Search results for ""Dalkey Archive Press""

War is raging in Georgia, Russian fighter planes are thundering overhead, and yet, for some, the falling bombs cause no more impact than the slight ripple moving through the purified water of their swimming pools, or the rattling of a spoon in their cappuccino cups. Filtered through the bleary and cynical mind of Shako--a journalist famed for his appearance in Georgian Pepsi ads--"Adibas" is a tragic satire describing the progressive falsification of his life, invaded by consumer goods, consumer sex, consumer carnage. A "war novel" without a single battle scene, Zaza Burchuladze's English-language debut anatomizes the Western world's ongoing "feast in the time of plague."

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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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An autobiographical novel that takes a life to pieces, "One Spoon on this Earth" stands a sort of digest of contemporary Korean history as it might be seen through the lens of one man's life and opinions.

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A counterfeiter, sculptor, filmmaker, mystic, and terminal recluse uses his ill-gotten gains to wreak secret havoc upon a bankrupt London, in this timely debut novel.

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The debut novel of Bernard Comment, acclaimed author and editor, now available in English for the first time, The Shadow of Memory brings a fairy-tale premise into the modern world, where information--and its loss--can be a matter of life and death.

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Theo Fales is a one-time historian turned book editor who specializes in ghostwriting the memoirs of leading American policy-makers. For over twenty-five years, Theo has been helping retired generals and CIA directors justify their decisions in the first-person. One day, however, hearing a song at a colleague’s memorial service, Theo has a vision: he senses, in the music, a completely different way to live. He becomes obsessed by a need to align musical time with the metre of his own life and prose. Theo’s method opens onto two seemingly contradictory interior landscapes: one, a rage of identification with a college classmate who has written and signed the legal document justifying the use of torture by the US; the other, a love for the singer best known for her interpretations of the composer who wrote that vital song. Theo commits himself to the idea that only through his method will he be able to save himself. Is he mad, or has history itself lost its way?

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Milan Kundera on Marek Bienczyk's "Transparency" "The subject of transparency has always interested me; in "The Art of the Novel" I discussed it as one of the key words in my personal lexicon. Marek Bienczyk is right to give it an entire book of its own: transparency remains one of the foundational concepts of today's social imaginary, and its role never ceases to grow. These lovely pages, in which the essay brushes up against fiction, offer us more than an historical and philosophical study, but a truly existential, and thus novelistic, investigation of transparency. It's a delight." Drawing on all his resources as a novelist, cultural critic, and scholar, Marek Bienczyk peels away the layers of our contemporary obsession with "transparency," skipping across centuries and continents to piece together the genesis of our fears of deception and overexposure. Highly poignant, and transcending the genres of criticism, personal essay, and the metaphysical novel, "Transparency" is a gorgeous revelation--about our never-ending need for revelation.

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Calling to mind the minimalist novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Motti is at once an exercise in simplicity and a self-conscious investigation into storytelling . . .

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Russell H. Greenan's "It Happened in Boston?" is one of the most radical narratives to appear in the late 1960s ("this is a book that encompasses everything" as David L. Ulin noted in "Bookforum"). Yet due in large part to the difficulty of classifying Greenan's fiction, many readers are unaware of his other novels. In "The Birth of Death and Other Comedies: The Novels of Russell H. Greenan," Tom Whalen, drawing widely from the American literary tradition, locates Greenan's lineage in the work of Hawthorne and Poe "where allegory and dream mingle with and illuminate realism," as well as in the fiction of Twain, West, Hammett, Cain, and Thompson. Examining Greenan's characteristic themes and strategies, Whalen provides perceptive readings of the dark comedies of this criminally neglected American master, and in a coda reflects on Greenan's career and the reception of his work.

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This issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction presents new Slovak fiction in translation, congregating such significant writers as Dusan Dusek, Brano Hochel, Michal Hvorecky, Jan Johanides, Daniela Kapitanova, Monika Kompanikova, and Dusan Simko, among others most of whom have never before been translated into English to form a literary portrait of contemporary Slovak identity, framed by traditionalism and yet striving to engage the modern world with a voice all its own.

