Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
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...
2) 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 357
Language
English
Appears on list
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...
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1340
Language
English
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...
5) The factory
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1460
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
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...
6) Praiseworthy
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1585
Pub. Date
2024.
Language
English
Description
"In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A crazed visionary looks to donkeys to solve the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife, seeking solace from his madness, follows the dance of butterflies and scours the internet to find out how her Aboriginal/Chinese family could be repatriated to China. One of their...
7) Mild vertigo
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1562
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Appears on list
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...
8) The divorce
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1501
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
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...
9) Artforum
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1472
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
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...
10) Paris spleen
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 294
Language
English
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
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.
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 204
Language
English
Description
Ambiguity involves "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of langauge." The authors discusses seven classifications of differing complexity and depth of well-known literary works
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1283
Language
English
Description
Robert wants nothing more than to become a serious art historian. But his hopes for a staid academic life are put on hold when he's driven from London to Venice to escape one lover and seek out another: the enigmatic Bulgarian refugee Lina Pancev. In Venice, Robert encounters a grand carnival of lust, lies, blackmail, cocktail parties, and regicide. As he chases Lina, his heart's desire, the city itself provides a priceless education in love, art,...
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 53
Language
English
Description
"William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but he was fascinated by the texture of American history. Beginning with Columbus's discovery of the Indies and moving on through Sir Walter Raleigh, Cotton Mather, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln, Williams found in the fabric of familiar episodes new shades of meaning and configurations of character. He brought a poetic imagination to the...
15) Michael Kohlhaas
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1473
Language
English
Description
"Michael Kohlhaas has been wronged. First his finest horses were unfairly confiscated and mistreated. And things keep going worse-his servants have been beaten, his wife killed, and the lawsuits he pursues are stymied-but Kohlhaas, determined to find justice at all costs, tirelessly persists. Standing up against the bureaucratic machine of the empire, Kohlhaas becomes an indomitable figure that you can't help rooting for from start to finish. Knotty,...
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1323
Language
English
Description
In this novel by the author of The Berlin Stories, a listless pair of siblings in post-WWI London battle the constraints of society and their mother.
It's the 1920s-the wake of the Great War-and Britain is undergoing a transformation. The middle class is struggling, and the younger generation, feeling constrained by the values that once fueled the empire, is yearning to break free . . .
A new war is brewing in the slums of Kensington, London....
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1313
Publisher
New Directions
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
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,...
19) The sacred fount
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The Sacred Fount is a novel by Henry James, first published in 1901. This strange, often baffling book concerns an unnamed narrator who attempts to discover the truth about the love lives of his fellow guests at a weekend party in the English countryside. He spurns the "detective and keyhole" methods as ignoble, and instead tries to decipher these relationships purely from the behavior and appearance of each guest. He expends huge resources of energy...
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