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"Not after the establishment, but speaking straight ahead." This is how William Carlos Williams referred to his own forthrightness as well as his practice of using only American speech patterns in his poems. In Interviews with William Carlos Williams, Linda Wagner of the English Department, Michigan State University, has assembled Dr. Williams's most important public statements. The first section, entitled simply "Interviews," reproduces in toto three in-depth conversations, revealing Dr. Williams's humor, vitality, and American-ness, as he discusses his theories of poetic meter and diction, his opinions of such contemporaries as Pound and Eliot, and his view of his own role in shaping the course of modern American poetry. The second section, "Dialogues," is arranged alphabetically by subject heading. Here are recorded the poet's thoughts on topics from "Art" to "Women." The third and final part of Interviews with William Carlos Williams, "Memoirs and Miscellany," includes the touching account of a visit to the Williamses by artist Gael Turnbull in 1958. Also reprinted are two of Dr. Williams's best expositions of his own poetic techniques, "The American Idiot" and "How to Write"--essays which appeared in early New Directions anthologies but have been generally unavailable since. This valuable collection of comments "for the record" is annotated and includes an index.

An Empty Room is the first book by the celebrated Chinese writer Mu Xin to appear in English. A cycle of thirteen tenderly evocative stories written while Mu Xin was living in exile, this collection is reminiscent of the structural beauty of Hemingway's In Our Time and the imagistic power of Kawabata's palm-of-the-hand stories. From the ordinary (a bus accident) to the unusual (Buddhist halos) to the wise (Goethe, Lao Zi), Mu Xin's wandering "I" interweaves plots with philosophical grace and spiritual profundity. A small blue bowl becomes a symbol of vanishing childhood; a painter in a race against fading memory scribbles notes in an underground prison during the Cultural Revolution; an abandoned temple room holds a dark mystery. An Empty Room is a soul-stirring page turner, a Sebaldian reverie of passing time, loss, and humanity regained.

Here are portraits of American life during the Great Depression and after, populated by a hopelessly hopeful chorus girl, a munitions manufacturer ensnared in a love triangle, a rural family that deals "justice" on its children, an overconfident mob dandy, a poor couple who quarrel to vanquish despair, a young "spinster" enthralled by the impulse of rebellion, and, in "The Magic Tower," a passionate artist and his wife whose youth and optimism are not enough to protect their "dream marriage." This new volume gathers some of Williams's most exuberant early work and includes one-acts that he would later expand to powerful full-length dramas: "The Pretty Trap," a cheerful take on The Glass Menagerie, and "Interior: Panic," a stunning precursor to A Streetcar Named Desire.The plays include:     . At Liberty     . The Magic Tower     . Me, Vashya     . Curtains for the Gentleman     . In Our Profession     . Every Twenty Minutes     . Honor the Living     . The Case of the Crushed Petunias     . Moony's Kid Don't Cry     . The Dark Room     . The Pretty Trap     . Interior: Panic     . Kingdom of Earth     . I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays     . Some Problems for The Moose Lodge

Between 1967 and 1997, George Steiner wrote more than 130 pieces on a great range of topics for The New Yorker, making new books, difficult ideas, and unfamiliar subjects seem compelling not only to intellectuals but to "the common reader." He possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children's games, war-time Britain, Hitler's bunker, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Cellini, Bernhard, Chardin, Mandelstam, Kafka, Cardinal Newman, Verdi, Gogol, Borges, Brecht, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal guide from the Risorgimento in Italy to the literature of the Gulag, from the history of chess to the enduring importance of George Orwell. Again and again everything Steiner looks at in his New Yorker essays is made to bristle with some genuine prospect of turning out to be freshly thrilling or surprising.

Lands of Memory presents a half-dozen wonderful works by Felisberto Hernández, "a writer like no other," Italo Calvino declared, "like no European or Latin American. He is an 'irregular,' who eludes all classifications and labellings-yet he is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books."Named a Guardian Best Book of the Year by Alfred Brendel and a TLS Best Book of the Year by Michael Hofmann (who calls Felisberto "a loopier, vegetarian Kafka, inhabiting his mazy personal baroque"), Lands of Memory collects four astonishing stories and the two dreamlike novellas "Around the Time of Clemente Colling" and "Lands of Memory."

Allen Grossman's newest work Descartes' Loneliness blends the comic and tragic. As the writer Ha Jin once wrote, it is "remarkable for the stout spirit of the speaker who dares to be funny while tackling such an austere subject as death." Poems such as "The Famished Dead," where the poet is visited by lost loved ones, "one at a time," confirm Jorie Graham's observation that "from the bottom reaches of the underworld, to the elevations from which one need cry to be heard-Grossman invents such peace as Poetry can invent."

