New Directions is pleased to announce the relaunch of the long-celebrated bilingual edition of Rimbaud's A Season In Hell & The Drunken Boat - a personal poem of damnation as well as a plea to be released from "the examination of his own depths." Rimbaud originally distributed A Season In Hell to friends as a self-published booklet, and soon afterward, at the age of nineteen, quit poetry altogether. New Directions's edition was among the first to be published in the U.S., and it quickly became a classic. Rimbaud's famous poem "The Drunken Boat" was subsequently added to the first paperbook printing. Allen Ginsberg proclaimed Arthur Rimbaud as "the first punk" - a visionary mentor to the Beats for both his recklessness and his fiery poetry. This new edition proudly dons the original Alvin Lustig-designed cover, and a introduction by another famous rebel - and now National Book Award-winner - Patti Smith.

Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil the city and its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art, and women. Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry a format which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux, and freedom of his age and one of the founding texts of literary modernism."

The Telegraph takes up from where The Green Huntsman left off with the career of Lucien Leuwen, the fashionable young cavalry officer with "republican" leanings but aristocratic tastes. When his father, an influential banker, places him in a government office, Lucien is quickly involved in a series of intrigues. He is required to assist in the suppression of a murder, fix a provincial election, and to advance the interest of his father's cabal, carry on a cold-blooded love affair with the most beautiful hostess in Paris. Through Lucien's eyes, Stendhal uncovers the moral decay of a society in which a failing government keeps itself in power by force and trickery.

Attractive, clever, a cavalry officer and very rich, young Leuwen had everything necessary for happiness and success--everything except belief in himself and the social order of his time. It is the period of King Louis-Philippe, when an induced conservatism was atrophying France after the cataclysm of the Revolution and the glorious illusion that was Napoleon. Here is an historical novel which is the real thing--a portrait without equal of a time, a place, and the way conflicting groups of Frenchmen felt about each other and themselves. Lucien Leuwen comes down from Paris to serve with a regiment garrisoned in the provincial city of Nancy. There, though he is only a rich bourgeois, not of the nobility, he cleverly makes his way into society and dares to fall in love with the blue blood belle of the town. The magic cast by one of France's greatest novelists transports us completely into the hearts of Lieutenant Leuwen and the beautiful Bathilde de Chasteller as their love affair follows its torturous course.