We’ve been blogging faithfully (if infrequently) on Cantos for several years now, sharing things like a look at designer Rodrigo Corral’s studio, an interview with translator Susan Bernofsky, and New Directions book cover designs by that little known artist Andy Warhol. As much fun as we’ve had, we’ve decided to kick off an all-new blog over at tumblr in honor of our upcoming 75th anniversary. Hopefully you’ll follow us over, where you can expect more updates, more books, and more fun. But don’t worry: our Cantos archives will still be available.

When I began reading Fortress Besieged, I couldn’t understand how it had become so obscure to Western readers.  In China, it is one of the most widely read and well known works of literature, and was made into a popular serialized television show in the 90s.  I had never heard of the novel before this past Spring, when I traveled to Shanghai.  Shanghai is a bizarre city.  Massive, brand new sky scrapers stand next to old towns of ramshackle housing.  Along the Huangpu river you can see beautiful buildings in several different architectural styles, some of them completely empty, abandoned since the days of the civil war.  The history of the city is complex and confusing, and I was eager to find novels and non-fiction books from different eras.

In a coincidence that isn’t really too surprising, I found that one of the greatest novels about Shanghai was published by New Directions.  Quian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged takes place in Shanghai, as well as in other places in China and Europe, during the time just before the Second Sino-Japanese War.  The novel depicts Shanghai at the height of the decadent time when the foreign concessions were the home of Western expatriates and government officials, expensive balls and Western intellectual culture.  The novel satires basically everything.

Fang Hung-chien is the protagonist of the sprawling, episodic adventure story.  He comes from a wealthy country background, and has an arranged marriage while studying at university, but his wife dies before he meets her.  According to custom, the family of the wife-to-be supports Fang’s travels to study abroad in Europe, Fang however, is unable to get a degree, and buys a fake diploma from an Irishmen.  He meets a woman on his voyage back to China, who he later marries.  The novels follows his downfall, living in Shanghai and the countryside, and the dissolution of his marriage.

Fortress Besieged at first appears mostly interested in satire and entertainment.  It’s actually incredibly funny, both the poop jokes and the (often misogynistic) commentary on romantic relationships.  Quan also satirizes Chinese intellectual culture and politics (the book was banned after China became communist, until 1980).  But for all the satire, there is serious commentary.  Quan was actually a scholar of English and Chinese literature, and he believed the Chinese adopted to much Western thought into their culture, making it less original.  The emotional complexity of Fang’s failed marriage also goes beyond satire.

I’m in the midst of compiling a database full of ND’s authors and their biographies. Along the way, I’ve come across many stories––interesting, intriguing, amusing, dark, impressive. The array can perhaps best be shown through the contrast in the deaths of Bohumil Hrabal, author of I Served the King of England, and Osamu Dazai, author of No Longer Human. Hrabal died in 1997 by falling out the fifth floor of a hospital in Prague, apparently trying to feed pigeons. Dazai committed suicide by throwing himself into the Tamagawa Reservoir in Tokyo. His body was found on what would have been his 39th birthday, June 19, 1948.

For many of the authors, their writing was only one of many careers. Basil Bunting (Complete Poems) and Muriel Spark (Not to Disturb) both worked for British Intelligence during WWII. Jonathan Williams (Ear in Bartram’s Tree), along with serving as the Musical Director of the Macon County Meshugga Sound Society, also acted as Vice-President of the Cast Iron Lawn Deer Owners of America. Robert Walser (Microscripts) worked as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor’s assistant. Uwe Timm (Snake Tree) apprenticed as a furrier before attending college. Will Alexander used to pull ticket stubs for the Los Angeles Lakers.

Some authors chose to remain quiet and reclusive. Landolfi, author of Gogol’s Wife & Other Stories, didn’t wish to release any information about his personal life. The jacket flap on a collection of his stories says: “This space left blank at the request of the author.” The cover photo for Gogol’s Wife was the only one Landolfi okayed for print, and it’s a photo of him with his hand in front of his face.

Xavier de Maistre’s novel, Voyage Around My Room, was the result of a forty-two day house arrest due to dueling.

Amelie Nothomb (Loving Sabotage) holds the world record for the fastest descent from Mount Fuji: 3,776 meters in 40 minutes.

During his youth, William Herrick (born 1915, author of Love and Terror) worked on an anarchist farm, lived in a Michigan commune, “hoboed” around the country, and was tarred and feathered while organizing Black sharecroppers in the South.

Roberto Bolaño escaped from prison during the Pinochet regime because two of the guards recognized him as a former classmate.

