New Directions Interview with Dunya Mikhail
Though Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail writes of a different time and experience, I feel a powerful connection to her poems about war, loss, and exile. Both my parents lived in Vietnam during a time of upheaval.
I find that she is an essential voice in poetry, and indeed, I am quite surprised that her work is not more widely read and discussed, especially given our political climate.
Born in Baghdad, Dunya Mikhail has published two collections of poetry in English. The War Works Hard, published by New Directions in 2005, won a PEN Translation Fund Award, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of 25 Best Books of 2005. Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, published in 2009, is a multi-genre bilingual book in two sections, depicting her life before and after she fled from Iraq to live in the United States. In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She lives in Michigan and works as an Arabic resource teacher for Dearborn Public Schools. She is currently working on a new manuscript of poems.
Dunya Mikhail read with Louise Glück on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at the 92nd Street Y. In preparation for this event, I interviewed her about various aspects of her poetry, including translation, censorship, and witness.
Cathy Linh Che: I’ve read that English is your third language, after Aramaic and Arabic. What do you think is the impact of having your work translated into English?
Dunya Mikhail: English made me more sensitive toward Arabic. I started to think about words more carefully and let me admit it: I caught myself sometimes picking Arabic phrases that would resonate in English as well. I always write in Arabic first and then try to translate this, so my writing goes from right to left then from left to right. Aramaic is the language I speak with my mother.
CC: In The War Works Hard, you speak in a number of voices and personas, and you also speak for others. Is it important for you to speak those who are silenced?
DM: Being a poet is so personal and so public at the same time. I am only with myself when I write, but I am with everyone when I finish the poem. People tell me that they could relate to these poems (just like you did), and I think, yes, I feel the same way toward other people’s experiences. I adopt them as if they are mine, and I try to distance myself from my own experience so that it looks like somebody else’s.
CC: In Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, you write:
“So I discover poetry is an amoeba:
It has an eye for witnessing, a foot
for leaving traces, and a flexible form.”
How important is the notion of “witnessing” and “leaving traces” to your poetry?
DM: My eyes were opened to war, and now, when I close my eyes, I still see war. Poetry, you know, is responsive, probably the most deeply responsive of all literary genres.
CC: How has/had censorship impacted your ability to publish your poetry?
DM: In Iraq, there was a department of censorship with actual employees whose job was to watch “public morals” and decide what you should read and write. Every writer needed approval first before publishing. That’s why I used a lot of metaphors and layers of meanings. This was probably good for my poetry but, still, you do not want to use such figures of speech just to hide meanings. Here, in America, a word does not usually cost a poet her life. However, speech is sometimes limited to what is acceptable according to public norms. So, in Iraq, text precedes censorship. In America, censorship precedes the text. So censorship is implicit in the U.S. and the West and explicit in Iraq and the Arab world. But the big relief you feel here is that you actually have an editor and not a censor anymore when you publish. You feel great despite the irony that the censor makes you feel so important that if you say the wrong thing you deserve to die. The editor makes you feel that you can say whatever you want, and it’s never the end of the world!
CC: Can you describe how the two sections of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea differ for you? Did censorship or a lack of censorship affect the writing of the two parts?
DM: The first part was written and published in Iraq. Therefore it is not that direct compared to the second part, which was written after leaving my homeland. Actually, censorship was the main reason for my leaving Iraq.
CC: In addition, the first section comes from a direct witness of war in Iraq and the second section was written in America (from a vantage point of indirect witness) during another war in Iraq. How have these different vantage points affected the writing of the two different sections?
Although war is one and always the same for me, the first section deals particularly with the two wars I lived through in Iraq (the Iraq-Iran war and the U.S.-allied Gulf war), and the second section focuses on the 2003 war which I witnessed from a distance. In the second part, I was not there in the middle of the sounds of airplanes and explosions, but I could easily recall my terrifying memories. One new thing I noticed, however, is that my old friends whom I could contact in Iraq were giving me the impression, “Oh, well, I was injured, that’s ordinary…” It seemed to me war was becoming familiar in the country as ordinary fact, and that peace was the exception. Or was it because my friends didn’t want me to worry? Or was it because they wanted to get more attention with that denial of harm, especially now that I am on the outside?
