Search results for ""dalkey archive press""

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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One of the most remarkable books of contemporary Mexican literature, The Obstacles is the story of young writers coming of age in a world dominated entirely by their own fictions. It tells, in alternating chapters, the stories of two teenagers, Ricardo and Elias, who are characters in each others' novels.Blurring our notions of reality and fiction, Eloy Urroz takes the reader into a world where characters invent characters and challenge their creators. And the book's conclusion--in which a surprising connection between Ricardo and Elias is revealed--shows that not even fiction can be controlled in a world of such incredible unpredictability.

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The Power of Flies begins in a courtroom, where a man is undergoing an interrogation. He has committed a crime, and he must now explain himself. But instead of letting the judge, lawyer, and psychiatrist question him, he asks himself all the questions--and answers them. While ranting on to the court about various topics--his family, the museum where he works as a tour guide, and even the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal--the narrator of The Power of Flies reveals himself to be both calculating and unstable. In this latest novel from acclaimed French writer Lydie Salvayre, it is up to the reader to sort through his philosophical diatribe to discover why this man turned killer.

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Including pieces on Gregory Bateson, William Faulkner, Philip Pullman, Sir Oswald Mosley's politics, religion and stammering, this diverse collection gathers essays written by Nicholas Mosley over the past forty years. Resembling the behaviour of slime mould - a strange organism made up of separate amoebae that temporarily form a single pillar which then bursts in order to scatter its seeds across the forest floor - the ideas found in these essays converge and disperse, crossing over into other disciplines, and creating a unique way of looking at the world, one echoed in Mosley's fictional writings.

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-- First paperback edition. -- In this madcap metafictional mystery a 22-year-old philosophy student (Hortense) is kidnapped and a dog is murdered -- the imaginary country of Poldevia is somehow involved. Arranged in the form of a sestina (replete with authorial asides and plenty of puns, jokes and wordplay), this is the second installment in Roubaud's popular and widely acclaimed Hortense series. -- A professor of mathematics at the University of Paris X Nanterre and a long time member of Oulipo, the Workshop for Potential Literature, Jacques Roubaud is the author of several novels and works of poetry. -- First published in the U.S. by Dalkey Archive (1989).

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Paying homage to the Italian-American experience, Italian Stories celebrates an Italian neighbourhood in the Bronx during the 1930s and '40s, and mourns the loss of this ethnic identity with the migration of subsequent generations to the suburbs. With stories that are both melancholy and comic, Papaleo here explores the contradictory desires of assimilation: his characters want to live the life of the average American while maintaining a strong link to their rich heritage. In addition, Papaleo rails against the damaging stereotypes of Italian-Americans propagated by the media in movies and television.

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Grattan Fletcher and Suck Ryle are on the road, risking their dignity and occasionally their lives to renew the civic spirit of Ireland. Grattan is an idealistic, ageing civil servant who has enlisted Ryle, a skeptic prone to violent temper, in a quixotic quest to make a better Irish future for Grattan’s granddaughter. Along the way, they encounter politicians, protesters, and power brokers, some of whom are fascinated and others only flummoxed by Grattan’s wide sympathies and wild philosophical musings. In sprawling comic fashion, Grattan and Me addresses countless contemporary political, economic and ecological problems, allowing no person or institution to remain safe from ridicule.

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The narrator of this novel begins by introducing himself not as a speaker but a listener, spellbound by his friend Caracala's yarns, which blend accounts of youthful mischief with casual references to Cervantes and Laurence Sterne. At first, the spotlight is entirely on Caracala, but the narrator soon begins to distrust his friend, concluding that Caracala is no more than a sham: a performer. Yet the reader will in turn come to doubt the narrator's own pretensions to honesty, until every source of information has become so unreliable as to make the very notion of a "true story" seem like blatant propaganda.

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When his marriage and career fall apart, a young lawyer sets out on a desperate mission to recapture the promise of his youth. His attempt leaves him stranded between a past he no longer recognizes and a life that’s no longer his—and he soon begins to suspect that the surest path to happiness lies in simply giving up. A moving, tragicomic novel about defeat, memory, and the seductive prospect of losing it all.

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-- Talking bridges the stylistic gap between David Antin's early experimental poems and the talk pieces for which he is most well-known. Combining one poem with two improvisations and his first published talk-poem, Talking is a unique book that cannot be classified as solely poetry, fiction or criticism. Infusing the lyricism of poetry with the compelling pull of the spoken voice, this collection is a testament to David Antin's reputation as one of the most influential artists of the contemporary era.

