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“Until you have language or history or context, you are in the dark.” In this episode of the Fashion Neurosis podcast hosted by Bella Freud, Hilton Als talks about discovering the power of art and language at an early age, how criticism should come from a place of “critical love,” and writing about Prince in his memoir My Pinup (New Directions, 2022).
In this 2012 Library of Congress event, László Krasznahorkai reads from his novel Satantango (New Directions, 2013), translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes, and speaks about the evolution of his writing style and the relationship between author and translator. Krasznahorkai is the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature.
In this 2020 Wheeler Centre virtual event, Roanna Gonsalves hosts a discussion about womanhood in fiction and the power of translation with Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season (New Directions, 2020), translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes; and Mieko Kawakami, author of Breasts and Eggs (Europa Editions, 2020), translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.
In this Books Are Magic event, Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda reads from her English translation of Yoko Tawada’s essay collection Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (New Directions, 2025) and discusses Tawada’s defamiliarization of the Japanese and German languages in a conversation with fellow translator Susan Bernofsky.
In this McNally Jackson Books event, Polly Barton reads from her English translation of Mai Ishizawa’s debut novel, The Place of Shells (New Directions, 2025), and talks about her experience researching the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in order to capture the historical, emotional center of Ishizawa’s writing in a conversation with Eliza St. James.
“On the wall of the room there was a mirror / reflecting back a comical skull that was laughing at itself.” In this bilingual poetry reading, “Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence” is read in the original Spanish by Homero Aridjis and the English translation is read by George McWhirter. Aridjis and McWhirter won the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize for the collection of the same name, published by New Directions.
In this London Review Bookshop event, Fernanda Melchor reads from her novel Paradais (New Directions, 2022), translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes, and discusses her work and signature writing style with author Nicole Flattery.
“I’ll dig in, / into my days, having come here to live, not to visit.” The late Denise Levertov reads poems from her collections Evening Train (New Directions, 1992) and Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1996) in this video from a 1993 event at the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles.
“[The Congo] is the heartbeat of the world, and it’s never recognized as a central heartbeat,” says Will Alexander about the focus of his most recent collection, Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, in this Poetry.LA interview with Douglas Manuel about the intuition he follows for his writing. “I’m not colonized by cognitive expertise,” says Alexander.
“We in the fields, the watchers from the burnt slope, / Facing the west, facing the bright sky, hopelessly longing / to know the red beauty…” In this 2011 PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Yang reads William Everson’s poem “We in the Fields” along with other poems published in Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems From New Directions, an anthology edited by the poet celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of New Directions. Yang’s new poetry collection, Line and Light (Graywolf Press, 2022), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