CC: I am particularly interested in the ways that you speak of the impact of war on personal lives. How important is it for you to speak of the personal when speaking of the political?
DM: One of the diseases of Arabic poetry, in my opinion, is when it speaks about political issues in a non-personal way. They call these as “big issues” but there is no “small” nor “big” issue in poetry. There is only poetry in poetry.
CC: Is there any possibility for your return to Iraq?
DM: Not sure. Being “here” is an occasion to think of “there” but on a practical level, I am afraid I will not find the country that I know, or I will not know the country that I find. And it’s not all about me now. I have a daughter whose future seems to be more promising here. My husband’s niece was kidnapped in Iraq. It has been more than a year, and she has not been found. That alone makes the idea of return so scary.
CC: How do you think war has impacted contemporary Iraqi and Arabic poetry?
DM: Traditional Arabic poetry has a strict form that might not match with the mess of modern war and its urgency. Contemporary forms give it some flexibility. There is a tension in the Arab world between poets of traditional forms and the “prose poets,” as they are called. In Egypt, for example, there was an article about poets boycotting this poetry festival because this is formal and that’s not formal and so on. When it comes to Iraqi war poetry, some of it is trash (talk about the Iraqi soldier as a superhero who fears nothing etc.) and some of it is great (it allows poetry to survive the war).
CC: What do you think is the role of a poet in the U.S.? Is this different from the role of a poet in the world at large?
DM: The first known poet in history, Enheduanna, was an Iraqi woman. She wrote about Inanna on tablets in the cuneiform language. The interesting thing about her is that she had a position or title. It was “The keeper of the flame.” I think that if a poet should have any role at all, it should be (wherever and whenever) the same: “keeper of the flame.”
As part of the publicity campaign for Javier Marías’ Bad Nature, part of the recently introduced Pearl Series, I have been looking at Elvis related websites and contacting them about featuring Bad Nature on their sites.
In Bad Nature, the protagonist is a Spanish man working as a a translator and accent coach on a film shoot in Mexico. The story is fictional, but has an interesting portrayal of Elvis, and is accurate in it’s timing of his career. Elvis starred in many movies during the period between 1960 and 1967, but he took it a bit too far, and the movies became formulaic and his performances, both live and in the movies, suffered from his schedule of constant working and making movies. At the time, Javier Marías would have been about seventeen or eighteen, so (although we already know that this is fictional) it is unlikely that he shares this experience with the narrator of his story. Apparently Marías is obsessed with Elvis, so it is easy to imagine him wanting to create a story where he could place himself near Elvis, and this is probably the most likely way he would have gotten to work with Elvis.
This research has been cool because you would never really think about how many Elvis sites there are. According to Quantcast.com rankings, there are more than fifty websites in the top million websites on the Internet. This doesn’t sound like many, but the top million sites get a lot of traffic compared to most sites out there. According to some report written in February of 2008, there were approximately 156 million websites, of which 62 million were active. Considering that the total number of websites on the Internet has grown exponentially since 1995, this number could be way way more. So a site being in the top million is a pretty big deal. Many of the sites belong to Elvis impersonators. Oddly, a few of them belonged to motorcycle stores owned by guys named Elvis. But a lot of them are news sites, fan sites and collectors sites, to which I’ve been writing emails about the new publication. Some aren’t even active websites, which is crazy if you think about it, because more people have typed in things like “elvis-in-person.com” than have been to the New Directions website. There are Elvis fansites in many countries, like Norway, Romania, Poland, Australia, several from Holland, and there are Elvis sites that are just collections of links to other Elvis sites. Clearly, Marías isn’t the only person out there obsessed with Elvis.
Mishima’s Only Film
The Criterion Collection released Yukio Mishima’s 1965 film, Patriotism, based on the story, which is being reissued in the ND Pearl series next month. It is the only film that Mishima made. We found a it on YouTube as well. The film is very faithful to the story, with no dialog and only written narration. Even the sex scene is still pretty hot. Mishima said that “Patriotism” was his favorite story. The film is especially haunting when considering that Mishima took his own life in a similar fashion only five years later. Click here for parts two and three.
