Where to Begin?

This fall, New Directions – known as a pioneer of American modernism and foreign writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Roberto Bolaño and WG Sebald – published six ‘storybooks’ for adults, or perhaps especially precocious children. The stated aim of the series is ‘to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvellous book from cover to cover in an afternoon’. Curated by the Egyptian-born writer-translator Gini Alhadeff, each volume comes handsomely outfitted with a silvery spine and a design by book artist du jour Peter Mendelsund.