From "one of the greatest modern novelists" comes a haunting tale of angels, art, and modern love (A. S. Byatt).In Lost Paradise, Cees Nooteboom sets out to connect two seemingly unrelated strangers whom he has glimpsed on his travels, and to explore the major impact that small interactions can have on the course of our journeys.A beautiful woman aboard a Berlin-bound flight becomes Alma, a young lady who leaves her parents' São Paulo home on a hot...

The best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from and about Berlin—in the series that's "like a literary vacation" ( Publishers Weekly).In 1990s Berlin, the scars of a century of war were still visible everywhere: coal stoves, crumbling buildings, desolate minimarts, not a working buzzer or elevator. To visit the city then was a hallucinatory experience, a simultaneous journey into the past and into the future.The abandoned ruins, the hidden...

Cosmopolitan, vivacious essays in the tradition of Brodsky’s Watermark and Benjamin’s The Arcades Project by a celebrated young Mexican author.Valeria Luiselli is an evening cyclist; a literary tourist in Venice, searching for Joseph Brodsky’s tomb; an excavator of her own artifacts, unpacking from a move. In essays that are as companionable as they are ambitious, she uses the city to exercise a roving, meandering intelligence, seeking out the que...

“Profoundly unsettling . . . haunt[s] the mind for long afterwards.” —The Sunday Times“The kind of book that stays with you forever.” —The Guardian“Hugely entertaining." —The ScotsmanA Sunday Times Book of the Year: A brooding meditation on violence set during World War II—from a classic Dutch writer who has drawn comparisons to Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut

Roads to Berlin maps the changing landscape of Germany, from the period before the fall of the Wall to the present. Written and updated over the course of several decades, an eyewitness account of the pivotal events of 1989 gives way to a perceptive appreciation of its difficult passage to reunification.Nooteboom's writings on politics, people, architecture and culture are as digressive as they are eloquent; his innate curiosity takes him through the landscapes of Heine and Goethe,...

"An outstanding addition to an impressive oeuvre" Times Literary SupplementArthur Daane, a documentary film-maker and inveterate globetrotter, wanders the streets of Berlin, a city whose recent past provides the perfect backdrop for his reflections on life and the universe as he collects images for his latest project - a film that will show the world through his eyes.With his circle of friends - a philosopher, a sculptor and a physicist - Daane dis...

The noted Dutch poet and novelist Cees Nooteboom reflects upon the life of the mind through a reexamination of books, music, art, travel, and gardeningThough a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to Menorca, “the island of the wind.” It is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects, that the 533 days of writing take place. The result is not a di...

Set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in The Foxes Come At Night read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death. Their protagonists collect and reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of a photograph. In 'Paula', the narrator evokes the mysterious, brief life of a woman he once loved; in 'Paula II', the same woman is aware of the man thinking of her. No lon...

Beautifully translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, the IMPAC Award-winning translator of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, Hugo Claus’s poems are remarkable for their dexterity, intensity of feeling, and acute intelligence. From the richly associative and referential “Oostakker Poems” to the emotional and erotic outpouring of the “mad dog stanzas” in “Morning, You,” from his interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a modern adaptation of a Sanskrit masterpiece, this volume reveal...

A young mother in Mexico City, captive to a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a house she cannot abandon nor fully occupy, writes a novel of her days as a translator living in New York.A young translator, adrift in Harlem, is desperate to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s, and whose ghostly presence haunts her in the city’s subways. And Gilberto Owen, dying in Philadelphia i...

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for the best translated novel of 2014, now a New Directions paperbackWinner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,” each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first ch...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • An NPR "Great Reads" Book • Here is PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter's dazzling, sometimes devastating portrait of love and ambition.“Shimmering. . . . Intoxicating. . . . Few can match Salter’s depictions of life’s physical pleasures, the sheer sensual delight of being in this world.”—San Francisco Chronicle**All That Is explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change...