Anne Carson
ANTIGONICK
A reading directed by Ken Rus Schmoll
(New Directions, 2012)
Tuesday, May 15, 7PM
Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is the first time she's making translation into a combined visual and textual experience. Sophokles' disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language and presentation, making the fundamentally human issues of death and honor, family and morality as relevant as ever.
The text itself is hand-lettered on the page by Anne Carson, and features stunning drawings by Bianca Stone printed on translucent vellum pages that overlay the text.
John Donatich
THE VARIATIONS
(Holt, 2012)
Thursday, May 17, 7PM
This powerful debut novel is about a priest who has lost his church, his mentor, and his ability to pray. How can Father Dominic protect or guide his parish when everything he loves falls away? How can he counsel Dolores, a troubled teenager prone to emotional panic and spiritual monomania? Or James, a promising African American pianist, struggling to realize his artistic ambitions by bringing his own voice to a piece that has been played by the world's most brilliant pianists, Bach's Goldberg Variations.
Into this malaise comes Andrea, a sophisticated New York editor attracted at first by Dom's blog and then by the man himself. Dom's journey from the cloth into the secular world will offer carnal knowledge, but also something deeper, a more resistant knowledge as life fails to offer happiness or redemption. In prose both searching and muscular, John Donatich's The Variations has located the right metaphor for our spiritual crisis in this story of one man's spiritual disillusion and ache for self-knowledge.
Peter Carey
THE CHEMISTRY OF TEARS
(Knopf, 2012)
Wednesday, June 6, 7PM
London 2010: Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the sudden death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man, she must struggle to keep the depth of her anguish to herself. The one other person who knows Catherine’s secret—her boss—arranges for her to be given a special project away from prying eyes in the museum’s Annexe. Usually controlled and rational, but now mad with grief, Cat herine reluctantly unpacks an extraordinary, eerie automaton that she has been charged with bringing back to life.
As she begins to piece together the clockwork puzzle, she also uncovers a series of notebooks written by the mechanical creature’s original owner: a nineteenth-century English man, Henry Brandling, who traveled to Germany to commission it as a “magical amusement” for his consumptive son. But it is Catherine, nearly two hundred years later, who will find comfort and wonder in Henry’s story. And it is the automaton, in its beautiful, uncanny imitation of life, that will link two strangers confronted with the mysteries of creation, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention, and the body’s astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
THE GROUND
(FSG, 2012)
Thursday, June 7, 7PM
A poignant and terse vision of new York City unfolds in Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s debut book of poetry. A work of rare beauty and lyric grace, The Ground is an entire world, drawn
and revealed through contemplation of the post-9/11 landscape. With musicality and precision of thought, Phillips’s poems limn the troubadour’s journey in an increasingly surreal modern world (“I plugged my poem into a manhole cover / That flamed into the first guitar”). The poet’s subtle formal sophistication—somewhere between flair and restraint— and sense of lyric possibility bring together the hard glint of the contemporary landscape and the eroded permanence of the archaic one through remixes, underground sessions, Spenserian stan- zas, myths, and revamped translations. These are poems of fiery intelligence, inescapable music, and metaphysical splendor that concern themselves with lived life and the life of the imagination—both equally vivid and true—as they lay the framework for Phillips’s meditations on our connection to and estrangement from the natural world.
László Krasznahorkai
SATANTANGO
(New Directions, 2012)
Monday, June 11, 7PM
AT THE PAULA COOPER GALLERY
New Directions is proud to present László Krasznahorkai, author of Satantango, his first novel and haunting masterpiece, recently translated into English for the first time. The story of an unnamed isolated hamlet beset with nothing but failure, Krasznahorkai portrays the schemes, crimes, infidelities, crushed hopes, and betrayed trust with breathtaking clarity and honesty. In a rare US appearance, he’ll read from the translation and discuss his work.
“Krasznahorkai is the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse who inspires comparisons with Gogol and Melville.” — Susan Sontag
“He offers us stories that are relentlessly generative and defiantly irresolvable. They are haunting, pleasantly weird and, ultimately, bigger than the worlds they inhabit. ” — The New York Times
Daniel Mendelsohn
COMPLETE POEMS: C.P. CAVAFY
(Knopf, 2012)
Tuesday, June 19, 7PM
No modern poet so vividly brought to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Whether advising Odysseus on his return to Ithaca or confronting the poet with the ghosts of his youth, these verses brilliantly make the historical personal—and vice versa. To his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity, Cavafy brings the historian’s assessing eye along with the poet’s compassionate heart.
After more than a decade of work and study, Mendelsohn—a classicist who alone among Cavafy’s translators shares the poet’s deep intimacy with the ancient world—gives readers full access to the genius of Cavafy’s verse: the sensuous rhymes, rich assonances, and strong rhythms of the original Greek that have eluded previous translators.
Mark Strand
ALMOST INVISIBLE
(Knopf, 2012)
Wednesday, July 11, 7PM
From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear within reach. Fable, domestic satire, meditation, joke, and fantasy all come together in what is arguably the liveliest, most entertaining book that Strand has yet written.
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