Search results for ""dalkey archive press""

Beginning as a road novel reuniting Donovan and Tom Lee, old friends from their college days, Christine Montalbetti's novel quickly becomes a playfully unpredictable exploration of American culture. Reflecting on college football, small-town gossip, and the automobile, among other American institutions, the dreamlike quality of Montalbett's narration creates fresh, often very funny new vantages on aspects of American life usually too familiar to be noticed.

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One of Jon Fosse’s most acclaimed novels, Boathouse is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator leading a largely hermit-like existence until he unexpectedly encounters a long-lost childhood friend and his wife. Told partially in a stream-of-consciousness style and with an atmosphere reminiscent of a gripping crime novel, Boathouse slowly unravels the story of a love triangle leading to jealousy, betrayal, and eventually death.

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Evening Proposal is a collection of eight stories about the grim and often faceless nature of urban life. Faintly reminiscent of Franz Kafka, the stories range from a man who discovers that his job performance has no significance while taking refuge in taking care of an abandoned rabbit to a man who finally expresses his love to discover that his expression frightened him more than his fear in anticipating the event. Evening Proposal reissues the warning that the orderliness and system that civilization created in order to confront nature’s chaos is in fact “the hell of monotony.”

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?ric Chevillard here seeks to clear up a persistent and pernicious literary misunderstanding: the belief that a novel's narrator must necessarily be a mouthpiece for his or her writer's own opinions. Thus, we are introduced to a narrator haunted by a deep loathing for cauliflower gratin (and by a no less passionate fondness for trout almondine), but his monologue has been helpfully and hilariously annotated in order to clarify all the many ways in which this gentleman and ?ric Chevillard are nothing alike. Language and logic are pushed to their farthest extremes in one of Chevillard's funniest novels yet.

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In Tests of Time (2003), Gass shares his thoughts about writing, reading, culture, history, politics, and public opinion, including essays on classic writers and contemporaries, literary "lists" and their use, the extent and cost of political influences on writers, and the First Amendment. First published by University of Chicago Press.

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Here we have the anatomy of the contemporary writer, as imagined by the pseudonymous, "post-exotic" Antoine Volodine. His writers aren't the familiar, bitter, alcoholic kind, however; nor are they great, romantic, tortured geniuses; and least of all are they media darlings and socialites. No, in Volodine's universe, the writer is pitted in a pathetic struggle against silence and sickness--that is, when she's not about to be murdered by random lunatics or fellow inmates. Consisting of seven loosely interlocking stories, "Writers" is a window onto a chaotic reality where expressing oneself brings along with it repercussions both absurd and frighteningly familiar.

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The World Within the Word, Gass's second published volume of criticism, is a landmark collection discussing Val ry, Henry Miller, Sartre, Freud, Faulkner, suicide, "art and order," and the transformation of language into poetry and fiction. Revelatory and gorgeous, by turns humorous and devastating, it stands among Gass's best and most provocative books. First published by Knopf in 1978.

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Caterva (meaning "throng" or "horde") tells the story of seven erudite, homeless, and semi-incompetent radicals traveling from city to city in an attempt to foment a revolution: conspiring with striking workers, setting off bombs, and evading the local authorities. But this is no political thriller. Like his literary "descendant" Julio Cortazar--who mentions this book in Hopscotch--Filloy is far more concerned with his characters' occasionally farcical inner lives than with their radical machinations. With its encyclopedic feel, and its satirical look at both solidarity and nonconformity, Caterva is considered to be among Filloy's greatest achievements.

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Nicholas Mosley's Whitbread Award-winning novel Hopeful Monsters dealt with the suggestion that if human nature could not be improved by scientific manipulation, perhaps a suitable environment or soil might nonetheless be prepared into which an appropriate seed for change might fall, and not be smothered by weeds. In Metamorphosis, a humanitarian worker and a journalist in a vast refugee camp in East Africa come across a newborn child who for some inexplicable reason gives them the impression that it might be just such a seed. But why? And what to do about it?

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Octave Mirbeau, author of The Torture Garden and Diary of a Chambermaid, wrote this scathing novel on the cusp of the twentieth century. Driven mad by modern life, Georges Vasseur leaves for a rest cure, where he encounters corrupt politicians, amnesiac coquettes, cheerfully sadistic killers, imperialist generals, and quack psychiatrists. Hypocrites are eternal, and not much has changed since Mirbeau wrote this acid portrait of his era.

