Ask any book designer, and it’s clear that the feel of the book in your hand and its aesthetics are always top of mind. It’s an intriguing prospect for a project to take aim explicitly at the reader’s experience of time and accomplishment as integral to the pleasure of reading. This understanding of the goals of Storybook ND brings with it a dual sense of time: time spent reading and time as experienced inside the text. But New Directions asks us to go back to the comfort that is childhood reading, before it was ruined by us high school teachers-back when we could both get lost in a marvelous book and finish it in an afternoon. As a high school teacher, I’ll see students turn away from reading as it evolves from a hobby into homework. The pleasure of reading, the series implies, has been lost on adult readers, whose Sisyphean tasks and adult sensibilities about what constitutes a real book push them toward ever-longer novels (just think of My Struggle: Book Two or Ducks, Newburyport). The series features slim hardcover books designed, New Directions says, “to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.” The publisher paints a picture of reading that’s nostalgic, tactile, and imbued with a sense of accomplishment-the “afternoon” here might be a particular nod to precocious latchkey kids who spent their childhoods after school reading yellowed library books cover to cover. The authors included in the first tranche of books in the series should be familiar to New Directions devotees, with Clarice Lispector and César Aira headlining alongside Helen Dewitt, Yoko Tawada, Osamu Dazai, and the reclusive Czech writer and International Booker Prize winner László Krasznahorkai. In look and feel, these reprints seem like an updated version of the classic Little Golden Books, complete with an edging band on the spine and a thick cardboard cover. This September, New Directions will come out with their first six titles under the new series Storybook ND.
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