New Pearl Series
Beginning in February, New Directions will release a new series by favorite ND authors in small format books, similar to the ND Bibelot series that ran from 1993–2004. The Bibelot series served as short introductions to the great 20th century modernist authors such as Henry Miller and Ezra Pound, as well as reissuing short modern classics. The new Pearl series will relaunch some of the Bibelots and introduce short works by new ND authors such as Javier Marías and César Aira.
The editions are pocket sized, with clean designs by Rodrigo Corral, New Directions’ Creative Director at Large, whose minimalist style gives the books a unique look—a rhombus expanding in shape and growing in color; an abstraction of a pearl shining on the spine.
These gorgeous-looking, affordably priced ($9.95!) miniature masterpieces are also quite pragmatic. I really can’t leave my house without something to read, which can be problematic at times, like when I just have to walk down the street to meet a friend or something, does it really makes sense to carry a book with me? But there’s always the chance that the person I’m meeting will be late and I’ll be stuck without a book, but then I end up having to carry a bag with just one book in it, or folding a paperback in half and stuffing it in my back pocket. The Pearl series can solve a lot of these problems for me.
February will see the release of the first series of Pearls, including Patriotism by Yukio Mishima, Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico by Javier Marías, In Search of Duende by Federico García Lorca, and Tales of Desire by Tennessee Williams. The two I’ve read so far have been great. Patriotism is one of the most intense reads I’ve experience in a while, and Bad Nature is a wry tale that takes a comic premise down a dark alley. I used the descriptions from the back jacket of each book:
Patriotism by Yukio Mishima, Translated by Geoffrey W. Sargent
Shinji Takeyama, a lieutenant in the Japanese army, comes home to his wife and informs that his closest friends have become mutineers. Torn between his allegiances to the Emperor and his rebellious friends, Shinji and his beautiful, loyal wife Reiko decide to end their lives together. Incredible detail Mishima describes Shinji and Reiko making love for the last time and the ritual suicide by seppuku that follows.
Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico by Javier Marías, Translated by Esther Allen
“It all happened because of Elvis Presley.”
A boiled-down gem of a Marías story about how Elvis (in Acapulco to film a movie) and his hard-drinking entrouage abandon their interpreter in a seedy cantina full of enraged criminals after insults start to fly. When the local kingpin demands to be told what the Americans are saying, Elvis himself delivers an even more stinging parting shot–and who has to translate that?
In Search of Duende by Federico García Lorca, Translated by Christopher Mauer (Poems translated by Norman di Giovanni, Edwin Honig, Langston Hughes, Lysander Kemp, W. S. Merwin, Stephen Spender, J. L. Gili and Christopher Mauer)
The notion of “duende” became a conerstone of Federico García Lorca’s poetics over the course of his career. In his lecture “Play and Theory of the Duende,” he says, “there are no maps nor disciplines to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned…” The duende is portrayed by Lorca as a demonic earth spirit embodying irrationality, earthiness, and a heightened awareness of death. In Search of Duende gathers Lorca’s writings about the duende and about three art forms most susceptible to it: dance, music, and the bullfight. A full bilingual sampling of Lorca’s poetry is also included, with special attention to poems arising from traditional Spanish verse forms. The result is an excellent introduction to Lorca’s poetry and prose for American readers.
Tales of Desire by Tennessee Williams
“I cannot write any sort of story,” said Tennessee Williams to Gore Vidal, “unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.” These five transgressive Tales of Desire—”The Mysteries of the Joy Rio,” “One Arm,” “Desire and the Black Masseur,” “Hard Candy,” and “The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen”—show the iconic playwright at his outrageous best.
Love and Other Stories
It’s rare for a movie to find its inspiration in a short story, but such is the case with Szerelem (1971), inspired by two short stories, “Two Women” and “Love,” written by Tibor Dery, both collected in his book published by New Directions: Love and Other Stories. The stories don’t obviously go together, apart from a slight ache and loneliness left inside the reader, but the movie weaves the two in such a way that the combination, once made, becomes inevitable.
Szerelem (Love) is a Hungarian movie by Károly Makk. Its rhythm is slow and lilting; moments are spent on silence and small words between a newlywed (played by Mari Torcsik) and her aged mother-in-law (Lili Darvas, pictured on the cover of Love and Other Stories). The old woman is slow and methodical. Her thought process flashes across the screen as she reads a letter from her son––amplified imaginings of Eleanor Roosevelt, a feathered hat, a black cat, a keyhole, Victorian silhouettes of women.