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One afternoon in December 1992, in Tartu, Estonia, Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman reluctantly sat down to dictate his memoirs to Elena Pogosian, his assistant, over a pot of tea. It was to be the first of twelve dictation sessions during which the initial draft of Non-Memoirs was created. The sessions were spread out over that winter and into the spring of 1993--the last spring of Lotman's life. The result of the process is this book - a book of memories and recollections of a good part of 20th century, divided into seven sections. The five shorter sections concern themselves with a single anecdote or theme (lice on the front, an encounter with a hare, a "totally Bulgakovian" episode, a visit from the KGB, Tartu School politics); the two longer sections provide the narrative backbone of the memoirs, tending to treat the passage of time, rather than a single event (school and frontline life, the end of the war and postwar university life).

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This issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction will feature excerpts from a variety of works currently being translated.

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In The Black Mountain Letters, poet and scholar Jonathan C. Creasy breathes new life into one of the most important experiments in arts and education ever established in the United States. Through years of research into the life and legacy of Black Mountain College, Creasy has produced a unique book that brings together poems, prose, visual art, and archive material, illuminating the college’s fascinating history while engaging with the work of its most important faculty and alumni, including Josef and Anni Albers, Charles Olson, John Cage, and Robert Creeley.

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The "plot" of Dror Burstein's dazzling meditation consists of nothing more than the author's lying on a bench, looking up at the night sky. What results from this simple action is, however, a monologue whose scope is both personal and cosmic, with Burstein's thoughts ricocheting between stories from his past and visions of the origin and end of the universe. The result is a fascinating blend of reminiscence, fiction, and amateur science, seeking to convey not only a personal story but the big picture in which the saga of life on Earth and of the stars that surround it have the same status as anecdotes about one's aunts and uncles. With a tip of the hat to W. G. Sebald and Yoel Hoffmann, "Netanya" seeks to transform human history into an intimate family story, and demonstrates how the mind at play can bring a little warmth into a cold universe.

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"Free City" is master storyteller Joao Almino's third novel to focus on the city of Bras?lia, the social swirl of its early years, when contractors, corporate profiteers, idealists, politicians, mystical sects, and even celebrities mingled--including Aldous Huxley, Fidel Castro, Andre Malraux, John Dos Passos, Elizabeth Bishop, and many others. Putting past and present into direct conflict, the story takes the form of a blog, even incorporating comments from other bloggers, each with their vested interests, each with new reasons for spinning fictions of their own.

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Through an ingenious structure that jumps from narrator to narrator and spans decades, "Call Me Brooklyn" follows the life of Gal Ackerman, a Spanish orphan adopted during the Spanish Civil War and raised in Brooklyn, NY. Moving from the secret tunnels that shelter the forgotten residents of Manhattan to the studio where Mark Rothko put an end to his life, from the jazz clubs frequented by Thomas Pynchon to the bar in Madrid where we learn the truth about Ackerman's past, "Call Me Brooklyn" draws upon a rich tradition that includes Nabokov's "Pale Fire," Bellow's "Humbolt's Gift," and the novels of Felipe Alfau--a hymn to mystery and to the power of fiction.

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Featuring ten stories never before translated, dating from 1878 to 1886 (regarded as Joaquim Machado de Assis’s most radically experimental period), this selection of short fiction by Brazil’s greatest author ranges in tone from elegiac and philosophical to impishly ironic. Including the author’s classic essay on world literature–also appearing in English for the first time–and with pieces chosen from his vast body of work for their playfulness, pathos, and stylistic subversion, this collection is an ideal introduction to one of world literature’s greatest talents. “A prodigy of accomplishment…deserving of a permanent place in world literature” – Susan Sontag “Everything about Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis seems double. There’s before and after, domestic and metaphysical, high and low, black and white, erotic and austere, short and long, trapped and free, gentle and cruel, perceived and real. The 200 or so stories he wrote spin out these oppositions into a remarkable variousness.”–Peter Robb, Times Literary Supplement “There is in Machado’s prose a playfulness that teases the reader, humor that mocks solemnity and seriousness. He punctures pretentiousness and ridicules received ideas (…) The range of allusions in his work would have amazed even Nabokov. And as with Nabokov, indeed as with any work of art which gives us what Nabokov calls the shiver between the shoulder blades, what elicits one’s astonished admiration is not to do with subject matter…but with that abstract and elusive concept…which manifests itself in that purely aesthetic thing called style.” – Zulfikar Ghose, Context No. 12

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The narrator of "Villa Bunker" receives letters, dozens of them, written by his mother in an isolated seaside villa, which tell of his parents' troubles in this uninhabitable house, soon to become a kind of labyrinth roamed by memories and long-buried emotions. At first the narrator's parents fret most about the villa's physical deterioration, but soon their own psychological deterioration becomes the inescapable focus of their stories. Is their joint madness due to the villa's aberrant architecture? Or is its isolation to blame? Or were they mad all along? The narrator is left to decipher the clues, himself in turn becoming prey to his own house, which, like memory and time, seems in a state of permanent metamorphosis.

