This year marks the seventieth anniversary of New Directions, the independent press founded by the late James Laughlin. To celebrate, the press will hold two events in New York City this fall—a private party in November at the used bookstore Housing Works and a public gathering at the New School on December 5. Cosponsored by the Poetry Society of America, the event at the New School will feature readings by Forrest Gander, Edward Hirsch, Richard Howard, Marie Ponsot, Eliot Weinberger, and other New Directions poets, who will also celebrate the November publication of The Way It Wasn’t: From the Files of James Laughlin, a collection of material from the publisher’s archive of poems, notes, and correspondence.
Laughlin, who died in 1997, started New Directions after receiving encouragement from poet Ezra Pound. The initial titles published by the press were a series of anthologies, the first of which, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, featured Elizabeth Bishop, e. e. cummings, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Other writers who were published by New Directions, or whose works were reissued after going out of print, include Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Federico García Lorca, W. G. Sebald, Muriel Spark, and Dylan Thomas.
For more information about the New School celebration, visit the Web site.