The letter, however, is a fiction created by her daughter-in-law, resolutely trying to hide the fact that her husband, the mother’s son, had recently been captured by the police. The letters describe a larger-than-life account of his doings in America while on the set of a film:
“The first night of the film will be a month from today in a New York film theater that holds thirty thousand people. It is just being built on the outskirts of the city on top of a high mountain and has to be completed for the first night because they want to open it with my film. From the roof you can see half of America down to the Cordilleras and the Andes, not to speak of the Atlantic Ocean, which is just as blue here as the Adriatic at Abbazia, where we were together one summer….”
The letter goes on, and his mother laps the grand story up. The fiction is thin, however, and on her more lucid days she’s able to tell something isn’t right. The question then becomes how much she wants to know and how much she allows herself to question.
Large sections are taken verbatim from the stories, lending credence to the movie’s existence as a separate but worthy component. The movie takes the simplicity of the two stories, the silence and longing and compassion, without adding sentimentality or dramatics. The darker undertones are drawn out and explored––difficult times with the Hungarian police, the need to conform and what happens to those who don’t, the paranoia and worry that set in. Sometimes it’s hard to empathize with the daughter-in-law, other times it’s harder to empathize with the mother, but throughout it’s vastly clear that all they’re trying to do is survive, and whatever mechanisms in their lives that seem foreign to us–cushioned on a couch or in bed while watching the film or reading the stories–are their means of survival. When the second story enters the movie in the last twenty minutes, it’s with a mixture of sorrow and relief.
Posted by Kelsey Ford
A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM
Last Friday, the 27th of November, Tennessee Williams’ formidable play A Streetcar Named Desire opened at BAM’s Harvey Theatre to a sold-out audience. The staff at New Directions were lucky enough to attend the dress rehersal that afternoon, which, due to prevailing illness amongst the cast, was the first time the actors had done a full run-through of the play.
Under the direction of Liv Ullmann, the production was a tour de force from start to finish. The two-story set design opened the cramped Kowalski apartment onto the audience, with the upper story left stark and minimal—a gray, outer wall of the upstairs apartment featuring just a single window. The levels were joined by the fire escape, and there also featured two doors onstage— both within the Kowalski kitchen—effectively used throughout the play to convey emotion (with characters like Stanley stomping through and slamming them), as well as forming literal and liminal thresholds between the prison-like interior of the apartment and the outer world of New Orleans. In the blank space beyond these doors, this outer world was perfectly evoked through the use of sound effects and lighting.
Within these spaces, the actors played their parts with staggering virtuosity. Joel Edgerton ensnared the audience with his Brando-inspired portrayl of Stanley Kowalski, a man unafraid to mark what little territory in the world is his with aggressiveness. From the outset, his Stanley was commanding and comedically ignorant, forceful and violent, a man who feels he has to shout in order to be heard. Uncouth in his relationships both with women and with men, Edgerton gave Stanley his due dose of machismo, aptly defining the role in relation to his female counterparts— his passion-fuelled marriage to Stella, and his relentless bullying of Blanche. Indeed, Robin McLeavy gave a brilliant perfromance as Stella, a woman who is young and benign in the face of her husband’s truculence. She portrayed Stella’s gentle and unassuming nature with poise, and infused the role with emotion, particularly in the final scene, her tearful breakdown over Blanche further highlighting Stanley’s sadistic nature.
But it was Cate Blanchett, as aging Southern Belle Blanche DuBois, who stole the show. From the opening, Blanchett captured Blanche’s nervousness and charm, and injected as much humour as she did tragedy into the character, particularly in relation to Blanche’s obsession with her fading looks and her fondness for alcohol and young men. She played the part with creativity and precsion, seemlessly bringing to life one of Williams’ most fatal heroines, a woman tormented both by her ruinous past and by the brutish figure of Stanley. Indeed, it was in her scenes with the male leads (Stanley and suitor Mitch (played by Tim Richards)) that Blanchett deftly cut to the core of Blanche’s character; a displaced woman on the edge, who is desperate for security and admiration, yet is ultimately abused and abandoned by the men in her life. The drunken rape scene that culminates in Blanche’s inevitable demise was harrowing, the climax of the scene drowned out by the sound of the passing streetcar, a flickering of lights and an eventual blackout.