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There are no heroes in Igna cio de Loyola Branda o's world, only victims: not only of violence, but of deceit, desire, and fear. In The Good-Bye Angel, Branda o returns to his great subject: the tyranny of the community versus the individual, the city versus its inhabitants. Large enough to develop its own mythology, yet small enough to be provincial and petty, the city of Arealva (standing in for Brazil, and the world at large) is itself a character in Branda o's latest novel, toying with and finally consuming its citizens with the innocent cruelty of a cat with its prey--it's nothing personal, but it needs the meat. A cross between a film noir and a Greek tragedy, with more than its share of sex and drugs (though no rock 'n' roll), The Good-Bye Angel begins with a murder and ends in a panorama of ambition, obsession, libido, hypocrisy, and loneliness.

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A classic of dark eroticism from one of the great American writers of the twentieth century.

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In this improbable love story, Toussaint creates a character who is obsessed with himself: how he does things and all the ways he might have done them, how he thinks, why he thinks the way that he thinks, how he might do or think otherwise. What happens? He takes driving lessons, goes grocery shopping, spends endless hours with an adorable employee of the driving school he attends. And though he is aloof, though caught up in his own actions and in the movement of his own thoughts—he somehow emerges as surprisingly insightful and also very funny. In Toussaint’s touching novel, we come to know this character intimately and yet know almost nothing about him. These two extremes, existing together, are at the heart of Toussaint’s remarkable style.

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Winner of a 2007 American Academy of Arts and Letters, Rikki Ducornet is beloved as a novelist and essayist, but is known perhaps most of all for her work as a writer of short stories. In the tradition of Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Angela Carter, Ducornet creates modern-day fables filled with characters as complex and surprising as any in American short fiction. This landmark collection of new stories is generously illustrated by T. Motley, whose gritty, fantastical cartooning explores the same post-magical realism that has been the subject of Ducornet’s distinguished career.

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"Toussaint is a genuinely funny writer . . . small erotic moments are captured perfectly . . . makes me long for more by Toussaint." Kirkus Review

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Mr. Optimus Oloop is a Finnish statistician living in Buenos Aires.

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In Curtis White's first novel, The Idea Of Home, he attempts to imagine "a place in which humans can live." This utopia is definitely not San Lorenzo - a post-war, prefabricated suburb in California - where White grew up and which is the basis for this novel. From the vantage point of anoff-kilter adulthood, White spins recent American history together with personal observations and investigations into the dark heart of American suburbia. Shocking, yet very funny and always learned, The Idea Of Home is a mix of the personal and the philosophical in an energetic collage that would resemble the biographies of Nietzsche and Mark Twain if they had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and '60s.

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Published posthumously in 1995, Mrs. Ted Bliss tells the story of an eighty-two-year-old widow starting life anew after the death of her husband. As Dorothy Bliss learns to cope with the mundane rituals of life in a Florida retirement community, she inadvertently becomes involved with a drug kingpin trying to use her as a front for his operations. Combining a comic plot with a deep concern for character, Elkin ends his career with a vivid portrait of a woman overcoming loss, a woman who is both recognizable and as unique as Elkin's other famous characters.

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Dedicated to the discussion and celebration of innovative fiction, the Review of Contemporary Fiction has featured the most influential authors of the twentieth century for over twenty years.This summer, with the issue on New Japanese Fiction, RCF will return to featuring interesting new fiction from around the world. This issue builds on a tradition in place since the origin of RCF, and has included publication of issues devoted to: New Italian Fiction (156478-121-6), New Danish Fiction (1-56478-127-5), New Finnish Fiction (1-56478-098-8) and New Latvian Fiction (1-56478-178-X).The fall issue highlights the new format for RCF, featuring long essays on two to four authors that provide both an introduction to their fiction and interpretative strategies for reading their work. For a complete list of recent issues.In addition, each issue features an extensive book review section, focused on contemporary fiction that is generally not reviewed by the mainstream media.

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Investigating the conceptualisation of structure and form within literature, the Russian Formalists affected both the creation of art during the 1920s and 1930s and the development of literary theory as a scientific discipline. Crucial to the understanding of this theoretical movement, this collection of essays by and about the Russian Formalists features work by: - Boris M. Eichenbaum ("The Theory of the Formal Method") - Viktor Shklvosky ("The Mystery Novel: Dickens's Little Dorrit") - Roman Jakobson ("On Realism in Art") - Mikhail Bakhtin ("Discourse Typology in Prose") - Osip M. Brik ("Contributions to the Study of Verse Language") A new introduction by Gerald L. Bruns provides a context for understanding why these works remain as important and influential now as when they were first written.

