Top Authors

Sholem Asch

Jose Martiniano Alencar

Top Translators

Gregory Rabassa

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Top Books

The Fall [Buy Direct] by Albert Camus

The Outsider [Buy Direct] by Albert Camus

An independent publisher for over 60 years, New Directions was founded when president and publisher James Laughlin issued the first New Directions anthology in 1936.

"I asked Ezra Pound for 'career advice,'" James Laughlin recalls. "He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do 'something' useful." The anthologies were intended "as a place where experimentalists could test their inventions by publication."

Novels, plays, poetry and story collections soon followed. At the core of ND's modernist backlist are early ND authors Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Tennessee Williams. Other early authors include H.D., John Hawkes, Djuna Barnes, Edward Dahlberg, Henry Miller, and Dylan Thomas. Interested in issuing influential foreign writers in translation (if poetry, often in bilingual editions), ND has helped promote in the U.S. the works of Céline, Borges, Apollinaire, Dazai, Mishima, Rilke, Berberova, Kafka, Montale, Lorca, Neruda, Nabokov, the 1990 Nobel Prize Laureate Octavio Paz, and more recently Clarice Lispector, W.G. Sebald, Javier Marías, Antonio Tabucchi, Muriel Spark, Shusaku Endo, Bei Dao, and many others.