A gem of a Marías story: Elvis and his entourage abandon their translator in a seedy cantina full of enraged criminals. “It all happened because of Elvis Presley.” Elvis, down south of the border to film a movie, has insisted his producers hire a proper Spaniard so that he can pronounce his few lines in Spanish with a Castillian accent. But Ruibérriz has taken on much more than he bargained for. One fatal night, horseplay in a local bar goes too far: a fatuous drunken American insults the local kingpin, and when the thug insists that Ruibérriz translate, Elvis himself adds an even more stinging comment—and who must translate that?

"In the small town of Progrody, Nissen Piczenik makes his living as a respected coral merchant. Despite his knowledge of coral, Nissen has never seen the sea. When a visiting sailor offers to take Nissen to Odessa, he eagerly accepts. But upon his return to Progrody, Nissen finds that a new coral merchant has moved into a neighboring town and is gaining popularity. As his customers dwindle, life takes an evil twist for Nissen Progrody. And the final decider of his fate may be the devil himself."--P. [4] of cover.

"I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny."—John Waters “I cannot write any sort of story,” said Tennessee [to Gore Vidal] “unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.” These transgressive Tales of Desire, including “One Arm,” “Desire and the Black Masseur,” “Hard Candy,” and “The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen,” show the iconic playwright at his outrageous best.

A story of love and memory from "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe) and the award-winning, international bestselling author of The Infatuations. On a train journey from Paris to Madrid a young opera singer becomes fascinated by those in his compartment: a middle-aged businessman, his alluring wife, and their male traveling companion. Soon his life of constant travel, luxury hotels, rehearsal and performance will become entangled with these three people, and the singer will find himself fatefully consumed by Natalia's beauty. The Man of Feeling is the haunting story of the birth and death of a passion, told in retrospect. Intricately interweaving desire and memory, it explores the nature of love, and asks whether we can ever truly recall something that no longer exists.

A book by Spain's greatest living writer weaves fiction and fact into a completely original and unforgettable hybrid. Called by its author a "false novel," Dark Back of Time begins with the tale of the odd effects of publishing All Souls, his witty and sardonic 1989 Oxford novel. All Souls is a book Marías swears to be fiction, but which its "characters"--the real-life dons and professors and bookshop owners who have "recognized themselves"--fiercely maintain to be a roman à clef. With the sleepy world of Oxford set into fretful motion by a world that never "existed," Dark Back of Time begins an odyssey into the nature of identity and of time. Marías weaves together autobiography, a legendary kingdom, strange ghostly literary figures, halls of mirrors, a one-eyed pilot, a curse in Havana, and a bullet lost in Mexico.

A daring masterwork by Javier Marias: "Spain's most subtle and gifted writer." (The Boston Globe)

An affectionate and very funny gallery of twenty great world authors from the pen of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe).

Presents a collection of short stories, including "While the women are sleeping," in which a man lying on the beach spectulates on the lives of another pair of beach goers, and "The Resignation Letter of Señor de Santiesteban," in which a ghost jeopardizes the job of a new teacher.

A collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best drinking stories makes this the most intoxicating New Directions Pearl yet! “First you take a drink,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, “then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” Fitzgerald wrote alcohol into almost every one of his stories. On Booze gathers debutantes and dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children and ragtime riff-raff into a newly compiled collection taken from The Crack-Up, and other works never before published by New Directions. On Booze portrays “The Jazz Age” as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, and lush — with quite a hangover.

Urn Burial, one of the most influential essays in Western literature, is now available as a New Directions Pearl. Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, is one of the pinnacles of Renaissance scholarship and without doubt one of the great essays in English literature. Beginning with observations on the recent discovery of Roman antiquities in the form of burial urns, Browne’s associative mind wanders to elephant graveyards, to pre-Christian cremation ceremonies, and finally to the idea of Christian burial. Browne then explores, with a more melancholic meditation, man’s struggles with mortality and the uncertainty of his fate and fame in the living world. This edition includes a magisterial discourse on Sir Thomas Browne taken from the first chapter of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.