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A riot of confession, complaint, and sensual detail, this novel charts the first year alone of a man who has abandoned his wife, life, family, and homeland, seeking an impossible ideal: freedom.

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Spanning fifty years, this collection brings together stories from nineteen authors from the Republic of Georgia, offering a window onto a vibrant literary scene that has been largely inaccessible to English-language readers until now.

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When the poet Luis Cernuda flees Spain in February of 1938, he has no idea that he will never again set foot on his native land. In exile in England, his former lover finds him a disheartening job that only intensifies his feelings of bitterness and despair: caring for 3,800 refugee children who have also fled to England after the city of Bilbao fell to Franco’s army. Seventy years later, a young Mexican filmmaker living in New York receives a mysterious email that throws his life into complete disarray and forever links him to the famous Spanish poet. The Family Interrupted (the title of Cernuda’s only play, which had gone missing for fifty years until Octavio Paz found it in a shoe box in his mother’s house) is, as Jorge Volpi once said, “A beautiful example of two decanting narratives constructed with the precision and accuracy of a watchmaker. From the opening lines, the characters’ destiny seems—almost—preordained.”

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The several essays that comprise Border Towns chase, worry, and trouble ideas about situation and reference. As a group, the essays’ topics—color, lycanthropy, African-Canadian history, cooking, public transit, etc.—make an unlikely field. But through all its pages the book traces and describes acts of situation; and— for all its werewolves, greengrocers, and paeans to miscegenation and migration—its interest is not in capturing but in “the shape of reference itself.” The title figure of the border town serves as a “beard” for the unassimilable. Border Towns—the book of essays—is perhaps, finally, a book about poetry. (“It often seems to me,” writes the author, “that one of the best uses to which prose can be put is describing poetry.”)

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It is 1936, and Albert B. is one of the first French citizens to join the Fascist party. During the war, he becomes a collaborator. It's only a matter of time before he dons a German uniform himself. Taking place in the limbo between the moment of Albert's initial "fall" and his inevitable capture, following the Allied invasion of Mainau, "The Laurels of Lake Constance" is the story not only of Albert himself, but of his daughter, who must endure the paradox of loving a man whose beliefs and allegiances are nothing short of catastrophic.Beautifully translated by novelist Harry Mathews, "The Laurels of Lake Constance" is a profoundly moving story about both war and childhood, and their intersection in one household, conjured in all its details, be they beautiful or shameful: a resigned mother playing music, a father absent, an era frozen in a tragic fresco where novelistic detail mixes with history.

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Mathea Martinsen has never been good at dealing with other people. After a lifetime, her only real accomplishment is her longevity: everyone she reads about in the obituaries has died younger than she is now. Afraid that her life will be over before anyone knows that she lived, Mathea digs out her old wedding dress, bakes some sweet cakes, and heads out into the world—to make her mark. She buries a time capsule out in the yard. (It gets dug up to make room for a flagpole.) She wears her late husband’s watch and hopes people will ask her for the time. (They never do.) Is it really possible for a woman to disappear so completely that the world won’t notice her passing? The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is a macabre twist on the notion that life “must be lived to the fullest.”

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'The Review of Contemporary Fiction' was founded in 1981 to promote a vision of literary culture that is not limited to the immediately popular, and to ensure that important world writers outside popular attention continue to be written about and discussed.

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An extraordinary lyrical novel about a culture seeking to bury its origins, which date to the Holocaust, preferring the biblical to the recent past . . .

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Businessman Yuki Yajima is fifty-one years old. He and his wife, Asako, are the parents of two daughters: Ryo, seventeen, and Yuka, an infant of only two months. Asking himself why he's allowed himself to become a father again at his age, Yuki begins to remember his uncle, who died quite young--younger, indeed, than Yuki is now. Thinking of this man, whom the young Yuki idolized, and who first introduced the boy to authors like Kenzaburo Oe and the Marquis de Sade, serves as a strange tipping point: allowing a sense of chaos and complexity back into his otherwise well-heeled life. A rare work of fiction focused simply on a man of integrity--a dying breed, in novels--"The Shadow of a Blue Cat" meticulously renders his life and opinions as Yuki tries to find a middle path between the radicalism of his uncle's life and the quiet bourgeois home he's worked so hard to build.