It would be interesting to map the intersections between ND authors. The map would probably end up covering a wall, mostly likely with Ezra Pound at the center. Although it would take forever to compile, here’s a small, modest beginning: Robert Duncan visited Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s in 1947 and subsequently began corresponding with him; Ezra Pound was briefly engaged to H.D. (Hilda Doolittle); the pair attended the University of Pennsylvania and were friends with William Carlos Williams, who was published in George Oppen’s Objectivist Press; Oppen also published Zukofsky, Reznikoff, and Rexroth; Rexroth led an anarchist discussion group in San Francisco, which Robert Duncan took part in. From there, it grows.

And finally, one of my favorite author photos, taken of Walter Abish (Alphabetical Africa, How German Is It):

–posted by Kelsey Ford

This May we continued our in house interviews with The Halfway House translator Anna Kushner, whose “commanding translation captures the unlikely combination of insouciance and resignation that defines Rosales’s tone.” (Words Without Borders). Anna tells the story of discovering the book in Spanish, and the following journey of securing the rights to the book in order to translate it.  Her insight into Rosales and his work provides an original perspective on the novel that truly enhances the meaning and significance of the work.

Watch Part 1 & 2 of the video segments here, and read the full transcript here.

We mourn the passing of Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago.  Saramago was the author of Blindness and All the Names, beautifully translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa.  Costa’s translation of All the Names won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the most prestigious European translation award. Saramago will be missed.

If you read Albert Cossery’s novel A Splendid Conspiracy with no prior knowledge, I imagine you would be surprised to learn that the smirking, irreverent, lighthearted tone, perfectly channeled into the arrogant world views of his three young main characters, belonged to a man writing in his 80s.

The novel opens with main character Teymour’s  melodramatic anguish at having returned home to his small town after spending six years in Paris. He left home under the pretense of continuing his studies; instead he embarked on a glorified vacation where the extent of what he learns is how much more exciting, interesting, and better European cities are.

In the first scene, Teymour sits at a café in a state of ennui, judging passersby as he faces “the terrifying prospect of having to stay there until he perished from boredom.” He quickly changes his attitude with the help of his friends and fellow revelers Imtaz and Medhat, but not before Cossery both empathizes with and gently mocks Teymour’s overblown self-pity in several hilarious passages:

“Do you live here? My god!”

“Yes,” sighed Teymour.

“You are so lucky!” said the man, for whom Teymour’s sigh seemed filled with contentment. “Allow me to envy you. I live in the country; I only come here on business from time to time. What a beautiful city!”

Teymour did not answer; holding a discussion about the beauty of the city with this poor ignoramus was, given the circumstances, equivalent to suicide. He simply nodded his head with a pained, tragic air, as if this mute agreement had been dragged out of him by torture.

Each scene of A Splendid Conspiracy is infused with Cossery’s particular brand of sly and gleeful humor, which often comes at the expense of his characters. His light-hearted descriptions often overwhelm the more serious revelations taking place. Some of these come through in Teymour’s constant revision of his interpretation of “the Awakening of the Nation,” a statue of a beckoning peasant woman that serves as a central figure in both the novel and the town square.  Teymour first sees her “lamenting the fact that she had been woken up to see this abomination,” corresponding with his own impression of the city. Later, after Teymour has revised his opinions and walks around the city happily laughing at humanity, he sees a vagrant sleeping at the statue’s feet and relishes the spectacle as a remarkable protest “against the system that had created the statue to serve its villainous cause.”

On the surface, A Splendid Conspiracy is about the mysterious disappearance and presumed murder of several wealthy men. The chief of police mistakes Teymour & Co.’s pranks and exploits for revolutionary plots, the absurdity of which isn’t lost on the tricksters, and they happily contribute to the suspicion. However, the mystery of the disappearances is always relegated to the back burner, never the primary focus. So much so that near the end, when the mystery is solved, I was surprised to even find out whodunit. Secrets, mysteries, and conspiracies criss-cross throughout the novel, but in deference to the three friends’ lighthearted attitudes, murder doesn’t take on any great significance. My favorite secret in the whole book, which highlights both Cossery’s wit and his character’s idiocy, is Teymour’s friend Imtaz’s nearsightedness:

His myopia, growing worse each year, was the bane of his acting career because Imtaz, not wanting to disappoint all those women who admired his tremendous good looks, refused to wear glasses…. He did not even wear them in town, and so people took him to be haughty and distant, an attitude completely foreign to his nature. And indeed, his short-sightedness gave his gaze the impenetrable and secretive air that lay at the very heart of his legend…. He was willing to do anything save spoil his beautiful face by donning a pair of ridiculous glasses. Rather than going around wearing such barbaric accouterments—which would have explained the true meaning of his misstep on stage—he had preferred to disappear from view, and had chosen his home town as his place of refuge.

