Search results for ""dalkey archive press""

In this collection by a canonical figure in Korean literature, meditations upon life in old age come to the fore -- at its best, accompanied by great beauty and compassion; at its worst by a cynicism that nonetheless turns a bitter smile upon the changing world.

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Even on holiday, sex and death are Jean-Philippe Toussaint s constant companions...

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A man lies sleepless in a foul-smelling room while raucous noises come from next door, and women--past and present, real or imagined--pass through his mind. From these few elements, Romanian author Dumitru Tsepeneag builds a dreamlike world both ancient and contemporary, and as mesmerizing as that in his critically acclaimed "Vain Art of the Fugue." Praised by Emil Cioran for its precise and masterly evocation of sensual detail, "The Necessary Marriage" confirms Tsepeneag's position as one of the most important Eastern European writers of the post-communist era.

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Queneau's tragicomic masterpiece which retells in an array of styles the primal Freudian myth of sons killing the father.Queneau satirizes anthropology, folklore, philosophy, and epistemology while spinning a story as appealing as a fairy tale about a land where it never rains and a bizarre festival is held every Saint Glinglin's Day.

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Who’s really telling this story? That’s the mystery at the heart of Danielle Mémoire’s novel, which opens with a writer on stage at a public reading—a public reading that isn’t one, because she never reads a word, much to the audience’s annoyance. When an audience member finally heckles her, the writer’s response sets off a chain reaction of nested stories that tumble one after another like a row of dominoes.Each storyteller in the series (most are writers at public readings) builds on what’s come before while often radically changing its meaning. Along the way, we encounter fatal stepladders, a painter obsessed with a transom window, a lovestruck dog-walker, and a lost cat restored to its owners through divine intervention. Playful, thought-provoking, and utterly unique, Public Reading Followed by Discussion defies classification and invites every reader to join the game.

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The Dogs of Inishere collects stories from across Alannah Hop- kin’s thirty-year career as a fiction and travel writer. The stories presented here move from adolescence to middle age, sensitive always to the particular social, emotional, and intellectual challenges of the different phases of a life. An adolescent girl bristles against the gendered assumptions and expectations o mid-sixties London. A young writer struggles to commit fully to the artist’s life. A group of pub regulars in a sleepy seaside town observe the quiet disappointments of love and marriage. Along the way, Hopkin’s protagonists, often writers themselves, wrestle with the influence of literary figures from the past, including Austen, Byron, Poe, Wilde, Lowry, and B.S. Johnson.

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Confined to a prison cell, thrice-murderer Pascual Duarte recounts his journey from a violent childhood to a life of pain and misfortune; juxtaposing tableaus of country poverty against scenes of bare brutality, Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela crafts a powerful meditation on cruelty and anomie. The Family of Pascual Duarte follows his upbringing in the poor Spanish province of Extremadura to his eventual imprisonment—and impending death sentence. Death permeates Duarte’s world: his father’s grotesque death to rabies, his young brother’s drowning in an oil vat, and the loss of his children. But it is his wife’s sudden death that condemns him to the darkest path when, losing all faith and driven by blind revenge, he kills her souteneur. Now an alien to the world around him, Pascual Duarte resigns himself to his bloodied fate—yet never gives up his search for peace.Camilo José Cela has been recognized as one of the pioneers of Spanish literary realism, and his masterwork The Family of Pascual Duarte proves the power of his prose. The novel, which birthed the transgressive and groundbreaking tremendismo movement, roils with emotion and unflinching inhumanity, painting the Spanish countryside in bloodshed, eroticism, and an unshakeable feeling of grief. Blending the political with the personal with the philosophic, the result is an unparalleled exploration of the fraught relationship between man and society, and the past’s inescapable hold on the present.

