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The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1999
Superb, Heartfelt Classic
This classic tale by Tennessee Williams captures the reader's emotions by so forcefully displaying those of its main characters. This is a story of longing and frustration, set in a frustrating time (The Great Depression). The story is narrated by Tom, who hates his ...
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By Night in Chile
Roberto Bolano
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2003
small poems within larger stories
What I have come to appreciate reading Bolaņo's book is the fact that he takes you on several small journeys getting you from plot-point to plot-point. You almost don't realize that he is doing it until you finish one of these tangents and get led carefully back to the ...
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Exercises in Style
Raymond Queneau
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1981
Etudes
The idea for this book came to the author after a performance of Bach's "The Art of the Fugue." Queneau thought it would be interesting to attempt, in prose, a similar exploration of variations on a theme. To that end, he began to write a series of stories exploring ...
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The Rings of Saturn
W.G. Sebald
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1999
The night of time far surpasseth the day and who knows when was the Aequinox?
Sebald takes a walk in Suffolk. He sees places and things, and remembers people and books, and thinks of history. This triggers reflections on natural, social and cultural decay, on human greed and callousness, on inhuman monstrosities.
It goes like this: he is in ...
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Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1969
"Every Man His Own Carver"
In both of these stunning novellas - one set in New York, the other in Los Angeles - Nathanael West shows us a world without a center, one in which the various characters are therefore free to pursue their own idiosyncratic notions of bliss. Conspicuously absent is any ...
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The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin (New Directions Book)
Christopher Isherwood
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1963
"Even now I can't altogether believe that any of this has really happened."
Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories" is perhaps most famous for having inspired the stage and screen masterpiece Cabaret, but those who are looking for an exact match between the two will be disappointed. The divine Sally Bowles does make an appearance (her ...
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Deep River
Shusaku Endo
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1995
Searching for Peace in an Expanded Horizon
This is a beautiful story of 5 people searching for the inner peace that has eluded them throughout much, if not all, of their lives. The cause of their inner turmoil comes from a variety of sources but their emptiness and incompleteness is very real. Shusaku Endo ...
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A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2004
The Glorious Bird's iconic melodrama
This is probably the most famous piece of literature from the US that I hadn'd read yet, until now. Nor watched as a play or movie. And still I seemed to know everything about it.
Having just read Gore Vidal's memoirs, where he calls TW the 'glorious bird', I was ...
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Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1951
A must read for any spiritual seeker
A journey through the life of a man with a single purpose: to find his own truth.
Knowing that the only way to discover life's greatest mysteries is to go through the heart of them alone, he finds himself living one extreme after another until he finally rests in ...
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The Emigrants
W. G. Sebald, Michael Hulse
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1997
The trail of the butterfly man: homage to Vladimir Dimitrovich
Having my appetite for Sebald wetted by Austerlitz, I picked up the Emigrants with high expectations, and they were surpassed: on top of the expected modern masterpiece I got a recognition of one the greatest writers on emigration that Europe produced in the 20th ...
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Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New Directions Paperbook, 161)
Henry Miller
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1957
saved my life
I first read this book exactly ten years ago when I was struggling through a profound period of depression. I don't want to say that the book cured me, because that would be too facile and too drastic a declaration, but I will say that Big Sur and the Oranges of ...
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Death on the Installment Plan
Louis Celine
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1971
Aesthetically pleasing. Theoretically important. Absurdly relevant.
The greatest novel of one of the greatest novelists of all time.
You would have to write a book longer than Celine's novel to do any justice to analyzing it. Thus I was shocked to find the Wikipedia article about this book was about five sentences long. I dropped ...
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The Hour of the Star (New Directions Paperbook)
Clarice Lispector
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1992
Not a normal book, and that's what makes it great.
Don't dig into this book expecting something normal. Lispector wasn't a normal writer at all. She wasn't a normal woman. This book was written while her cancer in her uterus was eating her alive, and you can almost taste the angst from the narrator. Not that her other ...
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The Invention of Curried Sausage
Uwe Timm
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1997
An excellent work, slyly seasoned with metaphor.
I read this book in its English translation, and
I must congratulate the translator, because the
imagery and themes shine through the language
differences with quite possibly all of the
original intent of Mr. Timm. To suggest that
somebody could "invent" curried ...
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The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions Book)
Thomas Merton
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1975
Fascinating journal of Christian monk encountering the East
This book is a must-read for fans of Merton, and for anyone interested in encounters between Western Christianity and Eastern religions (particularly Hinduism and Buddhism). Merton achieved incredible realizations and great insight into Buddhism despite the fact that ...
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