Search results for ""dalkey archive press""

Alistair Ian Blyth’s Card Catalogue is a book about books. Set in Bucharest in the decade after the Revolution, it presents a series of dreamlike narratives loosely linked by the subject of libraries: book hoarding, book hunting, book burning, and, above all, the dreams of infinite other books—past and future—that every individual codex volume inspires. Whether he is describing his encounters with Gribski (whose strange hidden library in Bucharest he is to see but once) or itemizing the various books whose existence he has dreamed (including “a collection of children’s paeans to Ceausescu bound in the same volume as a slim commentary on Pound’s Canto XIV”), Blyth shows himself to be a card catalogue unto himself. In the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Alberto Manguel, this book is bound to please.

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Domingo Notaro’s poems struggle to fix an innocent gaze on a contemporary world that appears more and more fraught with inhumanity and cruelty. They explore themes of exile, fertility, the human body’s connection to the wider cosmos, and the corrupting influence of power. Often literally scattered across the page, the poems compel the reader to become an active participant in a quest for sense and meaning. “Halfway between lucid vision and prophetic hallucination, Notaro’s poems seem to lean over the edge of an infinite vacuum-terrifying, at times, like the undifferentiated darkness of an Hegelian night, or overwhelmingly beautiful like the azure depth of a blue sky.”

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How to Tie Your Shoes is a confessional narrative that deals with the relationship between a father and son—more precisely it narrates this relationship’s absence into existence. The novel begins when the narrator learns that his father is terminally ill and decides to return home to arrange for his medical care. Mixing the most private fragments of their familial saga with the turbulent recent history of post-Yu- goslav transition, the book connects seemingly divid- ed fields of private and public and suggests a strong link between the two facets of trauma: individual and collective.

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Louis Meyer is an overworked aerospace engineer looking forward to a week-long vacation on the Mediterranean. DeMilo is an astronaut and self-proclaimed ladies’ man whose behavior borders on the obsessive and voyeuristic. When a series of coincidences and disasters-including a devastating earthquake in Marseilles-brings them together on a spacecraft with an aloof woman they are both strongly attracted to, the two men’s flaws and shortcomings emerge as they engage in an underhanded competition to win her over. Brimming with Jean Echenoz’s inimitable humor, We Three is both a satirical take on the adventure novel and subtle experiment with narrative point of view.

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The second short-story collection by Kim Jung-hyuk, the author of Penguin News, features a total of eight short stories, including “Syncopation D” which won the 2nd Kim You-jeong Literary Award in 2008. They represent the many sounds sampled by the author when he recorded over 600 kinds of musical instruments. Like instruments coming together in a symphony, the stories combine to make an opus consisting of variations on a theme. While the stories begin in an upbeat fashion and work to a crescendo, they end with notes in a minor key filling the vacuum. The Library of Musical Instruments is a collection to contemplate on more than one occasion.

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Alice Clark has been trying to avoid an acute state of "not-knowing" about what's happened and what's happening. Whatever happened has much to do with why three of her friends died early and badly and she did not. Alice is a mess, and her story is a mess too--digressive, disheveled, and wild. She takes us across the United States in an overdue effort to find out what part she's played, or failed to, in her own life. Along the way she revisits her memories and meets a variety of "Cheshire cats," who in scary, rude, and seductive ways help her to keep going and find things out... or not.

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With its echoes of fellow Austrian novelist Robert Musil's novella Young T?rless, and of G?nter Grass's The Tin Drum, Florjan Lipuš's "Young Tjaž," first published in 1972, helped moved the critique of Germanic Europe's fundamental social conformity into the postwar age.

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Though best known now for his novels, this collection of pre-exile short stories by the renowned Romanian author and "onirist" not only show Dumitru Tsepeneag at his best, but provide a glimpse into the secret history of surrealism uunder the brutal regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. In these stories, life is both banal and bizarre, on the verge of breaking down, like a film loop played once too often, with the hot glare of irrationality always waiting to burn through. Looking forward to "Vain Art of the Fugue" and back to Breton, "Waiting" is a subversive delicacy.

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This landmark anthology of short fiction presents six electrifying voices from Singapore: Alfian bin Sa'at, Wena Poon, Jeffrey Lim, Tan Mei Ching, Claire Tham, and Dave Chua.

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A word-crazed monologue in the mind of a man flying to his war-torn native country for the first time in years, "Without Origin" explores the ways a family, homeland, friendship, or even a favorite author, can come to overwhelm one's individuality.

