Search results for ""dalkey archive press""

This, the author writes, is "the novel of the individual in a world of barbarians." It is the story of Ondine and Oscarke, a young married couple adrift in a Belgian landscape that is darkening under the spread of industry and World War I. Ondine, who "came to serve god and live," finds that she must "serve the gentlemen" instead. Oscarke, an aspiring sculptor, finds himself unsuccessfully scouring Brussels for work and, when he is finally hired, too tired to make his own art. They grow old and their four children grow up as "technology and mechanization, unemployment, fascism, and war" take over around them. War destroys their attempts to establish a better life, which they seek continually and against all odds. And the chapters about these characters, some of whom first appeared in Chapel Road, alternate with chapters about Boon himself, who describes the impossibility of modern life and the destruction of war. As this wide-ranging novel progresses, the author's struggles--both with writing and with his own life--come more and more to resemble those of his characters.

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The debut novel from the author of Blood Lake, a collection of short stories that was critically acclaimed and landed on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list. An adventure in the absurd, Iceland begins with our narrator, Paul, arriving at a mysterious "Institute" to pick out - on doctor's orders - a new internal organ. There he meets Emily, a young, bikini-clad woman hired to stimulate the organs preserved in a nutrient-enhanced swimming pool, and falls in love amidst a flurry of chlorine and kick-boards. In Jim Krusoe's world, this is about as simple as life gets. Paul's brief interlude with Emily sets the course for his extraordinary adventures, which involve a troublesome stain on Paul's rug, a volcano, Paul's marriage and children, six years in a piano bar with a girl named Calypso Sally, and a long stretch in the State Penitentiary. But throughout it all Paul keeps re-imagining that first afternoon by the poolside with Emily, his one true love. Iceland is a novel of melancholic hilarity that raises serious questions along the way about the nature of memory, imagination, and desire.

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The setting of Nathalie Sarraute's Do You Hear Them? is a dinner conversation between a father and his old friend about a recently acquired pre-Columbian statue. As they discuss the merits of the piece and art in general, the father hears his children upstairs giggling. This childish mirth is barbaric and devastating to the father, for in their laughter he hears them mocking his "old-fashioned" viewpoint and the energy he wastes by collecting lifeless objects. In his mind, they have no respect for what has been of greatest importance in his life.

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Taken from throughout Mills's career, the essays collected in this volume delve into the work of such influential writers as Wallace Stevens, Denise Levertov, Samuel Beckett, Galway Kinnell, Edith Sitwell, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wilbur, Isabella Gardener, James Wright, David Ignatow, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Philip Levine, and Stanley Kunitz. Mills examines how the personal element informs the works of these writers and enables them "to speak to us, without impediment, from the deep center of a personal engagement with existence."

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-- First paperback edition. -- Formally inventive and utterly joyous, Grabinoulor recounts the fantastic adventures of its light-hearted, satyric, eponymous hero as he visits other planets, time travels, and finds poetry everywhere he goes. -- Grabinoulor has been praised highly by authors as diverse as Apollinaire, Celine, and Queneau. -- Albert-Birot founded and edited one of the first avant-garde book reviews, SIC, which published the futurists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists. Grabinoulor was first published in its pages. -- First U.S. edition by Dalkey Archive ('87).

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In his second "novel," Newspaper, the acclaimed writer, photographer, and artist Edouard Levé made perhaps his most radical attempt to remove himself from his own work. Made up of fictionalized newspaper articles, arranged according to broad sections—some familiar, some not—Newspaper gives us a tour of the modern world as reported by its supposedly impartial chroniclers. Much of this "news" is quite sad, some is funny, but the whole serves as a gory parody of the way we have been taught to see our lives and the lives of our fellow human beings.

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Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that their marriage can be rescued, The Sky Changes records the unimaginable damage they inflict upon each other in order to force themselves towards divorce. Along the way, their two children become victims of the parents' failures and are dragged through the torment of this disintegrating marriage. No other novel in American literature is so narrowly dedicated to recording close-up the devastating pain of a marriage falling apart and the doomed-to-fail efforts to make it work.