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In filling out a standard employment questionnaire, the narrator takes the command "Do Not Cross Out!" as an order not to omit anything and embarks on a search for his origins and the origins of his fellow Czech citizens.

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-- A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jewess and political radical. Together and apart, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which shape the twentieth century, taking them from Cambridge and Berlin to the Spanish Civil War, Russia, the Sahara, and finally to Los Alamos to witness the first nuclear test. -- Hopeful Monsters received Britain's prestigious Whitbread Award in 1990. -- Praising Mosley's ability to distill complex modes of thought, the New York Times called Hopeful Monsters a virtual encyclopedia of twentieth century thought, in fictional form. -- First U.S. edition by Dalkey Archive ('90), most recent paperback by Vintage ('93).

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Curtis White and Milorad Pavic Number

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A literary magazine devoted to discussions of contemporary fiction and authors, including selections from works-in-progress and interviews, as well as a lengthy book-review section.

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Best known as one of the most significant poets of the 20th century, Louis Zukofsky was also an accomplished writer of fiction, all of which is collected here for the first time. Included is his only novel, "Little" (1970), which John Leonard in the "New York Times" called "an odd, playful, thoroughly charming novel about a child prodigy." (The novel is very autobiographical and Zukofsky's son, violin virtuoso, Paul Zukofsky, has written an afterword for this edition.) Also included are the four stories comprising "It Was," published in 1961 in a limited edition and virtually unobtainable for years. The stories range from the brief title story in which a writer struggles with the composition of the perfect sentence to the novella length "Ferdinand," which Guy Davenport praised in the "New York Times Book Review" as "a finely tuned story from a sensibility of extraordinary range and skill."

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Gerald Burns is a leading practitioner of long-lined, thickly textured verse. "These / long lines are long life to us, go back to Kenneth Irby's 'A Set' I saw first in / a flyer from Lawrence, KS where Burroughs chats with Cage whose spitbubbles / may remind us with Zukofsky the heart of the bluebonnet's black. Anyone can learn from anything, " he writes, and as these lines from "For J. R. Here" indicate, Burns has learned much: his long dragnet lines display a lifetime of wide reading and close observation from an astonishing range of subjects.

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Like a series of snapshots, this novel presents a picture of a particular Brooklyn neighborhood between the years 1935 and 1951, covering the Depression, World War II, the beginnings of the Cold War, and the Korean War. In short, colorful, dramatic episodes, the book details the collapse of a basically decent, homogeneous, and honorable group of people into a greedy, ignorant, and slipshod conglomeration, corrupted by money made available by the war economy. The neighborhood as a whole is the protagonist, although there are many characters who become familiar. Moving the way memory does, the narrative skips from episode to episode in no conventional time sequence, projecting indelible flashes of the past as they strike the mind. Gilbert Sorrentino has beautifully encompassed a section of America in this very human, funny, intelligent novel which re-creates perfectly the mood and the time of its inhabitants and its past.

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"Century 21," a time machine in literary form, ignores the unity of time, space, and character. This tragicomical idyll of the future past mixes ancient and modern genres: Platonic dialogue and nineteenth-century romance, reportage and science fiction. At the book's core are two sisters, Ann Kar, a writer and survivor, and Carol, a suicidal artist. Considering herself a lunatic, Carol dreams about escaping from the earth to the moon (luna) and about the moon scholar, a lunar archeologist, who a thousand years after her death, while reconstructing terrestrial life, discovers the traces of her existence, falls in love with her, and begins to write about her - and his - erotic adventure. The result is a novel where Anna Karenina writes about Simone Weil, where Joseph Conrad meets Malcolm Lowry in Mexico, where Goethe presides over a literary institute made up of such members as Italo Svevo and Sextus Propertius, and where Djuna Barnes, dying from AIDS, visits Moses Maimonides in Japan. Ewa Kuryluk is fascinated by the repetition of the same situations and types, yet she's after her contemporaries who are starved for affection, lost in transit, ready to slip into somebody else's skin, and speaking in English, their second language, with a heavy accent. "Century 21" is a profoundly moving and original work.

