paperbook nightwood labyrinths directions

books:

Journey to the End of the Night (New Directions Paperbook)

93 reviews
Louis-Ferdinand Celine

New Directions, 2006

The Finest Book About Humanity Ever Written
The book in question is a triumph in every sense of the word. If you aren't taken in from the first couple of pages then do yourself a favor and kill yourself immediately. What Celine is able to do here is not only to paint a portrait of a character, or of a type, but in the end the whole of humanity. Much of the humanity in question is not pleasant, nor are the situations they force the poor, ...

Nightwood

21 reviews
Djuna Barnes

New Directions, 2006

Homosexuality is not really the focus -- but it's there
Barnes' Magnum opus, "Nightwood" (1936), was her second novel and one of those books that probably 'must' be read, the same as "Winesburg, Ohio" (Sherwood Anderson), or "The Great Gatsby", (F. Scott Fitzgerald). Poet Donald J. Greiner once wrote, "[It]...stands out among post-World War I American novels as one of the first notable experiments with a type of comedy that makes the reader want to ...

New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions Paperbook)

45 reviews
Thomas Merton

New Directions, 2007

"To hope is to risk frustration. So make up your mind in advance to risk frustration."
Thomas Merton's "New Seeds of Contemplation" is nothing short of life-changing: the complexity of his relationship with the interior life and titanic inward spirituality makes this the kind of book you will refer to for your entire life and may never understand it fully even then (I don't, and have read it twice now). For all that, you will still enjoy and admire the man. Just about ...

Nausea

90 reviews
Jean-Paul Sartre

New Directions, 2007

The poetry of obsessive uselessness
Sartre's "Nausea" is a gripping, twitchy little novella confirming the ways one person of unpleasant station can make them self sick , nervous, an odious presence by lingering long on the ambivalent shrug .No one else could write a better tale of an intensely self-aware intellectual whose physical discomforts translate into a changed worldview. Not a lot of laughs, but Sartre does insert his ...

The Berlin Stories

24 reviews
Christopher Isherwood

New Directions, 2008

"Even now I can't altogether believe that any of this has really happened."
Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories" is perhaps most famous for having inspired the stage and screen masterpiece Cabaret, but those who are looking for an exact match between the two will be disappointed. The divine Sally Bowles does make an appearance (her charisma and verve are the book's high point), but only briefly, and her story only contains only seeds of what would become Cabaret's ...

Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New Directions Paperbook)

39 reviews
Jorge Luis Borges

New Directions, 2007

Writings of a great reader
In "How To Read a Book" Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren describe the fourth level of reading. Synoptical reading challenges the reader who, having carefully and thoroughly understood several individual works, strives to hear the conversation of their ensemble. "Labyrinths" brings us the dreamlike reflections of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges's profoundly synoptical reading. Borges ...

Colossus of Maroussi

29 reviews
Henry Miller

New Directions, 1975

Miller at his finest, then again, not so much like Miller
When he was not tackling sex and philosophy, Henry Miller traveled. The Colossus of Maroussi is a book of those later times, when he, an "American Savage", entered the world of peace, beauty, and most of all, simplicity he was longing for while living in America. Nothing could prepare him for what he encountered in Greece, not the streets of New York, nor the streets of Paris. Although enamored ...

I Served the King of England (New Directions Paperbook)

20 reviews
Bohumil Hrabal

New Directions, 2007

"I was always lucky in my bad luck."
First published and distributed secretly during the 1980s in Czechoslovakia, this tragicomic novel by Bohumil Hrabal is a first-person account by Ditie, a teenage busboy at a rural hotel who progresses to waiter, and eventually to successful hotel owner before his fall when the communists take over. The picaresque plot serves as the framework for a series of often hilarious stories about the ...