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In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman who answers as "Mom." Billy spends his time fantasizing a future in which he will be famous, perhaps in the United States as a movie star, or as a psychiatrist, or as a doctor to blondes with breast enlargements, or as the author of "Billy England's Book of Pain." Together they both support and torture each other, barely able to remember their pasts but intent on forging a future that will bring them happiness and reunite them with the ever-elusive Mom. Billy and Girl are every boy and girl reeling from the pain of their childhoods, forgetting what they need to forget, inventing worlds they think will be better, but usually just prolonging nightmares as they begin to create--or so it seems--alternative personalities that will allow them to survive and conquer and punish. In the end, the reader is as bewildered as Billy and Girl--have they found Mom and a semblance of family, or are, they completely out of control and ready to explode?

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Tracing the Great War through the Millennium Bug, 1999 through 1900, Dadaism through Scientology through Sierra Leonean bicycle riding and back, award-winning Czech author Patrik Ourednik explores the horror and absurdity of the twentieth century in an explosive deconstruction of historical memory.Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century opens on the beaches of Normandy in 1944, comparing the heights of different forces’ soldiers and considering how tall, long, or good at fertilizing fields the men’s bodies will be. Probing the depths of humanity and inhumanity, this is an account of history as it has never been told: “engaging, even frightening.” At once recreating and uncreating the twentieth century, Ourednik explores the connections across the decades between the disparate figures, events, and politics we thought we knew.Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana merits the author’s reputation as a giant of post-1989 Czech literature. Now translated into 33 languages, the book is a masterwork of cubism, a polymorphic monologue of statistics and movements and fine print and discoveries that evokes the deadpan absurdity of Kafka and the gallows humor of Hašek. Ourednik has created a mesmerizing, maddening account of the past, and his interrogation of “truth” and objectivity resonates now more than ever.

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In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable specificity: loneliness, family angst, memory loss—from a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucatán Peninsula. Mayo’s unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucatán culture and community that Marrufo Huchim describes through her narrator’s fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers.

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A rumination on authority and its limitations, about what we think we know - and the spaces in between. In Confessions of Narcissus, Scully suggests that our demand for narrative coherence is one of the things that makes our lives so difficult to bear, that when William Hazlitt declared, "It is we who are Hamlet", he was telling us something about Shakespeare’s universality that is worth considering: Hamlet does not just give voice to our own fears and anxieties, he also calls them into being. In the process of trying to find cures for ourselves, that is to say, we become creators, to some extent, of our own misfortunes. Confessions of Narcissus builds from the idea that stories are what we require and also (partly) what we suffer from. In this series of observations and aphorisms about literature and life, Scully makes the case that uncertainty isn't an ailment that we should necessarily try to overcome. Following in the tradition of Keats and others, uncertainty may be something that we have good cause to be more curious about, that uncertainty has artistic merit and is a state of being that we might even come to enjoy.

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A Spanish-gothic version of a Patricia Highsmith novel Jon and Katharina spend the winter in Jon’s childhood home on the Cantabrian coast, lonely and bored, ambivalent about their precarious freelance jobs and disconnected in their relationship. Yet the couple’s routine will soon be disturbed when one rainy night, they witness strange lights in the sky over the village. The next morning, ufologists begin to arrive in the village, anxious to make extraterrestrial contact. The morning brings other unexpected guests: Jon's distant cousin, Markel, and his companion, the silent, alluring Virginia. The visit becomes increasingly uncomfortable as—like the ufologists camped out in view of the house—the strangers stay on and show little sign of planning to leave. Days stretch into weeks, even as the cousins can't remember ever having met, Virginia’s behavior becomes subtly threatening, and Jon begins doubt that Markel is who he says he . . . A deliciously tense and darkly humorous novella that explores the border that separates love from routine and offers a twist on theme of “the other” and how to live with the unknown, The Strangers introduces English readers to singular talent.

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Widely regarded as Sorrentino's finest achievement, Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very book we are reading) turns into a literary "stew" an uproariously funny melange of journal entries, erotic poetry, parodies of all kinds, love letters, interviews, and lists—as Hugh Kenner in "Harper's" wrote, "for another such virtuoso of the List you'd have to resurrect Joyce." Soon, Lamont's characters (on loan from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, and Dashiell Hammet) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative. Sorrentino has vastly extended the possibilities of what a novel can be in this extraordinary work, which both parodies and pays homage to the art of fiction.