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While investigating his mentor's life and death, Michael, a voyeuristic fashion photographer, travels through a Dionysian landscape where sex is daydream, women and horses share the same erotic power, and perversity is the rule. An inventive mix of biography, history, erotica, and classic whodunit, "Whistlejacket" is John Hawkes at his best as he blurs distinctions between death and desire, image and language, art and morality.

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A blend of postmodern metafiction and old-style bedroom farce, The Journalist explores the elusive, sometimes illusive, boundaries between facts and the fictions we weave around them. The novel's protagonist, living at a time that might be the present in a city that might be anywhere, has decided for reasons of mental hygiene to keep a detailed record of his thoughts, words, and deeds. Very quickly, however, the project begins to absorb his entire life, as the increasingly meticulous recording of experience threatens to supplant experience itself. To make matters worse, what he records offers its own grist for worry: his devoted wife suddenly grows secretive, his equally devoted mistress turns evasive, his frustratingly independent son might or might not be visiting that same mistress behind his back, and his closest friend begins acting in mysterious ways (and is it just his imagination, or is this friend having clandestine meetings with his wife?). His ever more convoluted perceptions breed a dark muddle of suspicion, leading to a climax that is at once intensely funny and excruciatingly poignant.

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Dane Johnson, Introduction: Chased by Life, Politics, Demons: Flying to Fiction/Luis Rebaza-Soraluz, Demons and Lies: Motivation and Form in Mario Vargas Llosa/Mario Vargas Llosa, The Trumpet of Deya/Mario Vargas Llosa, A Bullfight in the Andes/Efrain Kristal, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service: A Transitional Novel/Elizabeth Dipple, Outside Looking In: Aunt Julia and Vargas Llosa/Alex Zisman, Out of Failure Comes Success: Autobiography and Testimony in A Fish in the Water/Alex Zisman, A Mario Vargas Llosa Checklist/Steve Horowitz, Introduction: The Bittersweet Vision of Josef Skvorecky and a Selected Bibliography of Works by and about Him/Sam Solecki, The Last Decade: An Interview with Josef Skvorecky/Josef Skvorecky, Three Bachelors in a Fiery Furnace, a short story/Josef Skvorecky, Authors, Critics, Reviewers, a lecture/Josef Skvorecky, Keynote Address on Eastern European Literature in Transition/Lubomir Doruzka, A Genial Gossipmonger/Mila Sakova-Pierce, The Cowards: Josef Skvorecky and His Contributions to Czech Humorist Literature/Josef Jarab, This Thing, The Bass Saxophone, Is Anything But Ordinary/Edward Galligan, The Engineer of Human Souls: Skvorecky's Comic Vision/James Grove, Place and Placelessness in Josef Skvorecky's Dvorak in Love/Helena Kosek, American Themes in Skvorecky's Work: The Bride from Texas/Maria Nemcova Banerjee, Josef Skvorecky's Variation on American Themes: The Bride from Texas/Robert L.McLaughlin, A Josef Skvorecky Checklist/Margaret Wehr, The Culture of Everyday Venality: Or a Life in the Book Industry

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George Garrett, "'Once More unto the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More': The Publishing Scene and American Literary Art"/John Barth, "Postmodernism Revisited"/Gilbert Sorrentino, "Writing and Writers: Disjecta Membra"/David Foster Wallace, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young"/Claude Ollier, "Conflictual Inscriptions"/Christine Brooke-Rose, "Ill Locutions"/Robert Creeley, "Thinking of You"/Harry Mathews, "Notes on the Threshold of a Book"/Harry Mathews, "Les Marveilleux Nuages"/Robert Kelly, "Poundian Romance: Investigating Thomas McEvilley's Novel, North of Yesterday"/Keith Abbott, "Shadows and Marble: Richard Brautigan"/Paul West, "Inspector Javert's Moment of Pure Aeschylus"/James McCourt, "Strange Attractions: Exaltation and Calculation in the Poetry of James Schuyler"/Thomas McGonigle, "Reactionary"/Mary McCarthy, "Felipe Alfau's Locos"

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Cast in the form of a hilariously ribald parody of a literary quarterly, ?"The Tar Baby"?is a brilliant, audacious, story-filled novel populated by an array of brawling academics and earthy townies. A commemorative issue honoring the late Anatole Waxman-Weissman, the book/journal parodies a number of academic fads and concerns as the various contributors expose their and their subject's many idiosyncrasies while pursuing their own private agendas.

