Mindful Witnesses: Three Books from New Directions
Barbara Berman reviews work by Dunya Mikhail, Thomas Merton, and Robert Lax.
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Posts Tagged: new directions
Painful Celebrations: Five Books for National Poetry Month
Every act of reading is inseparable from what the reader has encountered before.
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Urgent Connections: Negative Space and Too Afraid to Cry
There’s no such thing as too much of this kind of light, especially in dark times.
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Barbara Berman’s 2018 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
Barbara Berman’s 2018 Poetry Shout-out.
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Into the Margins: Talking with Siglio Press
Founder and publisher Lisa Pearson discusses Siglio Press.
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A Weeping Tree of His Own: Yasunari Kawabata’s Dandelions
Blindness as a concept is central to Kawabata’s novel, where every character is blind to something.
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Music and Spirituality: A Conversation with Marcia Douglas
Marcia Douglas discusses her forthcoming novel, THE MARVELLOUS EQUATIONS OF THE DREAD.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Melissa Broder
Melissa Broder discusses her debut novel, The Pisces (Hogarth, May 2018), the importance of love between women, and mermaid sex.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #128: Dunya Mikhail
“All art is somehow a kind of witness, whether to beauty or to anything else.”
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Barbara Berman’s 2017 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Barbara Berman offers gift recommendations for the poets on your holiday shopping list.
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A Zombie Existence: Fleur Jaeggy’s I Am the Brother of XX
Unlike clothing, which can disguise the state of the soul, a person’s eyes reveal the truth.
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Hunters and the Hunted: The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai
Vastness does not always mean an abyss.
...moreThe Kind of Madness That Is Passion
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been alone with herself. Maybe never. It was always her–with others, and in these others she was reflected and the others were reflected in her. Nothing was–was pure, she thought without understanding what she meant. Another newly released story by the dazzling Clarice Lispector, “Beauty and the Beast […]
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“And She Went on Her Way Rejoicing”
Muriel Spark and the perennial question: “Am I a woman or an intellectual monster?”
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Exercises in Style
Exercises in Style has been one of the most beloved books in the New Directions catalog since they first published it in 1981.
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The Secret of Evil, by Roberto Bolaño
In one of the stories in Roberto Bolaño’s new collection The Secret of Evil, the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, whose arresting and beastly Jupiter and Seleme graces the American jacket of Bolaño’s 2666, is referenced by a man “present at a gathering of madmen.”
...moreA Preposterous Proposal, But No, Not Quite
Helen DeWitt’s satirical novel Lightning Rods turns the quotidian American workplace into a cloaked prostitution ring and makes us wonder if it isn’t already one.
...moreThe Singing Caryatids of Modern Moscow
Victor Pelevin’s new novella, Hall of the Singing Caryatids, satirizes contemporary capitalism in a smart and fun critique of what we do for money and with money.
...moreJavier Marias on KCRW’s Bookworm
Allen Ginsberg claimed that his reading voice was an imitation of the voice with which William Blake spoke to him in his visions and dreams. Once you hear Ginsberg read, you are stuck in his dream forever. Javier Marias, the prolific Spanish author who blends wit and private conspiracies in unparalleled ways, was on KCRW’s […]
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