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Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet’s dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity. Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland, the novel takes the form of a series of letters from a current resident to an old friend describing the island’s seventeenth-century history that brings together the violent Inquisition, the thoughtless extinction of the island’s exotic fauna, and the amorous story of the deformed artist-philosopher-inventor Phosphor and his impassioned, obsessional love for the beautiful Extravaganza. The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet’s novel that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was described by one reviewer as “Jane Austen meets Angela Carter via Lewis Carroll.” Phosphor in Dreamland can be described as Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges. This is Ducornet at her magical best.

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Savannah is a starkly tender and intimate recollection by French writer and journalist Jean Rolin of his friendship with British Vogue photographer Kate Barry. Both humorous and insightful, it in many ways serves as the epitaph to her life, which ended in a fall from her fourth-floor apartment in France. Barry was a very close friend of Jean Rolin, and together the two of them made a trip to the United States to retrace the footsteps of Flannery O'Connor, a Southern writer for whom Kate was deeply impassioned. In 2014, after Barry's death, Jean Rolin wanted to revisit this trip and reconstruct the memory of their journey in her absence. As he recreates his roadtrip over the course of this book, which ends, fittingly, in Savannah, Rolin evokes landscapes, characters, and a uniquely Southern atmosphere that underscores the relentless passage of time. Juxtaposed against the themes of loss and mortality, Jean Rolin evokes with light touches the figure of Kate. His incredible descriptive talent shines through in vivid descriptions of the South; he approaches his travel memoir with the accuracy of a documentary and the vibrant writing of a poet, and his memories of Kate are preserved beneath the motif of sucking the marrow out of life and keeping death at bay.

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With a twisted sense of humor and a heavy dose of fantasy, Katchadjian takes those things that are so common as to be ordinary—bad bosses, crazy significant others, descent into drug use—and sets them in a realm that brings to mind Kafka or Kojève. Our narrator presents us with a constantly moving array of bizarre, philosophically tinged excitement: a slave rebellion in a strange castle on an unnamed island, an attack of flying worms made of ash which either represents Adam’s sin or the Oedipal complex, a feral young woman who lives off the grid on whatever she can scrounge, and a hallucinatory root that throws the narrator into a black void, which he comes to fear he may never escape.

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In this collection of eighteen stories, Hugh Fulham-McQuillan writes with the playfulness and intelligence of such masters of the short form as Borges, Poe, and Barthelme. He examines the aesthetics of murder, the reigning fascination of the macabre in popular culture, and the tenuous line that separates art from life. One narrator traces the Möbius strip that encloses the assassination of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, and the murder of Lincoln by a famous actor in a theater. Another undergoes plastic surgery to accelerate the process of his being possessed by the ghost of the Italian composer Gesualdo. A detective ponders the interest he takes in investigating murders. Fulham-McQuillan wears his learning lightly and writes with the tact of a born storyteller.

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California is still the world's biggest hideout. The only thing more western is the Pacific Ocean, where, if the Big One happens, California might find a home at the bottom. One of those hiding out is Peter Bowman, a former army brat, and lecturer at Woodrow Wilson Community College, who is being hunted for a quality most men would crave. But for Bowman, nicknamed Boa, it has become burdensome. When an opportunity comes, he has to choose between becoming financially solvent or exposing himself to his pursuers. Along the way, he runs into some memorable characters both in reality and in his dreams, including Ishmael Reed. In Ishmael Reed's Conjugating Hindi, stories, histories and myths of different cultures are mixed and sampled. Modern issues like gentrification addressed. It is the closest that a fiction writer has gotten to the hip-hop form on the page. Once again, Ishmael Reed has pioneered a new form. If his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, was an early Afro-Futurist novel, Mumbo Jumbo recognized as “a graphic novel before we used the term” (according to Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson), Yellow Back Radio Broke Down Blazing Saddles's “important precursor,” Flight To Canada his "Neo Slave Narrative," a concept that he coined–Conjugating Hindi is his global novel. One that crosses all borders.

