Search results for ""Dalkey Archive Press""

A gift for his wife, Jay Wright’s Polynomials and Pollen explores the complementary exigencies of abstraction and physicality. In five sections, each arranged under the aegis of a tutelary concept—from the Yoruba, Akan, Bamana, and Náhuatl—the book is a constellation of protophilosophical inquiry into notions of order, disarray, evidence, flowering, and return; it is also a dynamically visceral work whose feelingtones register rage as well as devotion.

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In this contemporary retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Estonian writer Mati Unt offers a playful yet unsettling mixture of fact and fiction, combining pieces of Estonian political history—in particular the figure of Lydia Koidula (1843-1886), widely regarded as the first Estonian woman to express an Estonian longing for independence—with portraits of life in contemporary Estonia, all set against a backdrop of vampirism and the Gothic novel.

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A retired academic and writer is becoming a media celebrity of sorts, appearing on various talk shows to voice his controversial views on human nature and war. While in New York to make such an appearance, he becomes the victim of a hit-and-run--set up by the CIA? the FBI? terrorists?--and ends up confined to a hospital bed. This forced inactivity allows him to reflect on his life--the work he has done, the women he has known--as various people from his life gather around him, including both his first and second wives. Reminiscing about his past while dealing with his present, the man begins to see his provocative ideas about fidelity, sin, and grace play themselves out in a virtuosic way that could only be conceived by Nicholas Mosley.

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Dorothy Nelson's first book to be published in the United States focuses on a demented, dysfunctional Irish family. The Crawford family is dominated by Da (Joe), a manic-depressive thief and liar who has spent two years in prison for exposing himself in the woods to young children and couples. Ma is a weak and downtrodden victim of her husband's violent temper who occasionally flirts with her son Benjee, an overly sensitive boy with little hope for future happiness. As the narrative passes back and forth between the members of the family (in a style reminiscent of Ann Quin), a compelling portrait of abuse and its consequences is constructed, one that contains both horror and humor in the sexual and social sicknesses of the characters.

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Readers of the contemporary novel in France are witnessing the most astonishing reinvigoration of narrative prose since the New Novel of the 1950s. In the last few years, bold, innovative, and richly compelling novels have been written by a variety of young writers. These texts question traditional strategies of character, plot, theme, and message; and they demand new strategies of reading, too. Choosing ten novels published during the 1990s as examples of that trend, Warren Motte traces the resurgence of the novel in France. He argues that each of the novels under consideration here, quite apart from what other stories it tells, presents a?fable?of the novel that deals with the genre's possibilities, limitations, and future as a cultural form.

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In Children of Darkness and Light, Mosley takes on what for most novelists has been the most challenging of subjects: a novel directly concerned with religious belief. A middle-aged, burnt-out journalist is sent to the north of England to do a story about the possible appearance of the Blessed Virgin to a group of children, though this may be a rumor initiated by the government to cover up a nuclear disaster. Or both. Out of such conflicting possibilities, Mosley invents a sinister world where nothing is what it seems to be. And as Mosley's narrator moves through the possibilities of half-truths, lies, conspiracies, and betrayals, he himself creates a parallel crisis in his personal life wherein he and his wife are trying to destroy their marriage or save it, or - as we come to expect in Mosley novels - do both at once. And behind all this is the possibility that the narrator - half philosopher and half would-be saint - is little more than a middle-aged man trying to justify his irresponsibility and infidelity behind a shield of wit and irony.

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An innovative satire on the process by which bureaucracy and official regimentation insidiously pervade society. In a deadpan, pseudo-scientific tone, the nameless narrator takes us on a tour of a bizarre village whose inhabitants lead such habitual, regulated lives that they resemble elements in a mathematical equation.

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Annihilation is about a day in the life of a Polish-Jewish town shortly before World War II and the Holocaust, a town that soon will be annihilated by Nazi atrocities. With grace, wit, and love for the people and place that will be destroyed, Piotr Szewc creates a hymn to the victims of the Holocaust, as well as a literary masterpiece whose brilliance is evidenced on every page.

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A novel. In the tour de force called America, one of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses struggles upward to the penthouse of God, discovering too late he's taken the elevator marked down. Resurrected from the rubble of dreams as a messiah and accidental revolutionary, his cry for freedom echoes like a broken record as they lower him into the ground. Like a hopelessly lost coal miner, he digs on, deflating the gloom with slapstick, pensive as a clown, gathering strength for the next round.

