Tales of Desire (New Directions Pearls)
Tales of Desire (New Directions Pearls)

Author: Tennessee Williams

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2010-02-24

Total Pages: 81

ISBN-13: 0811220834

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"I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny."—John Waters “I cannot write any sort of story,” said Tennessee [to Gore Vidal] “unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.” These transgressive Tales of Desire, including “One Arm,” “Desire and the Black Masseur,” “Hard Candy,” and “The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen,” show the iconic playwright at his outrageous best.

Never Love a Gambler (New Directions Pearls)
Never Love a Gambler (New Directions Pearls)

Author: Keith Ridgway

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2014-05-27

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 0811222942

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In 'Never Love a Gambler,' the Irish writer Keith Ridgway flips conventional narrative with unconventional drama. His charcters negotiate their way through love and lust, religious obsession and ghost sightings, crimes and disappearance in stories told with innovative mastery and brightened by fiercely vivid dialogue. Here, Ridgway showcases his brilliance as a bracing and violently funny storyteller.

Tales of Desire
Tales of Desire

Author: Tennessee Williams

Publisher: New Directions Pearls

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780811218566

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I cannot write any sort of story, said Williams unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire. These transgressive "Tales of Desire" show the iconic playwright at his outrageous best.

Morphine (New Directions Pearls)
Morphine (New Directions Pearls)

Author: Mikhail Bulgakov

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2013-09-26

Total Pages: 65

ISBN-13: 0811221687

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From the author of The Master and Margarita comes this short and tragic masterpiece about drug addiction Young Dr. Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend’s aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What Bromgard uncovers in the entries is Polyakov’s uncontrollable and merciless descent into morphine addiction — his first injection to ease his back pain, the thrill of the drug as it overtakes him, the looming signs of addiction, and the feverish final entries before his death.

On Booze (New Directions Pearls)
On Booze (New Directions Pearls)

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2011-06-28

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 081121933X

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A collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best drinking stories makes this the most intoxicating New Directions Pearl yet! “First you take a drink,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, “then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” Fitzgerald wrote alcohol into almost every one of his stories. On Booze gathers debutantes and dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children and ragtime riff-raff into a newly compiled collection taken from The Crack-Up, and other works never before published by New Directions. On Booze portrays “The Jazz Age” as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, and lush — with quite a hangover.

The Leviathan (New Directions Pearls)
The Leviathan (New Directions Pearls)

Author: Joseph Roth

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2011-06-29

Total Pages: 65

ISBN-13: 0811219321

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Joseph Roth’s final novella, The Leviathan, concerns a shtetl’s finest coral merchant and how his dream of seeing the sea for the first time materializes at a terrible cost. In the small town of Progrody, Nissen Piczenik makes his living as the most respected coral merchant of the region. Nissen has never been outside of his town, deep in the Russian interior, and fantasizes that a Leviathan watches over the coral reefs. When the sailor nephew of one of Progrody’s residents comes to visit, Nissen loses little time in befriending him for the purpose of learning about the sea. The sailor offers Nissen a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come to Odessa and tour his ship. Nissen leaves his business during the peak coral season, and stays in Odessa for three weeks. But upon his return to Progrody, Nissen finds that a new coral merchant has moved into the neighboring town, and his coral is quickly becoming the most sought after. As his customers dwindle, life takes an evil twist for Nissen Piczenik. And the final decider of his fate may be the devil himself.

Urn Burial (New Directions Pearls)
Urn Burial (New Directions Pearls)

Author: Thomas Browne

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2010-10-26

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 0811221547

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Urn Burial, one of the most influential essays in Western literature, is now available as a New Directions Pearl. Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, is one of the pinnacles of Renaissance scholarship and without doubt one of the great essays in English literature. Beginning with observations on the recent discovery of Roman antiquities in the form of burial urns, Browne’s associative mind wanders to elephant graveyards, to pre-Christian cremation ceremonies, and finally to the idea of Christian burial. Browne then explores, with a more melancholic meditation, man’s struggles with mortality and the uncertainty of his fate and fame in the living world. This edition includes a magisterial discourse on Sir Thomas Browne taken from the first chapter of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

Everything and Nothing (New Directions Pearls)
Everything and Nothing (New Directions Pearls)

Author: Jorge Luis Borges

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2010-05-25

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 0811231283

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A pocket-sized Pearls edition of some of Borges’ best fictions and essays. Everything and Nothing collects the best of Borges’ highly influential work—written in the 1930s and ‘40s—that foresaw the internet (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”), quantum mechanics (“The Garden of Forking Paths”), and cloning (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”). David Foster Wallace described Borges as “scalp-crinkling . . . Borges’ work is designed primarily as metaphysical arguments...to transcend individual consciousness.”

The Literary Conference (New Directions Pearls)
The Literary Conference (New Directions Pearls)

Author: César Aira

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2010-05-25

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13: 0811218783

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New in the New Directions Pearls series: an extremely rich mad scientist attempts to clone a leading genius in a bid to take over the world. César is a translator who’s fallen on very hard times due to the global economic downturn; he is also an author, and a mad scientist hell-bent on world domination. On a visit to the beach he intuitively solves an ancient riddle, finds a pirate’s treasure, and becomes a very wealthy man. Even so, César’s bid for world domination comes first and so he attends a literary conference to be near the man whose clone he hopes will lead an army to victory: the world-renowned Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes. A comic science fiction fantasy of the first order, The Literary Conference is the perfect vehicle for César Aira’s take over of literature in the 21st century.

Because She Never Asked (New Directions Pearls)
Because She Never Asked (New Directions Pearls)

Author: Enrique Vila-Matas

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2015-11-09

Total Pages: 50

ISBN-13: 0811225704

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A novella—half joke and half nightmare— by "Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure" (The New Yorker) Because She Never Asked is a story reminiscent of that reached by the travelers in Patricia Highsmith's Stranger on a Train. The author first writes a piece for the artist Sophie Calle to live out: a young, aspiring, French artist travels to Lisbon and the Azores in pursuit of an older artist whose work she’s in love with. The second part of the story tells what happens between the author and Calle. She eludes, him; he becomes blocked, and suffers physical collapse. “Something strange happened along the way,” Vila-Matas wrote. “Normally, writers try to pass a work of fiction off as being real. But in Because She Never Asked, the opposite occurred: in order to give meaning to the story of my life, I found that I needed to present it as fiction.”