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Leave to Remain is a faux spy-novel possessed by the spirit of Janus: doubleness, duplicity, double-entendres, two-facedness, bridges and doorways—as is only appropriate for a work composed by two writers: one French, one American. Two-faced Janus resurrects into a time-traveling adventure, a tour of double-agents, double-speak, and double-dealings. In their earlier hybrid essay, A Prank of Georges (2010), Thalia Field and Abigail Lang returned us to "the primal force of language: naming" (Susan Howe). In Leave to Remain, a weathered Janus pursues an elusive quest, responding to a world of war, traitors, translations, and the slippery personal and political terrain between friends and enemies. This silly and deadly serious fiction-essay aims at nothing less than a full inquiry into how monstrous we are when we define loyalties and defend definitions, and how we are all double-agents seeking meaning and intelligence. Unafraid of being both timeless and timely, Leave to Remain challenges the reader to play in the world of folded imagery and language.

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The stories that Paul Filev has collected in this anthology of recent Macedonian fiction introduce English-language readers to a literature that has long been overlooked. Ranging from melancholy realism, such as Rumena Bužarovska’s “Lily,” to surreal fantasias, such as Tomislav Osmanli’s “Strained,” in which a stressed-out businessman eats his own computer, these texts provide a portrait of a country in constant transformation, still haunted by the Soviet past but quickly hurtling into the technocratic future. Comic and tragic, po-faced and hysterical, Contemporary Macedonian Fiction allows us to discover some of the most exciting young writers at work today.

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The Formality of the Page is a collection of powerfully personal and meditative poems tracking the difficult emotional histories of ageing, love, family, and the artist’s life. Along the way and alongside these personal reflections, Roberts looks back on the many writers and artists with a role in shaping his sensibility, including Catullus, Dickinson, Melville, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens.

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Beauty Looks Down On Me is a collection of by turns sad and funny stories about the thwarted expectations of the young as they grow older. HeeKyung’s characters are misfits who by virtue of their bodies or their lack of social status are left to dream of momentous changes that will never come. Unsatisfied with work, with family, with friends, they lose themselves in diets, books, and blogs. Heekyung’s collection humorously but humanely depicts the loneliness and monotony found in many modern lives.

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Love at Last Sight is a fierce novel about marital abuse, written for wives, girlfriends, mothers, and all women who have experienced trauma in their relationships. Rudan writes with conviction and strength, drawing upon her own personal experiences to create a book with powerful insight. Like Rudan’s previous fiction, Love at Last Sight moves with a strident feminist voice, and will undoubtedly leave its mark upon any reader sympathetic to Rudan’s story.

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The nine stories that make up this collection depict a wide variety of contemporary Koreans navigating a world focused on material wealth and social power, in which family ties have been disrupted and all relationships are dysfunctional. Unpredictable and enigmatic, these tales, though taking place in what would appear to be a shallow, materialistic environment, are nonetheless woven through with rich threads of imagination and fantasy: parables for the self-help age.

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A forlorn traveler is taken in by three suffering orphans, who, in the midst of their pain, give him food and shelter. The first, orphaned by history, still mourns a father who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp, never to return. The second, orphaned by pathology, has a rare disease, and is facing madness alone in a mountain chalet. The third, orphaned by philosophy, is a teenager who has decided to cut all ties with his parents. Never one to avoid challenging questions, in this poignant triptych Laroche examines the relationship between a writer and his words: suggesting that, perhaps, he is the orphan of his own work.

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Pushed around by ticket takers who demand his ticket in several languages, a middle aged man goes through a nightmare of hiding and getting away until he manages to cross a frontier guarded by soldiers and dogs. He’s made it back to his native village. There he finds his whole family gathered around a big table, as if for a wedding, a baptism or a wake, but no one recognizes him, not even his mother.