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Once a fêted literary figure, the former lover of B-list movie star Lucida, but now derelict, incontinent, asexual, ageing poet Harold Lime turns his back on material modernity, withdrawing to a basement in the university town of Cambridge, England. But human connections will prove difficult to sever completely, and he is drawn out of himself by a fox hunt saboteur (the sab woman), with whom he forms a poignant, uneasy relationship and who acts as his mutual confessor. In the isolation of his basement, Harold Lime obsessively listens to Mahler, whose nine symphonies, unfinished tenth, and Earth Songs, each corresponding to a separate chapter of this innovative poetic novel, will reawaken the sensitivities he has tried to erase, taking him back to his Australian childhood and youth, fostering a growing awareness of intertwined body and soul, of commitment and connectedness, of the ecology of rootedness and unrootedness in an unjust world.

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Sonia meets Knut in an online literary forum and begins a long-distance relationship with him that gradually turns to obsession. Though Sonia needs to create distance when Knut becomes too absorbing, she also yearns for a less predictable existence. Alternately attracted to and repulsed by Knut, Sonia begins a secret double life of theft and betrayal in which she will ultimately be trapped for years.

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While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary novel born of this constraint, and although the brilliant and playful letters contained here cover everything from observations about contemporary German and Russian life to theories of art and literature, nonetheless every one of them is indirectly dedicated to the one topic they are all required to avoid: their author's own unrequited love.

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Amanda Michalopoulou’s God’s Wife is a deceptive novel: it draws us close with promises of titillating confession and heart-warming intimacy only to send us on a conceptual scavenger hunt that probes the ethics of reading, writing, and the unspoken conventions of literary mastery. “It sounds like a lie, but I am His wife,” is the arresting opening declaration made by the novel’s unnamed narrator, who will always be known through her role as an appendage, “at His side.” This premise—bringing to mind as it does the very origins of the western novel: epistolary novels of romance as both salvation and captivity—immediately also raises issues of power, domination, truth and belief. God’s Wife, then, is ultimately a meditation on the power of literature to create a space of imaginative play. It is a love story, a philosophical treatise on the nature of faith and divinity, a self-conscious meditation on the nature of writing and creativity, and a feminist tract all rolled into one. What holds all these strands together is what can only be described as the compelling authenticity of the narrator’s voice and her relentless focus on the role of femininity as performance and convention in literature. Her voice is, of course, shaped by Michalopoulou’s inimitably spare, elegant and masterfully evocative prose, which like the narrator’s mother’s brand of storytelling, uses few words and eschews didacticism.

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Elegy for Joseph Cornell is at once a monologue; a collection of metafictional microfictions; a series of prose poems; an artist’s quest; the hero’s journey; a filmography, biography, bibliography, and inventory; a travel scrapbook; and a guidebook for creativity. Argentinian writer María Negroni transcends form and genre as she explores, with both luminous and illuminating results, the life of Joseph Cornell, a solitary urban artist whose work also defied conventional classification.

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A postmodern poet who successfully employed classic structures to exploit the range of possibilities inherent in the Slovenian language, this selection from the life's work of Milan Jesih highlights his revolutionary approach to verse. Beginning with humor and autobiography and gradually withdrawing into a universe of of fragments, quotations, dreams, and doubt, this collection offers English readers a first glimpse into the work of one of Slovenia's literary treasures.

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A major, never before translated novel by the author of "Muj?ng / The Heartless"--often called the first modern Korean novel--"The Soil" tells the story of an idealist dedicating his life to helping the inhabitants of the rural community in which he was raised. Striving to influence the poor farmers of the time to improve their lots, become self-reliant, and thus indirectly change the reality of colonial life on the Korean peninsula, "The Soil" was vitally important to the social movements of the time, echoing the effects and reception of such English-language novels as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle."

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A sweeping story of the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire over the course of the First World War, "Farewell" is a novel of one particular family living in one particular house during these historic events.