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A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, "The Master of Insomnia" is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's verse from the last fifteen years, including numerous poems never before available in English. In these sensitive translations, Novak stands revealed as both innovator and observer; as critic Aleš Debeljak has written: "The poet's power in bearing witness to Sarajevo and Dalmatia, to his childhood room and his retired father, to the indifferent passage of time and the desperate pain of loss, confirms the melancholy clairvoyance of Walter Benjamin, who stated that what is essential hides in the marginal, negligent, and hardly observed details. Whoever strives to see the 'big picture' will inevitably overlook the essential... [Novak's] wide-open eyes must watch over both the beauty of this life and the horror of its destruction."

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Following his anthologies Man + Dog (2009) and Man + Doctor (2012), Nick Wadley has, with our encouragement, compiled this collection of drawings around the theme of Man + Table. Tracing origins in the childhood world of “under the table,” he enjoys an habitual freedom to follow his nose, exploring predictable and unpredictable aspects of the subject, from the commonplace to the surreal and absurd.

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With a name like Jacques Boucher de Cr?vecoeur de Perthes, it ought to be easy to become a hero. Yet, how to go about it? A reallife nineteenth-century paleontologist and explorer, excavated here by Christine Montalbetti to serve as her protagonist, Jacques has tried everything: fighting off pirates, writing poetry, becoming a dandy, a man of culture... all without ever quite feeling he fits the bill. At last, when Jacques decides he'll make his name by discovering evidence of early man, it seems we, his, will be treated to a novel about mankind itself--unless, of course, our putative hero gets shanghaied into a love story along the way. "The Origin of Man" is the story of one man--and all humanity--waging a war against oblivion without ever quite winning the day. It's also a comedy about being immersed in heroic and fantastical events without one's ever noticing.

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Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions "a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera." Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. Joao Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life.

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A cornerstone of Swiss modernism, at last available in English translation from one of the great German translators of our time.

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In this nominally true story of an epic, transcontinental road trip, Jean Rolin travels to Africa from darkest France, accompanying a battered Audi to its new life as a taxi to be operated by the family of a Congolese security guard. The ghost of Joseph Conrad haunts Rolin's journey, as do memories of his expatriate youth in Kinshasa in the early 1960s--but no less present are W. G. Sebald and Marcel Proust, who are the guiding lights for Rolin's sensual and digressive attack upon history: his own as well as the world's. By turns comic, lyrical, gruesome, and humane, "The Explosion of the Radiator Hose" is a one-of-a-kind travelogue, and no less an exploration of what it means to be human in a life of perpetual exile and migration.

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First published in 1966, revolving musically around three separate identities and the idea of identity itself, Mr. Share's novel can, perhaps, be best described as a metaphysical farce.

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Here is a book about a man, supposedly a writer, who tries to write a novel, because he promised his readers he would. But he doesn’t have anything to say. He keeps erasing what he writes, and rewriting it, without having the slightest idea where he’s going with it. Soon enough he realizes that looking out of the window, sitting in front of his typewriter, describing anything and everything, is not enough to write a novel. His three friends, Edmond, Edgar, and Edouard, will aid him in his task . . . Pigeon Post will be the second book Dalkey Archive has published by the Romanian writer Dumitru Tsepeneag (after the critically acclaimed Vain Art of the Fugue), and we will be publishing more of his works in the years to come.

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From his birth in rural Kentucky during the Great Depression to his suicide in Manhattan in 1985, Coleman Dowell played many roles. He was a songwriter and lyricist for television. He was a model. He was a Broadway playwright. He served in the U.S. Army, both abroad and at home. And most notably, he was the author of novels that Edmund White, among others, has called "masterpieces." But Dowell was deeply troubled by a depression that hung over him his entire life. Pegged as both a Southern writer and a gay writer, he loathed such categorization, preferring to be judged only by his work. Fever Vision describes one of the most tormented, talented, and inventive writers of recent American literature, and shows how his eventful life contributed to the making of his incredible art.

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The gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts its shadow, and Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature represents, in its author’s words, a report on ten years watching of shadows. Collecting the earliest short essays and reviews by a man who was arguably the greatest English-language critic-scholar of the twentieth century, Gnomon not only provides valuable, entertaining, and often scabrous insights into the workings of literature, as well as the books of such modern giants as William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, but is itself a cross-section of the the development of Kenner’s own body of work, which inits beauty, irreverence, and disregard for convention proves him as much an artist as the men and women he spent his life championing.