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Hailed as "the best comic fantasy since "Tristram Shandy" upon its publication in 1964, "The Dalkey Archive," is Flann O'Brien's fifth and final novel; or rather (as O'Brien wrote to his editor), "The book is not meant to be a novel or anything of the kind but a study in derision, various writers with their styles, and sundry modes, attitudes and cults being the rats in the cage." Among the targets of O'Brien's derision are religiosity, intellectual abstractions, J. W. Dunne's and Albert Einstein's views on time and relativity, and the lives and works of Saint Augustine and James Joyce, both of whom have speaking parts in the novel. Bewildering? Yes, but as O'Brien insists, "a measure of bewilderment is part of the job of literature."

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Both comic and haunting, ?"Crystal Vision"?invokes the world of magic and the arcane as filtered through a group of characters gathered on the streets and in the stores of their Brooklyn neighborhood to gossip, insult, lust, brag, and argue. In a series of seventy-eight short narratives, Gilbert Sorrentino perfectly captures the speech, illusions, and confusion of The Magician, Ritchie, The Arab, Irish Billy, Big Duck, Doc Friday, Fat Frankie, and many others. Through formal inventiveness, Sorrentino liberates these characters from the confines of realism and gives us their world--zany, vulgar, hilarious, and exuberant.

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In?"God Head," Scott Zwiren boldly and courageously records the terrifying, destructive experience of manic depression. From a promising young college student to mental hospitals to a confined, out-of-control, roller-coaster life on New York City's Upper West Side, Zwiren's narrator traces from the inside the horrors of an existence that swings between numbing depression and exalting highs.

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Along with one or two books by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds is the most famous (and infamous) of Irish novels published in the twentieth century. A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading he is composing a mischief-filled novel about Dermot Trellis, a second-rate author whose characters ultimately rebel against him and seek vengeance. From drugging him as he sleeps to dropping the ceiling on his head, these figures of Irish myth make Trellis pay dearly for his bad writing. Hilariously funny and inventive, At Swim-Two-Birds has influenced generations of writers, opening up new possibilities for what can be done in fiction. It is a true masterpiece of Irish literature.

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Tynset takes place during a sleepless night, but as the work unfolds it becomes apparent that the circumstances of the immediate present serve merely as points of departure. Plagued by incessant rumination, the narrator’s restless mind spins thread after thread of thought, fantasy, and memory into an elaborate tapestry spanning centuries and covering thousands of miles-all without the narrator ever leaving his house. Hildesheimer famously refused to describe Tynset as a novel; instead, he chose to think of the work as an extended monologue whose structure derives from the musical rondo form, with the recurrence of the titular Norwegian town functioning as a refrain.

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Complex and hauntingly beautiful, Lygia Fagundes Telles’s most acclaimed novel is a journey into the inner lives of three young women, each revealing her secrets and loves, each awaiting a destiny tied to the colorful and violent world of modern Brazil. Sensual and wealthy Lorena dreams of a tryst with a married man. Unhappy Lia burns with a frantic desire to free her imprisoned fiancé. Glamorous Ana Clara, unable to escape her past, falls toward a tragedy of drugs and obsession. Intimate and unforgettable, The Girl in the Photograph creates an extraordinary picture of the wonder and the darkness that come to possess a woman’s mind, and stands as one of the greatest novels to come out of Brazil in the late twentieth century.

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Initially published in 1984, Dermot Healy’s stunning first novel, Fighting with Shadows, returns to print after almost thirty years. Largely set in the border village of Fanacross, Co. Fermanagh, as Ireland stumbles clumsily toward modernity, the Allen family negotiate a bitter and troubled terrain. Fighting with Shadows offers extraordinary and poetic glimpses of the compelling lives of ordinary people. The novel’s landscape is of borderlands, of in-between spaces; it tells of violently sundered geographical borders, of maddening religious differences, of the anguished gaps between people as they struggle to find each other, and of how the dead reside among its inhabitants long after they’ve passed. At once realist account and nightmarish magic realist fable, Fighting with Shadows occupies a truly important position in the history of modern Irish fiction.

