoThe Rose of Time: New & Selected Poems presents a glowing selection of poetry by contemporary China's most celebrated poet, Bei Dao. From his earliest work, Bei Dao developed a wholly original poetic language composed of mysterious and arresting images tuned to a distinctive musical key. This collection spans Bei Dao's entire writing life, from his first book to appear in English, The August Sleepwalker, published a year after the Tiananmen tragedy, to the increasingly interior and complex poems of Landscape Over Zero and Unlock, to new never-before-published work. This bilingual edition also includes a prefatory note by the poet, and a brief afterword by the editor Eliot Weinberger. A must-read book from a seminal poet who has been translated into over thirty languages.

With his hallmark discernment, George Steiner presents in The Poetry of Thought his magnum opus, staking out his claim for the essential oneness of great thought and great style. Steiner spans the entire history of Western philosophy as it entwines with literature, finding that, as Sartre stated, in all philosophy there is "a hidden literary prose."

This bundle of four Poetry Pamphlets (9-12 in the series) includes:Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blasts Cries LaughterOsama Alomar's Fullblood ArabianOliverio Girondo's Poems to Read on a StreetcarFifteen Iraqi Poets (edited by Dunya Mikhail)

Piano Stories presents fifteen wonderful works by the great Uruguayan author Felisberto Hernández, "a writer like no other," as Italo Calvino declares in his introduction: "like no European or Latin American. He is an 'irregular,' who eludes all classifications and labellings - yet he is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books." Piano Stories contains classic tales such as "The Daisy Dolls," "The Usher," and "The Flooded House."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blasts contains blasts, blessings, and curses in the vortex of today, taking its cues from the original little magazine, Blast, published by Wyndham Lewis with Ezra Pound in 1914-15 that helped create the modernist movement in literature and the visual arts. In these fearless new poems, Ferlinghetti, America's everyman bard, speaks for the poor, the forgotten, the beaten, and the bombed.

Virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, Girondo is one of the pioneers of Latin American literature. This selection offers a glimpse of a precise and playful writer who insisted that a poem "should be constructed like a watch and sold like a sausage."

A prominent practitioner of the Arabic "very short story" (al-qisa al-qasira jiddan), Osama Alomar's poetic fictions embody the wisdom of Kahlil Gibran filtered through the violent gray absurdity of Assad's police state. Fullblood Arabian is the first publication of Alomar's strange, often humorously satirical allegories, where good and evil battle with indifference, avarice, and compassion using striking imagery and effervescent language.

The Gorgeous Nothings - the first full-color facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson's manuscripts ever to appear - is a deluxe edition of her late writings, presenting this crucially important, experimental late work exactly as she wrote it on scraps of envelopes. A never-before-possible glimpse into the process of one of our most important poets.The book presents all the envelope writings - 52 - reproduced life-size in full color both front and back, with an accompanying transcription to aid in the reading, allowing us to enjoy this little-known but important body of Dickinson's writing. Envisioned by the artist Jen Bervin and made possible by the extensive research of the Dickinson scholar Marta L. Werner, this book offers a new understanding and appreciation of the genius of Emily Dickinson.

This selection has been the introduction for generations of American readers to the mesmerizing poems of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1937). Lorca is admired the world over for the lyricism, immediacy and clarity of his poetry, as well as for his ability to encompass techniques of the symbolist movement with deeper psychological shadings. Most of all, Lorca's poems are admired for their beauty. Undercurrents of his major influences - Spanish folk traditions of his native Andalusia and Granada, gypsy ballads, and surrealists Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel - stream throughout Lorca's work.

"Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest." - Muriel Rukeyser, "Elegy in Joy"First published by New Directions in 1949, Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies were written over a seven years period the end of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the beginnings of the Cold War. Both and homage to Rilke's Duino Elegies and a spiritual reckoning that is particularly resonant today, these poems present no angelic orders, only the difficulties of living in the modern world, the depths of shipwreck, and "Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all."

Only a couple of days before the state visit of the President of the United States, Filiberto García - an impeccably groomed "gun for hire," ex-Mexican revolutionary, and classic anti-hero - is recruited by the Mexican police to discover how much truth there might be to KGB and FBI reports of a Chinese-Mongolian plot to assassinate the Soviet and American presidents during the unveiling of a statue.García kills various bad guys as he searches for clues in the opium dens, curio shops, and Cantonese restaurants of Mexico City's Chinatown - clues that appear to point not to Mongolia, but to Cuba. Yet as the bodies pile up, he begins to find traces of slimy political dealings: are local gears grinding away in these machinations of an "international incident"? Pulsating behind the smokescreen of this classic noir are fierce curses, a shockingly innocent affair,smoldering dialog, and unforgettable riffs about the meaning of life, the Mexican Revolution, women, and the best gun to use for close-range killing.

Maxi, a middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires's shantytown, attracts the attention of a corrupt, trigger-happy policeman who will use anyone - including two innocent teenage girls - to break a drug ring that he believes is operating within the slum. A strange new drug, a brightly lit carousel of a slum, the kindness of strangers, gunplay... no matter how serious the subject matter, and despite Aira's "fascination with urban violence and the sinister underside of Latin American politics" (The Millions), Shantytown, like all of Aira's mesmerizing work, is filled with wonder and mad invention.

