David Hadbawnik and Anne Carson aren’t aiming to produce new schoolroom translations of the classics; they’ve reimagined these ancient texts in the light of our violent and chaotic contemporaneity.
New Directions
Humankind’s History of Betraying Animals
Thalia Field’s poems collage scientific, historical, and philosophical sources to explore speciesism.
Missives From the War to End All Wars
Elizabeth Gray’s poems seek to discover where we are in the midst of a battle we can never fully see.
César Aira Portrays Artforum as an Object of Desire
The novelist transforms the magazine into an ambiguous symbol of everything its reader might lack.
A Writer’s Portrait of Louise Bourgeois
Now, Now Louison is a book that will trouble purists who believe in strict categories, such as biography, art criticism, and novel.
Susan Howe’s Feminist Poetics
Throughout her work and in her latest volume, Concordance, Howe confronts the plight of the female writer in a masculine literary culture.
The Artists Who Wrote Poetry at Black Mountain, From Josef Albers to John Cage
Including poems from well known writers and less expected artists, Black Mountain Poems produces a keener vision of the interdisciplinary culture of the famed college.
A Book Assumes the Voice of Louise Bourgeois in Uncomfortable Ways
Jean Frémon began his book Now, Now, Louison while the artist, who was also a friend, was still alive.
César Aira’s Memoir Responds to an Existentialist Crisis
Whatever might be truth or fiction in Birthday is used in service of the book’s main question: What has been the purpose of the author’s life?
A New Collection of Surrealist Writings Focuses on Women Authors
The Milk Bowl of Feathers shows how women’s contributions to the Surrealist literary canon captivatingly crack the wall of Surrealist phallocracy.
A Dystopian Fairy Tale Reflects Challenges of the Present
Despite the serious environmental and political challenges presented in The Emissary, Yoko Tawada suggests that another path exists.
Intertextual Depth in Susan Howe’s Debths
These poems collage Paul Thek’s art, 19th-century American literature, and a fairy tale to create a fresh understanding of the memory and soul.