Our hero Carlos Maia, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Portugal, is rich, handsome, generous and intelligent: he means to do something for his country, something useful, something that will make his beloved grandfather proud. However, Carlos is also a bit of a dilettante. He drifts along, becoming a doctor and pottering about in his laboratory, but spends more and more time riding his splendid horses or visiting the theater, having affairs or reading novels. His best friend and chief partner in crime, Ega, is likewise engaged in a long summertime of witticisms and pleasure. Carlos however is set on a dead reckoning course with fate-with the love of his life and with a terrible, terrible secret...Newly translated by the acclaimed translator Margaret Jull Costa (translator of José Saramago's Blindness), New Directions is proud to bring Eça de Queirós' brilliant prose to life for American readers for the first time.

Chosen as a 2005 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, Where Europe Begins has been described by the Russian literary phenomenon Victor Pelevin as "a spectacular journey through a world of colliding languages and multiplying cities." In these stories' disparate settings-Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany-the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author, or the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a traveler on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his own reflection. Through the timeless art of storytelling, Yoko Tawada discloses the virtues of bewilderment, estrangement, and Hilaritas: the goddess of rejoicing.

Madman. Prophet. Magician. Hippie. Murderer. Who is the Sunlight Man?In The Sunlight Dialogues, John Gardner's vision of America in the turbulent 1960s embraces an unconventional cast of conventional citizens in the small rural town of Batavia, New York. Sheriff Fred Clumly is trying desperately to unravel mysteries surrounding a disorderly, nameless drifter called "The Sunlight Man," who has been jailed for painting the word "LOVE" across two lanes of traffic, and who is later suspected of murder. The men battle over morality, freedom and their opposing notions of justice, leading each to find his own state of grace. Their conflict is mirrored in the community of middlebrow politicians and their church-going wives, Native Americans, working-class immigrants, farmers, soldiers, petty thieves, and even centenarian sisters too stubborn to die. Gardner's alchemy is existential: from the most raw, vulnerable, and conflicting characters in the American melting pot, he transmutes common denominators of human isolation and longing. With unnerving suspense, his acute ear for American speech, and permeated by his deep- rooted belief in morality, this expansive, sprawling, and ambitious novel is John Gardner's masterpiece: "A superb literary achievement," noted The Boston Globe.

A selection of harsh, sometimes violent, and often surreal stories by the premier young avant-garde Chinese woman writer.A couple moves with their young daughter to the seaside, only to be terrorized by hostile townsfolk, predatory seabirds, and the persistent sound of the waves. Two old friends spend their waning days traipsing amongst ruined walls, imagining bubbling brooks and lush marshland. An old man lives atop a bizarre wooden building in the clouds, where he is served pancakes by a hostile youth.These are the scenarios of just some of the stories in this generous new collection by Can Xue. Although rooted in the folk traditions of Chinese literature and the real conflicts of contemporary Chinese life, Can Xue's stories exist in a separate space and time where dreams and reality coalesce: tenderness quickly turns to violence, strange diseases are caught, and quaint landscapes become phantasmagorical. Can Xue's literary world is inhabited by ghosts, dying old men, street urchins, cobblers, farmers, cats, rats, and stray dogs. Much influenced by Borges, Kafka, and Bruno Schulz, this new collection of Can Xue's surreal stories confirms The New York Times' assessment that "reading Can Xue's fiction is like running downhill in the dark; you've got momentum, but you don't know where you're headed."

Mary de Rachewiltz's autobiographical account, Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher, which first appeared as a New Directions Paperbook in 1975, is now reissued with a new afterword by the author. Set against the background of Fascist Italy and the Tyrolean Alps where she spent the early years of her childhood, the story Ezra Pound's daughter movingly reveals is a side of the poet which is seldom touched upon, that of devoted father, and at the same time serves to illuminate many of the more difficult, personal passages of The Cantos. But the book is more than a mere memoir, for Mary de Rachewiltz is an accomplished poet and translator in her own right, guided in her craft under her father's tutelage: through her stylized, often oblique prose technique we are enabled to appreciate more deeply Pound's inner anguish during the war years and the strains put upon him by the circumstances of his life. Many of the scenes described are illustrated with photographs. while the narrative itself gleams with lines from The Cantos that light up the events of the author's life as her life lights up the poetry.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Pablo Neruda's birth, New Directions is pleased to announce the reissue of a classic work in a timeless translation by Donald D. Walsh and fully bilingual. Residence on Earth is perhaps Neruda's greatest work. Upon its publication in 1973, this bilingual publication instantly became "a revolution... a classic by which masterpieces are judged" (Review). "In Residence on Earth," wrote Amado Alonso, "the tornado of fury will no longer pass without lingering, because it will be identified with [Neruda's] heart."