Laziness in the Fertile Valley is Albert Cossery's biting social satire about a father, his three sons, and their uncle - slackers one and all. One brother has been sleeping for almost seven years, waking only to use the bathroom and eat a meal. Another savagely defends the household from women. Serag, the youngest, is the only member of the family interested in getting a job. But even he - try as he might - has a hard time resisting the call of laziness.

In this fiercely original and audacious work, George Steiner tells of seven books which he did not write. Because intimacies and indiscretions were too threatening. Because the topic brought too much pain. Because its emotional or intellectual challenge proved beyond his capacities. The actual themes range widely and defy conventional taboos: the torment of the gifted when they live among-when they confront-the very great; the experience of sex in different languages; a love for animals greater than for human beings; the costly privilege of exile; a theology of emptiness. Yet a unifying perception underlies this diversity. The best we have or can produce is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind every good book, as in a lit shadow, lies the book which remained unwritten, the one that would have failed better.

Four stories by one of the most popularand critically controversialyoung writers to emerge from post-Glasnost Russia. "Hermit and Six Toes"; "Vera Pavlovna's Ninth Dream"; "The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII"; and "Tai Shou Chuan USSR" are four characterstic stories by the young Russian virtuoso Victor Pelevin, here collected in a New Directions Bibelot edition. With a deadpan and cooly ironic voice that speaks of the phantasmagorical, the surreal, the grotesque and the absurd just as affectingly as Gogol did in his day, Victor Pelevin writes of the dark chaos of the New Russia. In one story, a public toilet attendant discovers in her tiled hovel the entranceway to an alternate reality; in another, a man walks through a city at night with a companion he isn't entirely sure isn't his own shadow. This slim volume offers first-time Pelevin readers a compelling taste of his bleakly comic genius.

As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bolano's short stories is that they can do the "work of a novel." The Insufferable Gaucho contains tales bent on returning to haunt you. Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire, a Bolano story might concern an elusive plagiarist or an elderly lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the family estate, now gone to wrack and ruin. Bolano's stories have been applauded as "bleakly luminous and perfectly calibrated" (Publishers Weekly) and "complex and provocative" (International Herald Tribune), and as Francine Prose said in The New York Times Book Review, "something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new." Two fascinating essays are also included.

Nathaniel Mackey's sixth collection of poems, Blue Fasa, carries forward what the New Yorker has described as the "mythological conception" and "descriptive daring" of his two intertwined serial poems. A long song that's one and more than one, this collection takes its title from two related black musical traditions, a West African griot epic as told by the Fasa, a clan in ancient Ghana, and trumpeter Kenny Dorham's hard bop classic "Blue Bossa," influenced by the emergence of Brazilian bossa nova. The book opens with the catch of the heart and the call of romance, as it follows a band of travelers, refugees from history, on their incessant migrations through time, place, and polity toward a truer sense of being and belonging.

Basharat and his family are Indian Muslims who have relocated to Pakistan, but who remain deeply steeped in the nostalgia of pre-Partition life in India. Through Mirages of the Mind's absurd anecdotes and unforgettable biographical sketches-which hide the deeper unease and sorrow of the family's journey from Kanpur to Karachi-Basharet emerges as a wise fool, and the host of this unique sketch comedy. From humorous scenes in colonial north India, to the heartbreak and homesickness of post-colonial life in Pakistan, Mirages of the Mind forms an authentic portrait of life among South Asia's Urdu speakers, rendered beautifully into English by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad.

Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann's Moods is flooded with feelings, evoked by his family, losses, loves, the soul's hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee-with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness, accentuated by a new dimension brought along by "that great big pill of Prozac."Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction-a small marvel of a book, and with its pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once compared himself to "a praying mantis inclined to melancholy."

Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.

A puzzling phone call shatters a writer's routine. An enigmatic female voice extends a dinner invitation, and it soon becomes clear that this is an invitation to take part in the documenta, the legendary exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in Kassel, Germany.  The writer's mission will be to sit down to write every morning in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town, transforming himself into a living art installation. Once in Kassel, the writer is surprised to find himself overcome by good cheer as he strolls through the city, spurred on by the endless supply of energy at the heart of the exhibition. This is his spontaneous, quirky response to art, rising up against pessimism.With humor, profundity, and a sharp eye, Enrique Vila-Matas tells the story of a solitary man, who, roaming the streets amid oddities and wonder, takes it upon himself to translate from a language he does not understand.

The great American jazz novel of "such exquisite rhythmic lyricism" (Bookforum) by National Book Award Winner Nathaniel Mackey.