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In this comic novel of political intrigue, Adam Gorozpe, a respected businessman in Mexico, has a life so perfect that he might as well be his namesake in the Garden of Eden--but there are snakes in this Eden too. For one thing, Adam's wife Priscila has fallen in love with the brash director of national security--also named Adam--who uses violence against token victims to hide the fact that he's letting drug runners, murderers, and kidnappers go free. Another unlikely snake is the little Boy-God who's started preaching in the street wearing a white tunic and stick-on wings, inspiring Adam's brother-in-law to give up his job writing soap operas to follow this junior deity and implore Adam to do the same. Even Elle, Adam's mistress, thinks the boy is important to their salvation--especially now that it seems the other Adam has put out a contract on Adam Gorozpe. To save his relationship, his marriage, his life, and the soul of his country, perhaps Adam will indeed have to call upon the wrath of the angels to expel all these snakes from his Mexican Eden.

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Conceived exactly nine months before the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World, the narrator of Christopher Unborn spends the novel waiting to be born. But what kind of world will he be delivered into? "Makesicko City," as the punning narrator calls it, is not doing well in this alternate, worst-case-scenario 1992. Politicians are selling pieces of their country to the United States. A black, acid rain falls relentlessly, forewarning of the even worse ecological catastrophes to come. Gangs of children, confined to the slums, terrorize their wealthy neighbors. A great novel of ideas and a work of aesthetic boldness, Christopher Unborn is a unique, and quite funny, work from one of the twentieth century's most respected authors.

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Set during the U.S. Occupation following World War II, Embracing Family is a novel of conflict--between Western and Eastern traditions, between a husband and wife, between ideals and reality. At the opening of the book, Miwa Shunsuke and his wife are trapped in a strained marriage, subtly attacking one another in a manner similar to that of the characters in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? When his wife has an affair with an American GI, Miwa is forced to come to terms with the disintegration of their relationship and the fact that his attempts to repair it only exacerbate the situation. An award-winning novel, critics have read this book as a metaphor of postwar Japanese society, in which the traditional moral and philosophical basis of Japanese culture is neglected in favor of Western conventions.

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This volume collects new short stories from one of Ireland’s leading writers in both the Irish and English languages. Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s stories are widely acclaimed for their acute perception of Irish women’s lives, the power of her verbal economy, and her skillful and unique use of bothhumor and the fantastic.

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Petar, a devoted family man, leaves his apartment to buy some coffee and goes missing. While his wife is desperately looking for him, he finds himself trapped in another woman’s dreams. As one dream encounter follows the other, Petar and the dreamer, Emilija, become aware of the spiritual and emotional emptiness that exists within them. Will they allow their connection to transcend the metaphysical domain to attain the real and corporeal? Fragile Travelers is a compelling story of an improbable intimacy between two people, introduced and closed by an omniscient narrator but told almost entirely in the alternating voices of Emilija and Petar. With its subtle lyricism and well-paced humor, Fragile Travelers takes the reader on a journey that explores the emotional emptiness of modern life, but gives its protagonists a chance to search for a meaningful existence—if nowhere else—at least in dreams.

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True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by award-winning playwright and poet Dan O’Brien concerning trauma, both political and personal. The Body of an American speaks to a moment in history when a single, stark photograph—of a US Army Ranger dragged from the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter through the streets of Mogadishu—altered the course of global events. In a story that ranges from Rwanda to Afghanistan to the Canadian Arctic, O’Brien dramatizes the ethical and psychological haunting of journalist Paul Watson. In The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage the playwright applies journalistic principles to investigating the source of his childhood unhappiness, as he searches for the reason why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more he learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his sense of self is shaken by rumors regarding his true parentage. The trilogy concludes with New Life, a tragicomedy that finds Paul Watson in Syria and the playwright in treatment for cancer, while together they endeavor to sell a TV series about journalists in war zones. New Life explores the paradox of war as entertainment, and dares to dream of healing after catastrophe. These three gritty yet poetic plays stand as a testament to the value of witnessing, honoring, and perhaps transcending the struggles of living.

