New Directions was founded by James Laughlin in 1936 when he was still a sophomore in college. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” the publisher explained. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”
Laughlin envisioned utility “as a place where experimentalists could test their inventions.” This roster has included W. C. Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Delmore Schwartz, Gary Snyder, and George Oppen, among others. After nearly a century, and fifteen hundred books to its name, the venture has proven one of the most formidable contributions to modern print.
My favorite installment is Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt—an office satire about a traveling salesman who introduces infrastructure for anonymous sex to the American workplace. With aims of curbing the sexual harassment epidemic and its ensuing lawsuits in hand, Dewitt offers an intrepid lampoon of corporate and gender relations at the turn of the twenty-first century. She shopped the manuscript for over a decade before it was picked up in 2011.
Likewise, No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai’s final work, only found an English-speaking audience ten years after his suicide through Laughlin’s efforts. Since its translation in 1958, New Directions has published eight more titles by Dazai, boring headlong into bleak, schismatic alienation.
Laughlin died in 1997. His legacy, however, still issues thirty volumes annually. This year, they’re set to release Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming in paperback, the conclusion to László Krasznahorkai’s four-volume magnum opus, as well as a new edition of Bernadette Mayer’s 1978 landmark, The Golden Book of Words.
Life is boring and painful, but I never run out of things to read. I fully intend to recoup the Sebald set ransacked in my divorce, and I’ve yet to crack the four Dag Solstad novels received on that wedding day. I don’t think I’ll get married again, but it’s nice to know New Directions will be there for me.
-David Fishkind