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-- Dying in a bamboo bed, Captain Clancy hallucinates several philosophical conversations with a snake and a tiger. Meanwhile, Captain Knightbridge and Nurse Jane of the Search & Rescue Unit have sex in their helicopter -- the Bamboo Bed -- at 10,000 feet, setting a wartime record. Down below, two hippy kids wander the forest trying to end the Vietnam war with a dream and a guitar. In the tradition of Catch-22 and Dr. Strangelove, The Bamboo Bed treats with hilarity and outrage the grim absurdity of war.

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Originally published in 1926, King Goshawk and the Birds is the first installment of O’Duffy’s Cuanduine trilogy, which also included The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1928) and Asses in Clover (1933), all set to be published by Dalkey Archive in the near future. Set in a future world devastated by the development of capitalism, King Goshawk concerns the eponymous tyrant’s attempt to buy all of the wildflowers and songbirds in Ireland, and the attempt by a Dublin philosopher as well as a number of mythical heroes of Irish tradition to stop him.

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Moritz Wenk is a moderately unsuccessful artist workng part-time as a commercial painter. He forms a harmonious if uncommitted couple with Judith, a dental hygienist. During a hot week in summer, Moritz reflects on his own position in life while mediating a marital dispute between two friends, hosting a dinner party for neighbors he hates, and turning thirty-eight. Told with Werner’s customary charm, spleen, and baroque artistry, Cold Shoulder is a comic portrait of an unexceptional modern man struggling to make the decisions that will bring his life meaning.

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Machado de Assis's first novel visits themes the author developed exquisitely throughout his career including marriage, memory, and perspective. In this insightful translation by Karen Sherwood Sotelino, and with an introduction by José Luiz Passos, the novel reveals the author’s early experiment in drawing out psychological and sociological issues of his times. Readers familiar with his mature works will recognize the progression from infatuation, through passion, doubt, and toxic jealousy, as experienced by protagonists Félix and Lívia in 19th century Rio de Janeiro.

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In Counterclaims, renowned poet H. L. Hix has amassed the responses of more than one hundred and fifty of his fellow writers, scholars, and artists to a singular problem, simultaneously a set of questions and a call-to-arms: whether the old truths inherent in 20th-century poetics can still be adhered to today, or whether new truths might take their place and what might they be?The answers collected in this volume from many of the greatest luminaries of their generation, writers young and old, from diverse backgrounds and cultures, form the basis of a new conversation; a step forward, not toward any one monolithic thesis or manifesto, but toward a new and ever adapting notion of poetry.

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Hired to write a travel article for a magazine, Ulan-Bator ventures to Mongolia, where he finds a cast of odd and outlandish expatriates, including an ex-Red Army officer turned Buddhist, a French zombie, and an American correspondent for a newspaper that no longer exists. At the center of this philosophical romance is the Genghis Khan Hotel, where a group of drunken intellectuals endlessly debate a new cosmological theory proposing that the world itself is a hologram.

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Abrupt Mutations leads the reader on a humorous, meandering tour of 1960s Megalopolis, at the heart of which is a hotly anticipated gathering of the city’s culturati at the home of O Jango, a Brazilian billionaire and aesthete equally revered and reviled by his fellow Megalopolitans. Parodying a number of literary styles, including the detective novel and science fiction, Revol’s novel is first and foremost a Menippean satire of the cosmopolitan west in the sixties, detailing hilariously but humanely the lives of intellectual and artistic émigré’s who have fled from dictatorships and found in their adopted city opportunities for personal freedom and pleasure they previously could never have dreamed of.

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Our Best Love Story traces the end of a romance as an unnamed narrator wanders the streets of his city, attempting to endure his new solitude, taking refuge in remembered places and imagined companions. Told in a series of fragments, the novel wrestles powerfully but playfully with its own obligation to craft a satisfying story of love’s formation, its decay, and its eventual end. Ultimately, Levi’s novel asks readers to consider whether books, stories, reading, writing, the artificial life and companionship found in literature, can ever truly form an adequate response to the inescapable fact of human solitude.

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Awarded the Alejo Carpentier Award in 2012, The Last Librarian follows the journey of a writer who has decided, as a way of honoring the artists who have meant the most to him, to visit and deposit a single book within each of the Seven Libraries of the World. Morales’s novel is a profound meditation on the origins and meaning of writing, time, and the act of artistic creation.

