Nicolson Baker on the Kindle
The new issue of The New Yorker has a really interesting piece by print-advocate Nicholson Baker about the Kindle. It’s worth reading the whole article—I haven’t read a review of the Kindle quite like this one—but here are a few of the highlights: It came, via UPS, in a big cardboard box. Inside ...
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2009 Man Asian Literary Prize Longlist
The twenty-four title longlist for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize was announced last week and is listed in full below. The press release has bio information for all of the authors, but not a lot of info on their books. (Just as Michael Orthofer has his bit about how this award isn’t Asian enough I have my standard ...
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Review of Bolano's The Skating Rink
The Abu Dhabi-based The National has one of the first reviews of Bolano’s The Skating Rink, which is coming out from New Directions later this year. Giles Harvey’s raview spends a lot of time on Borges and Poe, detective fiction, and the creation of the reader of detective fiction, which is all quite ...
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Latest Review: "The Unit" by Ninni Holmqvist
Our latest review is of Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, which was translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy and published by Other Press. Pretty interesting book (at least for the first two-thirds) about a future Sweden where those who are unwed and childless at the age of 50 have to live the rest of their lives in ...
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Introduction to Elsa Morante's Aracoeli
Our most recent release—which shipped to subscribers last week—is Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli, her last novel, and by far her darkest. Below you’ll find the excellent introduction Robert Boyers wrote for our reissue of this book. Thirty years ago, Elsa Morante seemed to many American writers and critics ...
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Where Have I Been These Past Few Months
That I didn’t realize New Directions has a blog. Not terribly active, but still, today’s post about Borges’s history with ND is pretty interesting. To provide some context for this quote: earlier in the summer ND held a contest to see if anyone could identify the first publication of Borges by ND. Answer: ...
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Scandinavian Crime Novels
Although I’m personally not a reader of Scandinavian crime fiction (unless you can somehow count Jan Kjaerstad’s trilogy in that group, which is closer to a leap than a stretch), I find the debate between Nathaniel Rich and Larissa Kyzer about why these books are so popular pretty fascinating. First off, ...
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