Terrestrial Intelligence: International Fiction Now from New Directions - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811216500 ISBN 13: 9780811216500

Publisher: New Directions, 2006

Synopsis

New Directions, the discoverer of the greatest of the great contemporary world writerssuch as W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolano, Inger Christensen and Bei Dao, Victor Pelevin and Javier Mariasnow puts them on display in a showcase anthology.

Terrestrial Intelligence gathers the best new ground-breaking fiction from around the world, from W. G. Sebald ("one of the most gripping writers imaginable," The New York Review of Books) and Roberto Bolano ("his generation's premier Latin-American writer, [his] reputation and legend are in meteoric ascent," The New York Times) to the Russian enfant terrible Victor Pelevin and the astonishing Yoko Tawada. Not to be missed are the pleasures of Antonio Tabucchi ("the most original voice in the new generation of Italian writers," The Harvard Book Review), Javier Marias ("Spain's best bait for the Nobel Prize," The New York Sun) and Yoel Hoffmann ("Israel's avant-garde genius," Forward). These are just a few of the two dozen fascinating new writers brought to you in wonderful translations, all on one plate, in Terrestrial Intelligence.

Take a trip around the worldArgentina, Brazil, Cape Verde, Chile, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Russia, and Spainand sample the intelligence: we guarantee you will never look at these countries the same way again.

New Directions"long struggling and long astonishing," as Richard Eder put it in The New York Timesis always busy presenting what people in other countries are reading: these are riches which resonate in Terrestrial Intelligence from story to story, like art hanging in an international biennale. These two showcase anthologies are convenient samplers, designed to push the wealth of the New Directions' list as a whole into a more public view. "It would be nice to think," as James Laughlin, founder of New Directions wrote to Ernest Hemingway in 1950, "that virtue met its reward without exterior pushes, but it just ain't so."

About this title

About the Author:

Barbara Epler is Editor-in-Chief of New Directions.

From Publishers Weekly:

Twenty-four authors from 16 countries and translated from 12 languages are represented in this sweeping but uneven anthology. While readers might be inspired by the book's altruistic intention-a well-rounded introduction to different writers, themes and styles from around the globe-they will soon become frustrated by the selections' lack of flavor; many stories seem choppy and flat, with half-developed characters, disjointed paragraphs and abrupt endings that leave readers without anything to grab onto. In some cases, this is because the full story is not included, as in Uwe Timm's offering from Morenga or Rodrigo Rey Rosa's excerpt from The Good Cripple. Other selections suffer from phoned-in translations. There are, however, a few gems: despite being an excerpt from Summer in Baden-Baden, Leonid Tsypkin's portrayal of Anna Grigor'yevna and Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky's travels is as delightful to read as if it were taken from Dostoyevsky's own diary. Kono Taeko's Bone Meat is a brief yet deliciously detailed account of a woman's descent into madness after her lover's departure, and Muriel Spark's The Portobello Road is a creepy yet entertaining post-mortem narrative with just the right pacing to do the trick. Though the source material is as strong as it is varied, its presentation leaves much to be desired.
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About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0811216500
• ISBN 13: 9780811216500
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 406
• Editor: Epler Barbara