Ezra Pound's book on the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was first published in 1916. An enlarged edition, including thirty pages of illustrations (sculpture and drawings) as well as Pound's later pieces on Gaudier, was brought out in 1970, and is now re-issued as an ND Paperbook. The memoir is valuable both for the history of modern art and for what it shows us of Pound himself, his ability to recognize genius in others and then to publicize it effectively. Would there today be a Salle Gaudier-Brzeska in the Musée de L'Art Moderne in Paris if Pound had not championed him? Gaudier's talent was impressive and his Vorticist aesthetic important as theory, but he was killed in World War I at the age of twenty-three, leaving only a small body of work. Pound knew Gaudier in London, where the young artist had come with his companion, the Polish-born Sophie Brzeska. whose name he added to his own. They were living in poverty when Pound bought Gaudier the stone from which the famous "hieratic head" of the poet was made. Pound arranged exhibitions and for the publication of Gaudier's manifestoes in Blast and The Egoist. And he wrote and sent packages to him in the trenches, where Gaudier--a sculptor to the last--carved a madonna and child from the butt of a captured German rifle, just two days before he died.

The Crack-Up tells the story of Fitzgerald's sudden descent at the age of thirty-nine from glamorous success to empty despair, and his determined recovery. Compiled and edited by Edmund Wilson shortly after F. Scott Fitzgerald's death, this revealing collection of his essays-as well as letters to and from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos-tells of a man with charm and talent to burn, whose gaiety and genius made him a living symbol of the Jazz Age, and whose recklessness brought him grief and loss. "Fitzgerald's physical and spiritual exhaustion is described brilliantly," noted The New York Review of Books: "the essays are amazing for the candor."

Brazilian poet Ledo Ivo's Snakes' Nest is a "tale badly told" in a most artful manner. Part political allegory, the novel explores the nature of good and evil in a provincial port in northeastern Brazil during World War II--all the ills of the repressive dictatorship then in power are reflected in the corrupt and violent society of Maceió. As Ivo says: "During a dictatorship, all narratives are poorly told, since a dictatorship is the Kingdom of Lies and cannot tolerate the truth." But to focus solely on the allegory would deny the richness of the book's many layers, the considerable skill with which the characters emerge from the narrator's false starts, the subtle and pervasive wit that skewers pomposity and pretension, the suspense created by the narrator's very unreliability, and the poetry with which the exotic setting is evoked. The last word in describing such a heady mixture belongs to the author, who calls it, "a story of terror and violence that is, surely, a sunny nightmare." Although Ledo Ivo is well known in his own country as a journalist and poetic spokesman of the "Generation of 1945," this edition of Snakes' Nest marks his first book-length appearance in English. Originally published in 1973 under the title Ninho de Cobras, Snakes' Nest won the prestigious Brazilian Walmap Prize for that year. The novel has been translated by Kern Krapohl who, for several years, lived in Brazil and worked closely with the author. Jon M. Tolman of the University of New Mexico has contributed an informative introduction which clearly places the story both historically and geographically.

The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas contains poems that Thomas personally decided best represented his work. A year before its publication Thomas died from swelling of the brain triggered by excessive drinking. (A piece of New Directions history: it was our founder James Laughlin who identified Thomas' body at the morgue of St. Vincent's Hospital.)Since its initial publication in 1953, this book has become the definitive edition of the poet's work. Thomas wrote "Prologue" addressed to "my readers, the strangers" - an introduction in verse that was the last poem he would ever write. Also included are classics such as "And Death Shall Have No Dominion," "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," and "Fern Hill" that have influenced generations of artists from Bob Dylan (who changed his last name from Zimmerman in honor of the poet), to John Lennon (The Beatles included Thomas' portrait on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band); this collection even appears in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road when it is retrieved from the rubble of a bookshelf.     And death shall have no dominion.     Dead men naked they shall be one     With the man in the wind and the west moon;     When their bones are picked clean and their clean bones gone,     They shall have stars at elbow and foot;     Though they go mad they shall be sane,     Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again,     Though lovers be lost love shall not:     And death shall have no dominion.             (From "And Death Shall Have No Dominion")

The incomparable Borges delivered these seven lectures in Buenos Aires in 1977; attendees were treated to Borges' erudition on the following topics: Dante's The Divine Comedy, Nightmares, Thousand and One Dreams, Buddhism, Poetry, The Kabbalah, and Blindness.

This long-awaited memoir is a joy to read, an instrumental guide to translating, and a look at the life of one of its great practitioners.

In An Essay on French Verse-For Readers of English Poetry, Jacques Barzun addresses the baffling English prejudice against French poetry. Barzun's many-faceted and entertaining study muses on six hundred years of French verse, its rules and forms and how they evolved. It also has significant sections on the French language itself, its sounds and difficulties; on verse music in language generally; on the character and achievements of the greatest French poets; and finally, on the social and political conditions that encouraged successive innovations, including the prevailing wordwide practice of free verse. The Essay, moreover, draws not only on a lifetime's reading, but on personal reminiscences as well: of stuffy poetry lessons in the French lycée; of the poet Apollinaire expounding his views on language to amuse the child sitting on his knee; of the author's great-grandmother telling him about proper French pronunciation, as it was in her youth, eighty years earlier. In sum, Barzun's book goes a long way toward answering the question posed in 1917 by A. E. Housman to André Gide: How is it that every nation has produced poetry except France?