––posted by Katie Raissian
Some Thanksgiving Treats from New Directions
Thanksgiving heralds a change in season and commences a period of relative hibernation. It confronts the ambiental recession we commonly experience through slower breathing, lower body temperature, and possible metabolic depression. We feel it coming, so we cook all we can reap. We sit together, we eat, and then we eat some more. For our culture with its expansive appetite for consumption, Thanksgiving returns each year with an ironic bend of surplus.
While the economic recession this year may have induced many into hunger unusual, this merry-making season will certainly not be short of gifts for which to be grateful. At New Directions, we have prepared a literary harvest ripe for the picking, including works by William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Bernadette Mayer and Tennessee Williams. To satisfy your desire to feel full and warm this this fall, compliment your cranberry and celebrate your stuffing with some great American poetry.
In In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams “sought to re-name the things seen, now lost in a chaos of borrowed titles, many of them inappropriate, under which the true character lies hid.” He has “recognized new contours suggested by old words so that new names were constituted.” From old records—letters, journals, reports of happenings, Williams preserves the original flavor and peculiarity while creating wholey unique recounts of American History. Since the earliest attested Thanksgiving celebration was on September 8, 1565 in what is now Saint Augustine, Florida, our excerpt begins with a newly-appelled rendition of De Soto’s arrival in the Americas. Against the passionate forebearers, WCW juxtaposes the puritans, and we visit Sir Walter Raleigh, the said founder of the colonies. Our selection concludes with The Voyage of the Mayflower the traditional “first Thanksgiving” is venerated as having occurred at the site of Plymouth Plantation, in 1621. This Thanksgiving, taste anew the tales and personages of The New World, and the “grain of the landscape in which they flowered.”
Midwinter Day, an epic poem about daily routine, written on December 22, 1978 in the Northeast, takes us from morning dream to night again with rich, linguistic flavor. Called “consummate” by Robert Creeley and “ a poet of extraordinary inveniveness, erotic energy and challenge, and ironic intellgience” by Michael Palmer, Bernadette Mayer might just provide the extra heat you crave in this bluster. Four morsels from Midwinter Day, a poem in six parts, will whet your poetry-prose palette.
Such a pre-determined day of reflection and gratitude can run the risk of religiousness; luckily, it is impossible during this holiday to overlook the nourishing break from daily tedium, and treat of partaking with kin in taste and creation, in indulgence and rest, in stirring and smelling together. But, perhaps this sensuousness is not so far from a practice of giving thanks. Denise Levertov, a poet often recognized for themes of politics and war, understands well the implicit blessing in all things. Her poetry touches upon family, relgion, taste and the outdoors, in addition to its activist edge. To remain present in ‘the times’, both in an urgency for peaceful actions and in gratitude for the light of the hour, we recommend excerpts these from Oblique Prayers
Tennessee Williams, a household name for those at home for the holidays. But who of you awaits seemless chemistry when thrust back into habitual family roles? Certainly Tennessee’s home life was not without strife, as the pained beauty in his drama seems to suggest. Instead of entertaining bitterness or speaking on behalf of an old role during these few cherished days of vacation, find something fresh in an otherwise familiar voice. Not many people know that Tennessee Williams published two volumes of poetry published during his life: In the Winter of Cities and Androgyne, Mon Amour (now available at New Directions in single collection with a cd of the author reading).This holiday you will have the opportunity to redefine and experience anew (whether with your family or alone) America’s great dramatic poet.
We hope you have enjoyed our a stimulating, euthermic medley. We worked hard to get the recipe just right. But if what we have chosen doesn’t quite make your stomach growl, it is, as the saying goes “if you don’t like pumpkin pie, there’s some turkey on the table.”
Posted by Leonora Zoninsein
A Visit to the Studio of Rodrigo Corral, ND’s Creative Director at Large
The walls in Rodrigo Corral’s office are covered with movie posters, four Alvin Lustig designs we’ve also hung in our office (including the original cover for Amerika by Franz Kafka), the photo of a sprinkle-covered hand featured on the cover of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, large paintings, and posters for art exhibitions. On the top of the bookcase just after the entrance is a display of one of the studio’s recent designs–-Mrs. O: The Face of Fashion Democracy by Mary Tomer. Beneath, the shelves are packed with books, including some New Directions titles Corral has designed (in the quick glance I got, I saw Kenneth Patchen, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, and Tennessee Williams).
