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 Directionslong 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.