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Editions P.O.L is perhaps the most innovative and important French publisher today, welcoming richly challenging and experimental literature into its fold to appear side by side with books belonging squarely in the mainstream. This issue of TheReview of Contemporary Fiction pays tribute to this remarkable publisher with essays, images, and excerpts from previously untranslated works, and an interview with founder and director Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens.

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"Talismano" is a novelistic exploration of writing seen as a hallucinatory journey through half-remembered, half-imagined cities--in particular, the city of Tunis, both as it is now, and as it once was. Walking and writing, journey and journal, mirror one another to produce a calligraphic, magical work: a palimpsest of various languages and cultures, highlighting Abdelwahab Meddeb's beguiling mastery of both the Western and Islamic traditions. Meddeb's journey is first and foremost a sensual one, almost decadent, where the narrator luxuriates in the Tunis of his memories and intercuts these impressions with recollections of other cities at other times, reviving the mythical figures of Arab-Islamic legend that have faded from memory in a rapidly westernizing North Africa. A fever dream situated on the knife-edge between competing cultures, "Talismano" is a testament to the power of language to evoke, and subdue, experience.

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In the late '60s, Juli?n R?os began work on what would have been his very first novel, but fearing that it wouldn't pass the stringent Spanish censorship under Franco, decided not to submit the completed book to publishers. Soon distracted by what would be his magnum opus--the "Larva" series--the manuscript was set aside and forgotten, until the author found and dusted it off almost fifty years later. Quite unlike his later postmodernist work, the short and bitter "Procession of Shadows" is filled with stories of love, war, and vengeance, focusing on the tiny, remote village of Tamoga--a place where vendettas are passed down from generation to generation, and where violence has left its traces in every corner. A "Winesberg, Ohio" for the end times, "Procession of Shadows" shows us a very different side of the usually playful R?os: dark, direct, and pitiless.

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A classic of contemporary Catalan literature, and a haunting and satirical portrait of a vanishing age, Lloren? Villalonga's "The Dolls' Room" concerns the decline of Don Toni and Dona Maria Ant?nia Bearn: aristocrats, cousins, husband and wife, and members of the decadent, age-old ruling class of a town that bears their name. Their story is told by the na?ve family priest, Don Joan, who was taken under Don Toni's wing as a schoolboy. Describing the shabby grandeur of his benefactors' lives in their ancient, rundown family mansion, their grand but ruinous excursions to Paris and Rome, and the mysterious events that lead to their deaths, the humbly devote Joan is continually challenged, and perhaps titillated, by Don Toni's impious personality, his defiance of church authority, and his scandalous affairs. Partly condemning and partly admiring his devilish mentor, the pure-minded Don Joan's lurid "biography" of the Bearns is a testament to the eternal attractiveness of the libertine, and the lengths to which we go in justifying our own worst impulses.

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A Voltairean attack on the political idealism that gave birth to the modern world.

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The first anthology of its kind to appear in English, "Modern Poetry of Pakistan" brings together not one but many poetic traditions indigenous to Pakistan, with 142 poems translated from seven major languages, six of them regional (Baluchi, Kashmiri, Panjabi, Pashto, Seraiki, and Sindhi) and one national (Urdu). Collecting the work of forty-two poets and fifteen translators, this book reveals a society riven by ethnic, class, and political differences--but also a beautiful and truly national literature, with work both classical and modern, belonging to the same culture and sharing many of the same concerns and perceptions.

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"The Review of Contemporary Fiction" was founded in 1981 to promote a vision of literary culture that is not limited to the immediately popular, and to ensure that important world writers out- side the popular attention continue to be written about and discussed.

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Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur Genius Award-winner Hemon, the Best European Fiction series offers a window into what's happening in literary scenes throughout Europe.

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Exiled in Tangiers, cut off from home and country, the narrator of Count Julian rants against the homeland he was forced to leave: Spain. The second novel in Juan Goytisolo's trilogy (including Marks of Identity and Juan the Landless), this story of an exiled Spaniard confronts all of Goytisolo's own worst fears about fascist Spain.

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Berlin, Spring of 1995. While a group of neo-Nazis are preparing an anniversary bash of disastrous proportions, an old physics professor returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoc designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and, in a room at Le Charit?, a Holocaust survivor tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist. Who is that talking cat, why do ghosts of SS soldiers roam the city, and what is Speer's favorite actress up to?

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This book is filled with passion and love for the art of writing and is a celebration of reading. Through the prism of the great Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, Douglas Glover provides a scrupulous reading of Cervantes's Don Quixote, opening this 400-year-old Spanish masterpiece to a new generation of readers, showing how Cervantes made his novel, and, finally, revealing how we as readers participate in his magic creation. Glover's brilliant accomplishment resides in his ability to seduce the reader with his own stunning prose and penetrating insight, while also creating the means for anyone to see into Cervantes's genius.