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Monogamy elaborates an ideology of romance from extraordinary poems and songs, one by one. Poems and popular songs are still the main medium for preserving the rules of romance. Each chapter is a meditation on one of eight commonplaces about love: that it makes one monogamous, sentimental, vulnerable; that its force is immediate and transformative; or that it is a fickle force, but cannot be bought, and yet endures. Strong poets and lyricists bend these notions, as lovers do too. Great poems and songs come from interstices between celebrated commonplaces, felt desires and second-thoughts. The Book of Love is heterogeneous, complicated. Some love poems reach significant numbers through books and anthologies, and eventually classroom textbooks, and are held in memory by generations of admirers. Many popular songs, however, have reached extremely large audiences, beginning with Broadway musicals, and continuing in the recordings of later jazz vocalists. They are not read, but they are firmly lodged in memory. They are the only poems known by most audiences. Canonical poems are imitated by aspiring poets and versifiers. The actual verse culture is layered with light verse, song lyrics, and Shakespeare’s sonnets. To understand what poems effectively teach—about romance, in particular—one should attend closely to songs too, particularly in the U.S. since 1920.

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The Deer is a rhythmic, surrealist psychological thriller about a physicist who hits—what appears—to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. Part experimental film, part jazz record, but always lyrical, luminous, and austere, The Deer is a poignant meditation on familial love, loss, and the mystery at the heart of existence.

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With each chapter embodying a separate Commandment, Living Tissue, 10x10 is both a Decalogue and a ribald, exuberant, deliriously inventive postmodern Decameron, which covers four decades in the life of the protagonist, unfolding against the backdrop of Soviet and post-communist Moldova, from the untimely death of Yuri Gagarin in 1968 to the so-called “twitter revolution” of 2009. Tens of tragical, comical, fantastical, historical tales intertwine, punctuated by the endless upheavals suffered by twentieth-century Moldova. But the narrative also takes euphoric flight, in episodes that travel as far afield as Paris, Moscow, and Tibet. In Living Tissue. 10x10, Emilian Galaicu-Păun engages in literary origami, bending and blending together real and fictional worlds, abolishing up and down, here and there, past and present, as if in an Escher engraving, alternating narrative techniques, braiding myth, history and literary allusion, transgressing the boundaries of languages and cultures to create a rapturously intricate novel in ten dimensions.

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The end of the world is the least of the problems facing Gaspard Boisvert, erstwhile advisor to “the stupidest American president in history,” when he discovers that he may share the genes of a certain, infamous Austrian corporal, thanks to a dalliance on the part of his grandmother during the First World War. Around the hapless Gaspard’s descent into amnesia and anti-social rebellion, an obsessive-compulsive narrator assembles 111 pithy chapters linked by the ultimate theme of all: the coming apocalypse. In this deadpan anti-novel, statistics and historical data are marshalled, and the divagations range over subjects as various as the history of religions, Viagra, vegetarianism and dietary taboos, aerial bombing, the Maltese national anthem, categories of suicide, varieties of stupidity, bathtubs, the critical density of the universe, pork and pigmen, and the etymology of the name Adolf.

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For seventeen years, Narcisse Dièze, chronic sufferer of a mysterious condition called "cerebral rheumatism"; has lived in the protective confines of a psychiatric hospital. There he has been attended by a contingent of nurses, for whom he has obligingly fathered somewhere between thirty-five and one hundred seventy-one children. (No one knows the exact number.) But the doctors abruptly decide that he is cured and prod him to reenter the outside world. Narcisse is floored, yet he gradually summons the will to try. What follows is an account of this naïve and timid patient’s adventures in the realm of the so-called sane. An endearing misfit in the tradition of Walter Mitty and Forrest Gump, Narcisse is destined to totter precariously on the highwire of his existence. Will we see him fall? A quirky fable that pokes holes in the accepted mental health verities and pleads for a touch of madness. With an introduction by Warren Motte.

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Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. A hymn to the city of Sofia, a series of whimsical character portraits, a literary mural of Bulgaria at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Is There Anybody There to Love You? is the first collection of stories from EU Prize-winning author Kalin Terziyski to be published in English. In these pages, you will meet the Collector of Valuable Things (packs of cigarettes, love letters, a magpie’s feather), a private eye at the end of his rope, and a young boy coming to terms, like the rest of us, with the mysteries of his existence. Most of all, you will be introduced to a gifted new writer, whose humanity and humor are reminiscent of Bruno Schulz and Bohumil Hrabal.

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