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Filled with many compelling, outrageous, and comic voices, White's novel is disturbing, charming, and biting. Curtis White's new novel begins with Mann's "unassuming young man," Hans Castorp, visiting his cousin at a health retreat. In this book, though, the retreat is a spa for recovering alcoholics, totally unlike all other rehab centres. Rather than encouraging their patients to free themselves from addiction, the directors of The Elixir believe that sobriety isn't for everyone, that you must let alcohol work its way on you. It is about a weird and unlikely world that, nevertheless, is quite recognisable as our own.

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On the night of a father's death, two women remember. Esther, the wife denied, and Sara, her corrupted daughter, look back at the father's overwhelming cruelty and ahead to their freedom from him. Finally liberated from his terrible physical and emotional abuse, they must decide whether they will accept new possibilities or conform to old values. The darkness, no matter how black, is not complete: "I don't hate being a woman," Sara tells herself. "I don't." Beautifully written and remarkably powerful, In Night's City extends the tradition of the lyrical, impressionistic Irish novel, turning it to the hard-edged story of two women's attempt to escape a terrifying past.

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In addition to his novels and stories, Aidan Higgins--one of Ireland's most respected contemporary writers--has written a large body of criticism. Windy Arbours includes pieces written between 1970-1990 and is the first collection of his reviews to be published. Incredibly well-read, Higgins covers writers from around the world, from relatively well-known authors such as William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, and Jorge Luis Borges, to more obscure writers such as Ralph Cusack and Dorothy Nelson. Serving as an informative guidebook about contemporary fiction, Higgins's criticism is always insightful, and oftentimes entertainingly acerbic.

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A modern epic on a grand scale, Avalovara is a rich and lyrical novel centered around Abel's courtship of three women. He pursues the sophisticated and inaccessible Roos across Europe; falls in love with Cecilia, a carnal, compassionate hermaphrodite; and achieves a tender, erotic alliance with a woman known only by an ideogram. Avalovara is an extraordinary novel, both in its depiction of modern life and in its rigorous, puzzlelike structure visually represented by a spiral and a five-word palindrome.

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Available For The First Time In One Volume, The Very Best Of Mathews's Short Fiction; This expertly designed original paperback presents a comprehensive collection of internationally renowned poet and novelist Harry Mathews' short prose. From the hilarious 'The Broadcast, ' in which the narrator learns from a radio program that everything he needs in life should fit into one sock, to 'Calibration of Latitude, ' which follows Sir Joseph Pernican on a meandering and seemingly aimless but deeply moving journey, this is a long-awaited addition to Mathew's beloved and masterful canon.

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"Let us not mince words here: Danilo Kis's Garden, Ashes is an unmitigated masterpiece, surely not just one of the best books about the Holocaust, but one of the greatest books of the past century." Aleksandar Hemon, from the introduction

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-- First paperback edition. -- A ghost story unfolds simultaneously across three centuries and two continents; a young cannibal details the daily life and appetites of his clan; a man slowly, and without pain or blood, loses his limbs, his tongue, and his sight. A collection culled from Coleman Dowell's entire career, The Houses of Children displays the wide range of his talent in a dense and beautifully stylistic prose. -- Coleman Dowell is the author of five novels including Island People and Mrs. October Was Here, and a memoir, A Star-Bright Lie, which won an Editor's Choice Lambda Literary Award. -- First published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1987).

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Hundreds of novels have explored the war in Vietnam. This is the first to explore the world of the architects of that war, and it cuts terribly close to home. Dimock brilliantly exposes the pained heart of a single family and offers a vision of what their way of life still costs us all. His book raises with startling freshness ancient yet urgent questions about relations between image, word, and act.

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"Memories of My Father Watching TV" has as its protagonists television shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience. And in Curtis White's hands, they become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in "Combat, " "Highway Patrol, " "Bonanza, " and other television shows (and one movie) from the 1950s and '60s. Comic in many ways, "Memories" is finally a sad lament of father-son relationship that is painful and tortured, displayed against a background of what they most shared, the watching of television, the universal American experience.

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Just as Ezra Pound wrote an "Homage to Sextus Propertius" to pay tribute to an important influence, Juli?n R?os offers in his novel an "Homage to Ezra Pound" (as the original Spanish edition is subtitled). On November 1, 1972, news of Pound's death in Venice reaches three Spanish bohemians in London, passionate admirers of "il miglior fabbro" ("the better craftsman," as Eliot called him), who decide to honor Pound's memory by visiting various sites in London associated with him.Filled with allusions to Pound's life and works and written in a style similar to Finnegans Wake, R?os's word-mad novel features the same characters from his first novel "Larva" the poet Milalias, his girlfriend Babelle, and their mentor X. Reis, each of whom writes part of the novel: Milalias writes the Joycean main text, Reis (as Herr Narrator) adds commentary on facing pages, and Babelle furnishes maps and photos. Together, they compile the "Parting Shots" at the end, dazzling short stories that expand upon incidents in the main text. Sound confusing? No more so than "The Cantos," and R?os is much funnier.