I thoroughly enjoyed the novel from start to finish, all the while irritated at Teymour, Medhat, and Imtaz’s insufferable misogyny. The three dandies treat the entire city as their playground, and this includes its women. Women (and young girls) appear in the novel in order to be “debauched,” as conquests or unwitting players in their pranks. Salma, the only one not sexualized, is instead considered “a bitter female” and is only useful to them as the hostess for their orgies.

I countered that by not taking them seriously, only fitting since they do not take anything seriously themselves. I found redemption for the main characters’ behavior in the treatment of the outer ring of characters, whose stories I found more compelling, like Rezk. A poor orphan who provides for himself and his sister by becoming a police informant, Rezk finds his job, and therefore himself, despicable. He struggles with the conflicting feelings of affection for Teymour and his friends, whom he is supposed to be spying on, and gratitude for his boss’s benevolence. His hatred for a man who gravely insulted his father shortly before his death weighs on him, and I found the moment when he’s freed of this bitterness the most touching in the novel.

Cossery created a playful and exuberant  novel, where the rare serious moments have an added weight. A Splendid Conspiracy was translated from the original French by Alyson Waters, who won a PEN Translation Fund Award for her translation of Cossery’s The Colors of Infamy, forthcoming from New Directions.

If you enjoy A Splendid Conspiracy, I also recommend The Tanners by Robert Walser—the main characters of the two novels seem like would be the best of friends, if only they were real and lived on the same continent.

Every four years, the US interest in soccer (football) is renewed for about a month during the World Cup.  If World Cup fever has hit you, you might want to check out B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, a novel about a soccer reporter.

Johnson, who is even more obscure than soccer is in the US, and just as undeservedly, was reporting football matches for the Observer at the time The Unfortunates was written.  But the novel isn’t just about soccer.  As the writer travels back and forth to a town to report on soccer matches, his work is interrupted by haunting memories of a deceased friend who died tragically young.

Like Anne Carson’s Nox, The Unfortunates is a “book in a box,” the unbound pages come in a novel shaped box.  Only the first and last chapters are numbered; the rest can be shuffled around and read in any order.  The packaging reflects Johnson’s process of writing through memory.  The book is highly autobiographical, and the randomness of order is a result of Johnson’s exploration of arbitrary nature of memory.

After finishing The Unfortunates, check out this primer at Longform.org to get familiar with this years World Cup teams.

— Owen Roberts

Recent posts at The Guardian and The Millions collected quotes from writers giving advice about writing. With so much from our own writers about their craft and process, we decided to dig back into the archives to find our own in-house quotes for guidance and perspective.

William Carlos Williams from I Wanted to Write a Poem:

Was he a born poet, wanting to write as far back as he could remember?

No, no. It began with a heart attack

Robert Walser, quoted in the introduction to Walser’s Microscripts:

The writer of these lines experienced a time when he hideously, frightfully hated his pen, I can’t begin to tell you how sick of it he was; he became an outright idiot the moment he made the least use of it; and to free himself from this pen malaise he began to pencil-sketch, to scribble, fiddle about. With the aid of my pencil I was able to play, to write; it seemed this revived my writerly enthusiasm. I can assure you (this all began in Berlin) I suffered a real breakdown in my hand on account of the pen, a sort of cramp from whose clutches I slowly, laboriously freed myself by means of the pencil. A swoon, a cramp, a stupor–these are always both physical and mental. So I experienced a period of disruption that was mirrored, as it were, in my handwriting and its disintegration, and when I copied out the texts from this pencil assignment, I learned again, like a little boy, to write.

James Laughlin from his entry ‘Writing’ in The Way It Wasn’t:

This vernal season finds me camped with Rexroth on Potrero Hill, turning out mighty mounds daily of long overdue correspondence, handling through gamuts of gooz masquerading as manuscripts, translating Part II of Faust with MacIntyre, and pondering astrological movements. The people next door keep a cock on their upstairs porch and he salutes the dawn very punctually at four. This is a most mortal sound, which reminds a man that though love and art be long the old gut is gamboling fast toward the gravybox and he had better hurry to set down in immortal fiction his record of time.

Roberto Bolaño in his poem ‘Resurrection’, in The Romantic Dogs:

Poetry slips into dreams / like a diver who’s dead / in the eyes of God.

Paul Auster in his essay ‘Why Write,’ collected in The Red Notebook:

It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without making sure I had a pencil in my pocket. It’s not that I had any particular plans for that pencil, but I didn’t want to be unprepared. I had been caught empty-handed once, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again. If nothing else, the years have taught me this: if there’s a pencil in your pocket, there’s a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it.