Rodrigo Corral, New Directions’ Creative Director at Large, welcomed five ND interns––Katie, Cathy, Leonora, Georgie, and me–and assistant editor Michael into his office on Thursday. While we sat around a ping-pong table discussing design and New Directions and world domination, a designer to the side worked in Photoshop on a potential cover for ND’s new Pearls series.
Since he began designing for New Directions more than three years ago, Corral’s designs have become a distinctive part of the catalog. Among many others, his portfolio for ND includes the eerie gray cover for Ghosts by César Aira; the red-speckled cover for The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales, featuring a stenciled man with his head stuck in a house, and a thought-bubble surrounding the title; the cover for My Unwritten Books by George Steiner which made use of empty-space between two metal bookends; the pink and metallic Love Poems by Pablo Neruda with romantically curled type.
Corral says he hasn’t been designing ND books with continuity in mind — he focuses on each text as its own entity. His covers stand out as visually appealing and do seem to have an overall idea, even if its nothing definite or intentional. There is an organic, natural feel to the designs, even when the design is a minimalistic photo, as in the case of My Unwritten Books.
The book as a physical object is important to Corral. “One of the first things I did when I started designing there was to make sure the paper quality of the books improved.” The covers for the books he designs are often matte and pleasant to hold; the labyrinthine cover for Borges’ Labyrinths was printed on metallic paper, making the mirrors in the image physically glint.
Many of the covers he has done for us are redesigns, including Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and Labyrinths by Borges. As Leonora told Corral, the copies of Siddhartha with its new textless cover quickly disappeared off our table at the Brooklyn Book Festival in September – even if the buyers already had a copy.
Corral said that for his designs he tries to find an overall symbol or idea to represent the text. For the cover of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, he built off of Junot Diaz’s descriptions of Oscar, Oscar’s obsessions with comic books and his incredible imagination, and the violence of the book. “How do you depict violence like that?” So Corral chose the now infamous paint-splattered side-silhouette of Oscar – a whimsical but unsettling depiction.
Often, Corral will have an idea for a cover and need an artist to execute it. When he first started designing, at FSG, he would run around to the art departments at local colleges and grab as many cards as he could. He’d tell artists he wasn’t able to pay, but was able to offer a potentially great opportunity, to have a piece of their artwork featured on the cover of a book.
Since then, Corral’s pool of artists has grown. While conceptualizing the cover for Nausea, he went to Leanne Shapton. “That’s watercolor. I couldn’t do that. I knew I wanted something that was hard to read but that I could read, and she did great.”
Corral is careful to ask for help from the correct artist for the job – “If I know a photographer who’s great with people, I’m not going to go to him for a still-life. It requires a different eye to get the light exactly right on a pile of gumballs.” Here he pointed to a glass of gumballs in the middle of the ping-pong table as an example.
Our conversation also touched on his work with Mary-Kate and Ashley for their recent release, Influence, a book full of photos and interviews, all to show a glimpse into the lives of the famous twins; relations with authors – he thinks it important to keep a middleman between author and designer; and the future of book design.
His answer to the question of publishing’s future is much more optimistic than some.
“I think it’ll go back to where it should be,” he said, mentioning how only a few years ago design offices were bloated. “They’d have five people on mechanical. You don’t need five people on mechanical.” Corral strongly believes the quality of books will go up, production won’t be rushed, and they’ll become much more luxury and quality items dedicated to representing the integrity of the text, as it should be.
Just before we left, Corral pulled out a copy of Coupe Magazine and flipped open to a page featuring his redesign for The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He lent Michael a copy to bring back to the ND office.
A gallery of some of Corral’s designs for New Directions can be found here and more images from our visit here.
Corral also helped design The Way it Wasn’t by James Laughlin – which we are serializing in parts at this blog.