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First published in 1936, and considered one of the most groundbreaking and significant novels written in Catalan, "Waltz" tells the tale of an idle, introspective, and somewhat oblivious young "man without qualities" as he stumbles through a milieu of civic upheaval and bourgeois tragedy, waltzing from one prospective bride to another, never willing to compromise his ideals, and so never quite becoming an adult. With one foot in the romanticism of Goethe or Kleist, and another in the wildly differing takes on the modern novel provided by Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, respectively, "Waltz" is an occasionally absurd comedy of indecision and indolence structured in imitation of the dance from which it takes its title.

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This volume collects two macabre novellas by one of Israel's greatest authors: "The Death of Lysanda," which tells the story of a taxidermist heading steadily into insanity, and "Ants," about an invasion of household insects forcing a doomed marriage into crisis.

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Closing the gap between the contemporary Russian novel and the masterpieces of the early Soviet avant-garde, this masterful mixture of prose and poetry, excerpts from private letters and diaries, and quotes from newspapers and NKVD documents, is a unique amalgam of documentary, philosophical novel, and black humor.

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"Wasabi for Breakfast" reintroduces best-selling Japanese author Foumiko Kometani's uniquely humorous voice to American readers. Kometani is rare among Japanese writers and cultural commentators in that she has lived in the United States for most of her adult life, bringing an outsider's--and woman's--perspective to both her adopted home and her native Japan. She lives her life in between cultures, and mines that gap to provide a thoroughly modern take on both societies.In "Family Business," Megumi, a long time resident of the United States, returns to Japan to visit her 87-year-old mother. After so many years living abroad, Megumi is almost as befuddled by the exotic intricacies of contemporary Japan as a foreigner. When her nephew runs away from home, and her elderly mother gives chase, Megumi sets off on a road trip through modern Japan--and her own past."1001 Raging Fires" chronicles a Japanese woman living in California during the Rodney King riots and struggling to come to terms with being an outcast from a society that itself seems to be self-immolating. Yu learns the real price of exclusion is that which your own family makes you pay.

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Twelve stories focusing on the tiny paradoxes and everyday realities experienced by a man in his sixties.

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A prismatic and erotic novel of the intersection of multiple worlds, this is the first novel by Roberto Bolano's early writing partner A. G. Porta to be translated into English.

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2013 may be the best year yet for Best European Fiction. The inimitable John Banville joins the list of distinguished preface writers for Aleksandar Hemon's series, and A. S. Byatt represents England among a luminous cast of European contributors. Fans of the series will find everything they've grown to love, while new readers will discover what they've been missing!

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"When you have put your trust in shadows there is nothing that is real. Have you found this?" Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle, as well as the older, more political Marius. Reality soon encroaches upon the foursome, however, in the form of Marius's ailing wife, forcing the narrator to confront the dark emptiness and fear at the heart of his friends' joie de vivre. In this, his second novel--written in the '50s and never before published--Nicholas Mosley weighs questions of responsibility and sacrifice against those of love and earthly desire, the spirit versus the flesh.

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These interviews with poets and writers still living and working in Iran demonstrate their belief that literature's value is in opening spaces of awareness in the minds of the reader.

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In this collection of thematically related stories, celebrated Belgian author Fran?ois Emmanuel shows his indebtedness to the great poetic iconoclasts of the French language--not least Charles Baudelaire, after whose famous poem this book was named.

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The tale is simple, if grim: a disenfranchised teenage boy from the housing projects on the outskirts of Paris rapes and murders the manager of the supermarket where his mother works. But Gerard Gavarry is a writer who knows how literary inventiveness can shed new light on a serious subject, and Hoppla! tells its story three times, in three separate sections, each in a different tone or mode and with different sets of images and vocabularies. The first relies on tropical images and the characters speak in a lexicon borrowed from the coconut industry--as if the Parisian suburbs had been transported to an exotic shore; the second is nautical in nature; the third invokes the mythology of the centaur, and ancient Greece butts up against modern-day France. Gavarry's bloody and poetic narrative takes dead aim at the social, political, and personal roots of violence, and argues for the transformative power of fiction.