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While lying on a beach in Greece with an accommodating female companion, the narrator of this novel, Petros Abatzoglou (also the name of the author), describes the peculiar life story and marriage of Mrs. Freeman. By turns digressive, tender, humorous, and pedantic, the narrator interrupts his monologue only when he wants something from his companion, usually another drink. In relating the story of Mrs. Freeman--a fiercely independent woman--the narrator exemplifies almost all the characteristics of a self-centered male. Obsessed with food, alcohol, and the need to be the center of a woman's attention, he paints a mental picture of the elusive Mrs. Freeman, and his own vision of the ideal woman.

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"A bloody marvelous book." Harold Pinter

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Reminiscent in theme and style to his Whitbread Award-winning?"Hopeful Monsters," Nicholas Mosley's?"The Hesperides Tree"?tells of a young man frustrated by the inability of his two chosen courses of study--biology and literature--to adequately define the world. Baffled by several life-shaping coincidences that seem to be part of life itself, he embarks on a physical and intellectual journey in search of a girl he fell in love with years earlier. This journey leads him to a deserted island off the coast of Ireland and, perhaps, to the mythical Garden of the Hesperides, home of the Tree of Life.

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When Leslie Braverman passes away at the early age of 41, four of his closest friends are reunited on an odyssey through the streets of Brooklyn in a beat-up Volkswagen searching for the funeral parlor. In a series of fits, starts and wrong-turns, the comedic banter that suffuses the journey of these four Jewish proponents of New Criticism and little-magazine writing is quietly transformed into a quest for the intellectual, emotional and sentimental aura of the past.The basis for the 1968 movie "Bye Bye Braverman," "To An Early Grave" is a testament to the exuberant inventiveness of Wallace Markfield's writing.

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-- Gerald Bruns's ground-breaking analysis compares two contrasting functions of language: the hermetic, where language is self-contained and self-referencing, and the Orphic, which originates from a belief in the mythical unity of word and being. Bruns lucidly depicts the distinctions and convergences between these two lines of thought by examining the works of Mallarme, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, and others.

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In a series of comic vignettes and letters, Mordechai Schamz sets out to investigate himself, his world, and the language which makes them both intelligible. Dumbfounded at every turn and undiscouraged by -- perhaps even unaware of -- his failures, he confidently gets lost in the labyrinth of his investigations. Reminiscent of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, Calvino's Palomar, and Beckett's Watt, Mordechai Schamz ponders the mysteries of life through cliches and solipsisms, making himself the master of the illogical and the clown of the absurd.

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Welcome to Brighton Beach of the 1930s and early '40s as filtered through Simon Sloan, from youth to would-be artist-as-a-young-man at Brooklyn College to the eve of his induction into the army. Wallace Markfield perfectly captures this Jewish neighborhood--its speech, its people, its unique zaniness.But like any masterpiece--Joyce's "Dubliners" comes readily to mind--"Teitlebaum's Window "both survives and expands upon its time and place. While remaining rooted in the specifics of its own world, thirty-seven years after first being published it teems with Markfield's inventiveness, hilarity, and singular voice.

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Described as "wonderfully funny" by Annie Dillard, "Heartbreak Hotel" reveals the collective memories, sorrows, and triumphs embodied in all women as the museum becomes the metaphor for the body of the narrator.

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Proving that the spirits of James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett still flow in the veins of at least one Irish writer, Roger Boylan has composed a novel filled with hilarity and doom about the inhabitants of the Irish town of Killoyle: Milo Rogers, a headwaiter and would-be poet with a bit of a drinking problem and a bit of a sexual one; Kathy Hickman, a writer for the woman's fashion magazine Glam, as well as a former pin-up girl; Wolfetone Grey, who reads books only by or about God, and who also makes anonymous phone calls through-out the town in order to make people believe, among other things, that they have just won the lottery; and a host of other peculiar folks, all suffering from and tortured by problems with God, sex, the drink, and of course Ireland. Accompanying all of this is a nameless figure who bursts on the scene in the form of acerbic, opinionated, hilarious footnotes that rudely comment upon the characters and numerous other subjects.

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In this complex novel, a gay man who has fled the violence of the city for an island retreat spends his time keeping a journal and writing stories. He invents a female alter-ego who haunts him, as does the ghost of the murderer who occupied his house in the 19th century; ultimately these hauntings are manifestations of his own psychic disintegration. Considered by many to be Dowell’s finest achievement, Island People conveys the fragmentation that results from prolonged isolation.

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