– posted by Kelsey Ford
A preview of the upcoming spring season
There’s a lot to look forward to in our upcoming spring and summer seasons – Bolaño’s Big Bang, a book-in-a-box, Beat poetry, pigeons and chat rooms, a man with a sexy body and face of a village idiot, Walser’s microscripts, household servants and accidental guests….
Antwerp by Roberto Bolano April
As Bolaño’s friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarria, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolaño’s fictional universe. From this springboard – which Bolaño chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he’d written in – as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel. Antwerp‘s fractured narration in 54 sections – voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers-by, from an omniscient narrator, from “Roberto Bolaño” all speak – moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.
If you can’t wait, an excerpt can be found in Conjunctions:53. In July, Antwerp will be followed by another Bolaño title, The Return.
Bird Lovers, Backyard by Thalia Field April
Field’s illuminating essays, or stories, in poetic form, place scientists, philosophers, animals, even the military, in real and imagined events. Her open questioning brings in subjects as diverse as pigeons, chat rooms, nuclear testing, the building of the Kennedy Space Center, the development of seaside beaches… Throughout, she intermingles fact and fiction, probing the porous boundaries between human and animal, calling into question “what we are willing to do with words,” and spinning a world where life is haunted by echoes.
Nox by Anne Carson April
Carson’s first book of poetry in five years comes as an accordion-fold-out “book in a box”, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catallus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages, and sketches on pages.
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The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams April
The Rose Tattoo is larger than life–a fable, a Greek tragedy, a comedy, a melodrama–it is a love letter from Tennessee Williams to anyone who has ever been in love or ever will be. Professional widow and dressmaker Serafina delle Rosa has withdrawn from the world, locking away her heart and her sixteen-year-old daughter Rosa. Then one day a man with the sexy body of her late Sicilian husband and the face of a village idiot stumbles into her life and clumsily unlocks Serafina’s fiery anger, sense of betrayal, pride, wit, passions, and eventually her capacious love.
The Literary Conference by César Aira and Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges May
These two new titles will be released as part of our new ‘Pearl’ series. The Literary Conference focuses on César, a translator fallen on hard times who is also an author and a mad scientist hell-bent on world domination. On a visit to the beach he intuitively solves an ancient riddle, finds a pirate’s treasure, and becomes a very wealthy man. And yet, his bid for world domination comes first and so he attends a literary conference to be near the man whose clone he hopes will lead an army to victory: the world-renowned Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes…. Everything and Nothing collects Borges’ highly influential work – written in the 1930s and ’40s – that forsaw the internet, quantum mechanics, and cloning. In one essay, he discusses the relationship between blindness and poetry. As Roberto Bolaño succinctly said: “I could live under a table reading Borges.”
The Microscripts by Robert Walser May
Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper (many of them written during his hospitalization in the Waldau sanatorium) covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author’s death in 1956. At first considered a secret code, the microscripts were eventually discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of a German script: a whole story could fit on the back of a business card. Selected from the six-volume German transcriptions from the original microscripts, these 25 short pieces are gathered in this gorgeously illustrated co-publication with the Christine Burgin Gallery. each microscript is reproduced in full color in its original form: the detached cover of a trashy crime novel, a disappointing letter, a receipt of payment.
Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark May
A winter’s night; a luxurious mansion near Geneva; a lucrative scandal. The first to arrive is the secretary dressed in furs with a bundle of cash, then the Baron, and finally the Baroness. They lock themselves in the library with specific instructions not to be disturbed for any reason. Soon, shouts and screams emerge from the library; the Baron’s lunatic brother starts madly howling in the attic; two of the secretary’s friends are left waiting in a car; a reverend’s services are needed for an impromptu wedding–and despite all that the servants obey their orders as they pass the time playing records, preparing dinner, and documenting false testimonies while a twisted murder plot unfolds upstairs.
Other great titles to look forward to:
Mysteriosos and Other Poems by Michael McClure — April
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas by Dylan Thomas — April
A Splendid Conspiracy by Albert Cossery — May
William Carlos Williams: An American Dad by William Eric Williams — May
The Three Fates by Linda Lê — June
The King of Trees by Ah Cheng — June
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Volumes 1-3 by Nathaniel Mackey — July
The Return by Roberto Bolaño — July
View the upcoming covers in full-size at our Flickr account here.
Cantos: A New Directions Blog 