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The Flemish writer Dani?l Robberechts (1937-1992) refused to identify his books as novels, stories, or essays, according them all equal status as, simply, writing. This liberation from genre gives his work, for all its apparent simplicity, an elusive, hypnotic quality, and no more so than in his debut, "Arriving in Avignon," which records a young man's first encounter with that labyrinthine city, and his likewise meandering relationship with a girl from his home town-and indeed virtually every woman he meets. Hesistant and cautious, unable quite to enter nor turn away, the young man seems to circle Avignon endlessly, in the process attempting to delay his inevitable descent into maturity and monogamy. What seems at first like a cross between a memoir and a guidebook comes in time to be the story of a young man's dogged yet futile quest to know his own mind-unless it's the ancient city of Avignon itself that is our real protagonist: a mystery that can be approached, but never wholly solved.

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Following in the footsteps of Celine and Joyce, and anticipating the gritty worldview of Burroughs and Bukowski . . .

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Painter and art historian Nick Wadley-who has curated exhibitions on Kurt Schwitters, Franciszka Themerson, Gaberbocchus Press, and Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi"-here turns his attentive and whimsical eye to one of life's most essential relationships.

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Drawing together a wide range of focused critical commentary and observation by internationally renowned scholars and writers, this collection of essays offers a major reassessment of Aidan Higgins' body of work almost 50 years after the appearance of his first book, 'Felo De Se'.

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Two men meet in an airport men's room ("Excuse me. But you're pissing on my foot.") sometime in the early 1990s in the Arabian Gulf. From this meeting, they proceed to get a bit drunk on bad liquor, discover a magical hidden room, get transported back to the Ireland of the late 1940s and '50s, rummage through memories of their days at Trinity College (though they apparently never knew each other), and fumble about like Laurel and Hardy trying to make a degree of sense of what's happening (or did happen) to them. As oblique and deliciously Irish as Joyce and Beckett, and drawing upon the time warps of Flann O'Brien, Bernard Share has composed an hallucinatory and comic romp through Ireland past and present.

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A literary exploration into the serendipitous convergences underpinning the writing of a novel (here, Ge rard Gavarry s masterful Hoppla! 1 2 3), this rare and revealing glimpse into the creative process pulls back the curtain on the composition of a playful and self-conscious work of fiction.

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Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?

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Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?

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Based on the life of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, Jacques Jouet's "Savage" compels the reader to ask whether it is the primitive or the civilized man who is savage. At the height of the Belle ?poque, an eccentric young clothing designer searches for inspiration and identity as an artist among the "savage" peoples of France's colonies. Influenced by several exotic lovers, a quirky "vieille" dame, and ?douard Manet himself, Paul's increasingly unconventional designs parallel his increasingly unbalanced state of mind as he struggles to find a market for his work among the haute bourgeoisie. The failure of this venture, coupled with psychosis due to an untreated illness, ultimately leads to his demise.

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Itself a mixture of idolatry, deft characterization, and critical insight, "Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde" is both an entertaining and insightful contribution to our understanding of the lives and thoughts of two masters.

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Hedyphagetica is a powerful political satire, a ribald comedy, and a desperate love letter to a woman named Aime?. "Oh my, yes, I am afraid that in the beginning was the word..." So begins the narrator's account of his homeland, Gron, a country whose militaristic and authoritarian government bombs its own people at air shows--to keep them awed--and leads them into pointless and interminable wars to keep them properly motivated Employing all the tools of modernity to achieve a medieval brand of repression, Gron is a grim place. The narrator, attempting a kind of history, tells his story through the life of Dr. Samuel Johnson (no relation), an everyman who suffers every indignity his government can offer (including having an eye removed to "cure" his migraines).

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