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Like so many of Woolf's odysseys into the heart of America's subcultures, ?"Wall to Wall"?traces a modern?Ulysses?in reverse: from a West Coast asylum where he works as an attendant to a Boston asylum where he visits his mother, Claude Squires views roadside America from its weak side--the tough underbelly of the Southwest, Tucson, the Rio Grande, Nogales, The Border--before thrusting himself into Okie's sacred shrine, Oklahoma City, and into the staid Eastern Corridor that ends in Boston. Claude's vehicle is a '59 Thunderhead, a "female beast," which his father, a used-car dealer in L.A., has commissioned him to deliver to Oklahoma City. And like all of Woolf's cars, the Thunderhead is a "she," a domineering companion in Claude's cross-country picaresque "flight of passage." In "Wall to Wall" Woolf's view is evocative and is very much his own. First published by Grove Press in 1962, "Wall to Wall" has been an underground classic for over thirty-five years, a comic and satiric masterpiece.

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As he's chauffeured about in his official limousine, aging City Commissioner of Streets Bobbo Druff comes to a frightening realization: he's lost force, the world has started to condescend to him. His once fear-inspiring figure has become everyone's "little old lady." In retaliation, Druff constructs a paranoid plot--his "MacGuffin"--within which (he believes) everyone is out to get him. With unabashed enthusiasm Druff starts an illicit affair (in order to incriminate himself), instigates fights with his employees, invents lies for his family--in short, does everything in his power to create a world in which he is placed safely and firmly at the scandalous center. One of Elkin's greatest comic figures, Druff's self-conscious madness is surprisingly smart and hilariously inventive. Few characters in modern literatureshow such immense creativity and courage in the face of such a hopeless dilemma--the very slipperiness of existence itself.

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The Bern Book is a travelogue, a memoir, a “diary of an isolated soul” (Darryl Pinckney), and a meditation on the myth and reality of race in midcentury Europe and America. In 1953, having left the US and settled in Bern, Switzerland, Vincent O. Carter, a struggling writer, set about composing a “record of a voyage of the mind.” The voyage begins with Carter’s furiously good-humored description of how, every time he leaves the house, he must face the possibility of being asked “the hated question” (namely, Why did you, a black man born in America, come to Bern?). It continues with stories of travel, war, financial struggle, the pleasure of walking, the pain of self-loathing, and, through it all, various experiments in what Carter calls “lacerating subjective sociology.” Now this long-neglected volume is back in print for the first time since 1973.

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Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. In this debut novel by the Polish writer Piotr Pazinski, a young man takes a train to a small town outside of Warsaw to visit a boarding house populated by the last generation of Polish Holocaust survivors. When his grandmother was alive, he had spent a great deal of time at this boarding house, and now he returns, as if to get one last glimpse of the past--to look at old faces and think old thoughts. Pazinski's narrative is at once dreamlike and hard-nosed, and it is structured with the haunting simplicity of a fairy tale. The Boarding House is a meditation on the sad, sometimes terrifying moment when living memory becomes history and the living become the dead.

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Anderson’s debut novel introduces readers to a writer of lucid, hallucinatory prose worthy of comparison with Roberto Bolaño, Cormac McCarthy, and José SaramagoLoosely based on events that occurred during the Chinese Civil War, The Western Contingent follows a group of forty-eight young men who unexpectedly find themselves recruited for a mysterious mission deemed vital to their country’s future prosperity.After undergoing a brief period of training and indoctrination, the peasants-turned-soldiers leave their hometown of Luan hungry for their first taste of combat. Doubt, however, soon sets in. Their colonel shows signs of mental instability, the people they’re supposedly fighting for treat them with indifference, and the purpose of their mission, as they continue marching west, only becomes more and more unclear. Anderson’s debut novel introduces readers to a writer of lucid, hallucinatory prose worthy of comparison with Roberto Bolaño, Cormac McCarthy, and José Saramago.

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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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