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Hidden behind a cloak of exotic mystery, Cuba is virtually unknown to American citizens. G. Cabrera Infante--in Infante's Inferno and several of his other novels--allows readers to peek behind the curtain surrounding this island and see the vibrant life that existed there before Fidel Castro's regime. Detailing the sexual education and adventures of the author, Infante's Inferno is a lush, erotic, funny book that provides readers with insight into what it was like to grow up in pre-revolutionary Havana. Viewing every girl as a potential lover, and the movies as a place both for entertainment and potential sexual escapades, Cabrera Infante captures the adolescent male mindset with a great deal of fun and self-consciousness. With his hallmark of puns and wordplay--excellently translated by Suzanne Jill Levine--Cabrera Infante has hilariously updated the Don Juan myth in a tropical setting.

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Copper Nickel Issue 22 will feature three essays on contemporary publishing by Dalkey Archive Press founder John O'Brien, Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin, and Virginia Quarterly Review digital editor and Publishers Weekly columnist Jane Friedman. It will also include poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by Norma Farber First Book Award winner Cathy Linh Che, Alice Fay Di Castagnola winner G. C. Waldrep, Soros Foundation Fellow David Keplinger, California Book Award winner Alexandra Teague, Thom Gunn Award winner Charlie Bondhus, Hopwood fellow Rachel Richardson, and numerous emerging and established writers including Jaswinder Bolina, Elyse Fenton, and Bernard Farai Matambo. Additionally, the issue will include three "Translation Folios" introducing and contextualizing for an American audience work by renowned Turkish poet Haydar Ergulen, Georg Buchner Prize winner Karl Krolow, and Prix Max-Jacob winner Emmanuel Moses in translations by (respectively) Derick Mattern, Stuart Friebert, and National Book Award and Lenore Marshall Prize winner Marilyn Hacker. The cover of Issue 22 features work by Los Angeles-based artist Christina Stormberg.

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Offering the everyday tasks of literary editors as inspired sources of postwar literary history Michel Foucault famously theorized “the author function” in his 1969 essay “What Is an Author?” proposing that the existence of the author limits textual meaning. Abram Foley shows a similar critique at work in the labor of several postwar editors who sought to question and undo the corporate “editorial/industrial complex.” Marking an end to the powerful trope of the editor as gatekeeper, The Editor Function demonstrates how practices of editing and publishing constitute their own kinds of thought, calling on us to rethink what we read and how.The Editor Function follows avant-garde American literary editors and the publishing practices they developed to compete against the postwar corporate consolidation of the publishing industry. Foley studies editing and publishing through archival readings and small press and literary journal publishing lists as unique sites for literary inquiry. Pairing histories and analyses of well- and lesser-known figures and publishing formations, from Cid Corman’s Origin and Nathaniel Mackey’s Hambone to Dalkey Archive Press and Semiotext(e), Foley offers the first in-depth engagement with major publishing initiatives in the postwar United States.The Editor Function proposes that from the seemingly mundane tasks of these editors—routine editorial correspondence, line editing, list formation—emerge visions of new, better worlds and new textual and conceptual spaces for collective action.

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Offering the everyday tasks of literary editors as inspired sources of postwar literary history Michel Foucault famously theorized “the author function” in his 1969 essay “What Is an Author?” proposing that the existence of the author limits textual meaning. Abram Foley shows a similar critique at work in the labor of several postwar editors who sought to question and undo the corporate “editorial/industrial complex.” Marking an end to the powerful trope of the editor as gatekeeper, The Editor Function demonstrates how practices of editing and publishing constitute their own kinds of thought, calling on us to rethink what we read and how.The Editor Function follows avant-garde American literary editors and the publishing practices they developed to compete against the postwar corporate consolidation of the publishing industry. Foley studies editing and publishing through archival readings and small press and literary journal publishing lists as unique sites for literary inquiry. Pairing histories and analyses of well- and lesser-known figures and publishing formations, from Cid Corman’s Origin and Nathaniel Mackey’s Hambone to Dalkey Archive Press and Semiotext(e), Foley offers the first in-depth engagement with major publishing initiatives in the postwar United States.The Editor Function proposes that from the seemingly mundane tasks of these editors—routine editorial correspondence, line editing, list formation—emerge visions of new, better worlds and new textual and conceptual spaces for collective action.

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