Henry Miller from the excerpt ‘Why Don’t You Try to Write’, collected in Henry Miller on Writing:

To write, I meditated, must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse. A child has no need to write, he is innocent. a man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with the virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a world down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. His inspiration is deflected at the source. If it is a world of truth, beauty and magic that he desires to create, why does he put millions of words between himself and reality of that world?

Gustave Flaubert’s definition for ‘Write’, from his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas:

Dash things off––the excuse for errors of style or spelling.

Jorge Luis Borges in his essay ‘Borges and I’ collected in Everything and Nothing:

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to… I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively.

Javier Marías in his introduction to Written Lives (which is well worth reading for more about authors and their lives):

Anyway, the one thing that leaps out when you read about these authors is that they were all fairly disastrous individuals; and although they were probably no more so than anyone else whose life we know about, their example is hardly likely to lure along the path of letters.

photo of William Carlos Williams taken from Laughlin’s The Way It Wasn’t.

Recently, I picked up Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark as it has been a while since I’ve read anything by him. After reading it, I did some research on its history and was surprised to discover that Laughter in the Dark was originally published under the title Camera Obscura. It was first translated into English from the Russian by Winifred Roy in 1936. Nabokov was so displeased with Roy’s version that he translated it into English himself, changing the names of the characters and altering parts of the story.  The result was Laughter in the Dark, originally published in 1938, and then reissued by New Directions in 1960.

Laughter in the Dark is a more appropriate title, because the novel is very humorous, but also the darkest book by Nabokov that I’ve read.  Written during Nabokov’s long stay in Berlin* (1922-1937), and his disposition of that city and its people is reflected in the novel.  There are no sympathetic character in Laughter in the Dark.  While I felt pity for many of the characters, they’re all pretty much evil, or kind of pathetic, or both.  The humor in the novel rests of Nabokov’s satire of Berlin’s intellectual circles, where it seems that no one actually likes anyone else, and their lives consist of endless pretension and social miscues.  An example:

Laughter in the Dark is, in a way, a precursor to Lolita.  The theme of an older man lusting after a young girl is very apparent in the book, though it isn’t as explicit as Lolita.  Although Margot is eighteen, the descriptions make her feel younger. The lust of the protagonist, an art critic named Albert Albinus, feels similar to that of Humbert Humbert. Yet Laughter in the Dark is clearly written by a younger Nabokov.  The humor is more bitter and less refined, and the lyrical precision that he attained with Lolita still has yet to be honed. But Laughter in the Dark is filled with surprising qualities. The portrayal of Albert Albinus’ lust is in some ways more compelling and more metaphorical than that of Humbert Humbert.  And though I won’t reveal it, the final scene of the novel alone is worth reading the whole book.  It’s incredible.

New Directions’s founder James Laughlin had an interesting relationship with Nabokov.  More on that can be found at the other New Directions blog, The Way It Wasn’t.

A number of our backlist titles are now available again. We’re especially excited about the Maude Hutchins titles: Georgiana, A Diary of Love, My Hero, and Love is a Pie. In these four novels, Hutchins writes, respectively, about a girl with brain and flair; a girl with a probing, darting, fantasy-building mind; a man’s intimate history, as seen through the eyes of a woman; and free will, responsibility, death, innocence and religion.  As an added bonus, Andy Warhol designed the cover for Love is a Pie. More information about Warhol and his covers for New Directions can be found in this earlier blog post.

Some editions have new and updated covers, including In the Green Morning: Memories of Federico by Francisco García Lorca and The Flower Show / The Toth Family by István Örkény.

In the Green Morning travels with Federico and brother Francisco through their childhood in the “quiet, very fragrant” Andalusian village of Fuente Vaqueros. The volume also includes ten of Francisco’s lectures on his brother’s work.

Örkény’s two novellas have much darker themes. The first, The Flower Show, explores the voyeurism of the modern media through the development of a reality TV show that follows the last days of a collection of characters. In The Toth Family, a mad army major terrorizes a village fireman and his family.

Other titles now available include:

• An Accidental Biography by Gregory Corso
• Moral Tales by Jules Laforgue
• Telegraph and The Green Huntsman by Stendhal
• Us He Devours by James B. Hall
• Zero Hour by Ernesto Cardenal
• An Ear in Bartram’s Tree by Jonathan Williams
• Deep Song and Other Prose by Federico Garcia Lorca
• Sunday After the War by Henry Miller
• Jean Racine––Dramatist by Martin Turnell