Ancestors startlingly reinvents one of the most important long poems of our hemisphere. Here in a single volume is Kamau Brathwaite's long unavailable, landmark trilogy--Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self (1977, 1982, and 1987)--now completely revised and expanded by the author. With its "Video Sycorax" typographic inventions and linguistic play, Ancestors liberates both the language and the new-Caliban vision of the poet. In its fresh and more experimental form the trilogy embodies the recapture (what the poet has called the "intercovery") of Brathwaite's African/Caribbean ancestry as a possession of power and renewal, even as it plumbs the deep tonalities of enslavement, oppression, and colonial dispossession.

If this, Uwe Timm's enchanting novel, were a cautionary tale, the tag line would go something like this: Should you plan to be in Berlin on Midsummer Night, the time of the summer solstice - Watch Out! The narrator of Timm's story is a writer who simply can't get started on his next book. So he accepts a commission to write an article about potatoes. He has some interest in the subject because of an uncle who could, remarkably, from taste alone, differentiate one species of potato from another. Since one of the authorities on the subject worked in East Berlin, our hero takes off to do some research. Rushing around the newly united city, he becomes involved in a series of madcap adventures, strange entanglements, and odd, sometimes threatening encounters. Uwe Timm spins a fascinating tale here, one filled with surprise, magic, comedy, and hope.

The poet presents a selection of thirty-four of her own poems culled from previously published volumes, tracing her movement from agnosticism to Christian faith and her oscillation from doubt to affirmation along the way.

Kamau Brathwaite, who won the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, has revised his celebrated 1979 Casa de las Americas collection, Black + Blues, for its first edition by a U.S. publisher. A rich, arid, beautiful collection, Black + Blues is cast in three parts - "Fragments," "Drought," and "Flowers." In Brathwaite's voice, as The Beloit Poetry Journal noted, "the false distinctions between poetry and polemic, between tragic vision and comic insight, between anger and tenderness, here disappear. At last a major poet of our troubled history and troubling time is available to readers in this country." "His dazzling, inventive language, his tragic yet unquenchable vision," as Adrienne Rich declared, "make Kamau Brathwaite one of the most compelling of late 20th century poets."

An experimental first novel of poem-like compression, Annotations has a great deal to say about growing up Black in St. Louis. Reminiscent of Jean Toomer's Cane, the book is in part a meditation on African-American autobiography. Keene explores questions of identity from many angles-from race to social class to sexuality (gay and straight). Employing all manner of textual play and rhythmic and rhetorical maneuvers, he (re)creates his life story as a jazz fugue-in-words.

Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style in Glass, Irony and God. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Brontë sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

Set in nineteenth-century India between two revolutionary moments of change, Twilight in Delhi brings history alive, depicting most movingly the loss of an entire culture and way of life. As Bonamy Dobree said, "It releases us into a different and quite complete world. Mr. Ahmed Ali makes us hear and smell Delhi...hear the flutter of pigeons' wings, the cries of itinerant vendors, the calls to prayer, the howls of mourners, the chants of qawwals, smell jasmine and sewage, frying ghee and burning wood." The detail, as E.M. Forster said, is "new and fascinating," poetic and brutal, delightful and callous. First published by the Hogarth Press in 1940. Twilight in Delhi was widely acclaimed by critics and hailed in India as a major literary event. Long since considered a landmark novel, it is now available in the U.S. as a New Directions Classic. Twilight in Delhi has also been translated into French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Urdu.

In her celebrated essay "Against Decoration," published in Parnassus, Mary Karr took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days and their attendant justifications: deconstruction and a "new formalism" that elevates form as an end in itself. Her own poems, she says, are "humanist poems," written for everyday readers rather than an exclusive audience--poems that do not require an academic explication in order to be understood. Of The Devil's Tour, her newest collection, she writes: "This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. l am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: 'The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heav'n or a heav'n of hell ... I myself am hell."

Stitching Porcelain, Deborah Larsen's first book of poetry, is a narrative-lyric sequence based on the life of Matteo Ricci, the resourceful Jesuit who entered China in 1583 and stayed for a quarter century. Pondering cultural accommodation as well as faith, many of the poems center on actual events: Ricci's dressing as a Buddhist; his awe-inspiring map (with China shrewdly centered); his prostration before an empty Dragon Throne. Other events the poet imagined. (In the title room, Ricci addresses a love lyric to China: "Your porcelain is so fine, so thin,/a brass wire can repair it . . . /Once I saw you beneath the bamboo/ . . . bent back/from the world, stitching porcelain.") With a felicity rare in a debut volume, Larsen's opalescent poetry works in perfect counterpoint to the strange and brilliant Ricci.

Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems is a new, expanded edition of Jimmy Santiago Baca's best-selling first book of poetry (originally published by Louisiana State University Press in 1979). A number of poems from early, now unavailable chapbooks have also been included so that the reader can at last have an overview of Baca's remarkable literary development. The voice of Immigrants will be familiar to readers of the widely praised Martín & Meditations on the South Valley and Black Mesa Poems (New Directions, 1987 and 1989), but the territory may not be. Most of the poems in this collection were written while the author was in prison, where he taught himself to read and write. All the poems are concerned with the incarcerated or the disenfranchised; they all communicate the sting from the backhand of the American promise. As Denise Levertov has noted, Baca "is far from being a naive realist," but of poverty and prejudice, of material that is truly raw, he "writes in unconcealed passion."

'Misunderstandings, uncertainties, belated understandings, useless remorse, treacherous memories, stupid and irredeemable mistakes, all these irresistibly fascinate me, ' the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi remarks. 'Life is by nature ambiguous and distributes ambiguities among all of us.' This side of life is reflected in these eleven stories. Is it choice, fate, accident, or even, occasionally, a kind of magic that plays the decisive role in the protagonists' lives?

With some changes in the contents-most notably the addition of sixteen recently discovered poems-Last & Lost Poems is a paperbound version of the highly praised 1979 Vanguard Press publication. That book disclosed that between 1958 and 1966, despite his disintegrating life, Delmore Schwartz was indeed working and producing poems full of the special magic that had propelled him early on into the literary limelight. Commenting on it, Richard Wilbur hailed Last & Lost Poems as "a valuable book... Schwartz sounds like no other voice in our time--rhapsodic yet philosophic; self-conscious; self-forgetting; unguarded; rejoicing or insisting on obligation to rejoice... Wonderfully free and energetic.""This posthumous collection will perhaps help to re-establish Delmore Schwartz as one of the major twentieth-century American poets."-John Ashbery"Delmore's genius survives in the sound of his words, in his hypnotizing lines."-Jonathan Galassi, The New York Review of Books"The greatest man I ever met."-Lou Reed

So cleverly and wittily are the stories told that we sense we belong in the charmed café society of post-1918 Britain, and life seems, as Ernest Jones says in his critical introduction, "a Nirvana in which homosexuals are the ultimate chic and in which... almost everyone turns out to be at least bi-sexual." In Vainglory, Mrs. Shamefoot, who "almost compels a tear," embraces the quest for a cathedral stained-glass window "that should be a miracle of violet glass." In Inclinations, Miss Brookomore, filled with longing for her companion, the "sunny" Miss Mabel Collins, travels to Greece where Mabel, rather treacherously, acquires a husband and baby. And in Caprice, Miss Sinquier flees her rural parents and the comfort of her black slippers ("all over little pearls with filigree butterflies that trembled above her toes") to pursue an acting career in bohemian London. To quote Mrs. Shamefoot describing a novelist clearly meant to be Firbank: "He has such a strange, peculiar style. His work calls to mind a frieze with figures of varying heights trotting all the same way. If one should by chance turn about it's usually merely to stare or to sneer or to make a grimace. Only occasionally his figures care to beckon. And they seldom really touch." Originally published in 1951, Three More Novels by Ronald Firbank is now reissued as a New Directions Paperbook.

In 1944, New Directions brought out Thomas Merton's first book of verse. By the time of his tragic, untimely death in 1968, Father Louis (as he was known at the Trappist monastery where he lived for twenty-seven years) had published upwards of fifty books and pamphlets, including several more collections of poetry. All of these poems have been assembled in a single, definitive volume (first published by New Directions in 1977) which includes much additional unpublished or uncollected material drawn from the archive of the Merton Studies Center at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, or supplied by the poet's friends and associates. Brought together in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton are: Early Poems (1940-42, published posthumously in 1971), Thirty Poems (1944), A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), Figures for an Apocalypse (1947), The Tear of the Blind Lions (1949), The Strange Islands (1957), Original Child Bomb (1962), Emblems of a Season of Fun (1963), Cables to Ace (1968), and The Geography of Lograire (completed in 1968 and published posthumously). These are followed by Sensation Time at the Home and Other New Poems, a book which Merton completed shortly before his death. There are also sections of uncollected poems, humorous verse, poems written in French, with some English translations, Merton's translations of poetry from various languages, drafts and fragments, and a selection of concrete poems. With the availability of The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton as a New Directions paperbook, an ever wider audience may more fully appreciate the impressive range of the poet's technique, the scope of his concerns, and the humaneness of his vision.