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The Lady of Solitude projects a fresh and daring new voice on to the Brazilian literary scene. These transgressive and highly charged erotic stories are all written from a woman’s point of view and they offer an unexpected perspective on the world, sex and desire in a changing Brazilian and global context. That is not to say that all of Parisot’s characters are strong, emancipated and resolute: they just live in a world where relationships of all kinds have changed. Avowedly a disciple of the famous detective writer Rubem Fonseca, Paula Parisot adds a new and sinister twist to crimes of passion in the big city. Some of the settings are familiar to Fonseca fans: high society salons, favelas, back alleys, and hotels in European capitals. Alternating the register from interior monologue to letters and omniscient narration, Parisot brings to the surface intimate moments as well as exact instants when certain social conventions change, move on or die.

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Majnun lives his life online in his grandparents’ well-appointed home in the Brazilian capital. No school, no work—just bored in Brasília. After falling in love with a married woman, however, he flees to Madrid with friends, intent on, well … something. Writing a historical novel about medieval Spain? Or perhaps converting to Islam and heading to North Africa? As Majnun floats through the crowds of Catholics, through encounters with legitimate medievalists, through romances, friendships, mosques, and palaces, his vague interests threaten to boil over into violent, even deadly action.

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Originally published in 1951, this novel tells of a young girl living with her deeply religious grandparents in pre-war Vyborg-before it became part of the Soviet Union. Leena hates school, loves music and rain, and wanders through the town in a state of childish enchantment. “Like a spruce cone, a child falls into a world where logical disorder replaces magical order, and there you are-in trouble, we’ll agree.” The world she inhabits features multiple layers of reality, and this is reflected in the novel’s artful narrative: life and death are reflections of each other, and reality is merely a map of the individual’s inner world. Through the naive perspective of a young girl, the book addresses deep philosophical concerns in simple, lucid prose.

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Both a sense of urgency and a goodly amount of patience are required for any writer to produce a novel. Moving between these two poles, Jean-Philippe Toussaint here collects a series of short essays on the art of writing, both his own and that of writers he's admired, for example Kafka, Beckett, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. As Toussaint himself has said, "It's only natural for writers... to say a word about how they write and what they owe to great authors."

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Since 2010, this anthology has been an essential resource for readers, critics, and publishers interested in contemporary European literature. In this, the seventh installment of the series, Best European Fiction 2016 continues its commitment to uncovering the best prose writing happening on the continent-from Azerbaijan to Denmark, from Portugal to the Ukraine-featuring work by established authors such as Josef Winkler, Christian Gailly, and João de Melo, as well as up-and-coming writers like Krisztina Tóth, Justyna Bargielska, Veronika Simoniti, and Bessora. The volume is also a forum for the best translators working today, featuring new translations by Lawrence Venuti, Vera Rich, Amaia Gabantxo, Adrian Nathan West, and many more. Also featuring a provocative prefatory essay written by John Fosse, Best European Fiction 2016 is another essential report on the state of global literature in the twenty-first century.

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Following on from his short story collection, "You Do Understand?," is this expansive collection of sixteen tales about "urban nomads" lost in a labyrinth of pop culture: "We go to the movies. We read books. We listen to music. No harm in that, but it's not real." A best-seller in Eastern Europe, "Law of Desire" is Blatnik at the height of his powers. He is one of the most respected and internationally relevant post-Yugoslav authors writing today.

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"Originally published in Portuguese as Um Homem: Klaus Klump by Editorial Caminho, Lisboa, 2003."

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"Originally published in Estonian as Raadio by Eesti Keele Sihtasutus, Tallinn, 2002 Copyright (c) 2002 Tonu Onnepalu."

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Although Dermot Healy (1947-2014) is probably best known as a novelist and poet, he was also a prolific playwright, screenwriter, and actor. Healy’s interest in drama was long-standing, and was central to his development as a writer. Between 1985 and 2010 he wrote thirteen stage plays, all of which are gathered here for the first time. Although the settings of Healy’s plays are often local and regional by design, their energy and vision transcend those boundaries. In this respect, the publication of The Collected Plays will be of interest to all scholars and practitioners of contemporary drama.

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Editor's note/An interview with Gerald Murnane by Antoni Jach/Looking for Writers Beyond Their Work by John Griswold/Five Silhouettes by Luis Chitarroni (translated by Sarah Denaci)/Seven and a Half Studies by S.D. Chrostowska/Nine Suppositions Concerning "Bouvard and Pecuchet" by Jacques Jouet (translated by E.C. Gogolak)/Irrationality, Situations, and Novels of Inquiry by Thalia Field/Margins and Mirrors by Warren Motte/The Colon by Lily Hoang and Bhanu Kapil/The Fragile Shelter of the Declarative: On Edouard Leve by Adrian West/Transgressive Autofictions by Jacques Houis/Contributors/Translators/Acknowledgments/Book Reviews/Books Received/Annual Index

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