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"Addendum to a Photo Album" is the saga of the births, deaths, and disappearances within the eccentric Mandrykin family. Following patriarch Malach, a Cossack captain, his wife Annushka, and his many sons all born with sideburns, the novel details their fraught relationships, particularly when sitting for family photographs. Vladislav Otroshenko's flowing sentences and rich metaphorical language describe characters whose concerns embrace the heroic, the metaphysical, and the mundane, as they fulfill their duties as Cossack warriors and family members. Otroshenko draws on his upbringing in Novocherkassk, a city on the Don River, creating a world and a book inhabited with absurdity, filial love, and unusual facial hair.

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Sister Carrie is a first novel by a woman writer possessing such an original voice and slashing, surrealistic wit that she is sure to take her place at the forefront of cutting-edge fiction writers. Carrie Meeber leaves her stifling Florida home for Chicago, where she enters the related fields of advertising and prostitution. As an unflappable narrator makes inquiries into her bizarre life, a cartoonish, hyperkinetic, blaring street world envelops the reader. Depraved characters parade themselves and their crass literary leanings; many keep journals, out of which Carrie is revealed with stylistic pyrotechnics. Fairbanks's scrappy, fantastic, debauched characters reveal themselves as well in hot rapid monologue and dialogue. There is something of Kathy Acker in Sister Carrie, something of Ronald Firbank, William Burroughs, Mark Leyner perhaps, even the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. (And Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie? revamped, accessorized, given riot grrrl attitude). But it is finally a tour de force from a young woman writer with a voice all her own and a sardonic world-view perfect for the irony-clad nineties.

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Every night when she goes to sleep, a woman dreams of erotic encounters with different men. She dreams of being the sponge squeezed to foaming in a gas station attendant's hand, and of twining her bare skin with a sea lion's thick pelt under the watchful eye of the sea lion trainer. From a gas station attendant to a sea lion trainer, a watchmaker to a teacher, a furrier to an astrologer, each evening's new encounter is more sensual and extravagant than the last.

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"Psalm 44" is the last major work of fiction by Danilo Kiš to be translated into English, and his only novel dealing explicitly with Auschwitz (where his own father died). Written when he was only twenty-five, before embarking on the masterpieces that would make him an integral figure in twentieth-century letters, Psalm 44 shows Kiš at his most lyrical and unguarded, demonstrating that even in "the place of dragons... covered with the shadow of death," there can still be poetry. Featuring characters based on actual inmates and warders--including the abominable Dr. Mengele--"Psalm 44" is a baring of many of the themes, patterns, and preoccupations Kiš would return to in future, albeit never with the same starkness or immediacy.

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Featuring the work of some of the greatest poets of the twentieth century as well as their contemporary counterparts, this anthology is unique in bringing together a broad selection of Switzerland 's greatest authors in all of the country 's major languages. Featuring Blaise Cendrars, Hugo Ball, Jacques Chessex, Hans Arp, Gerhard Meier, Philippe Jaccottet, Adelheid Duvanel, Arno Camenisch, Giorgio and Giovanni Orelli, Urs Allemann, Claire Genoux, and Robert Walser, among many others including some whose work has never before been available in English translation this overview of Swiss poetry stands as the ideal introduction to an undervalued and idiosyncratic force in international literature, standing at the foundations of many of the most influential literary movements, be they traditional or experimental.

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These fifteen journeys--fourteen of them within Poland--take six years, 1940-1946. The distances vary. Sometimes they are minimal, as short as a two-stop bus ride in a city, or a twenty-minute walk, and sometimes they are longer--much longer. The traveler is a young girl, who we meet at age seven. Along the way, she loses her home, her family, her name, her hair, and finally, her fear. Two things help her on her journeys during these difficult years: some lessons from her parents and a large share of luck, which never deserts her.

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From one of Serbia’s greatest contemporary writers, Hidden Camera opens with the narrator finding a mysterious, blank envelope stuck in his apartment door inviting him to a private showing of a movie. Or so he initially thinks. Upon arrival at the theatre, he discovers that there’s only one other person in the audience, a very attractive woman whom he’s seated next to. Then things get a bit more mysterious. The movie he’s been invited to see includes a scene showing him sitting in a park. Believing that he’s an unwitting participant in a complicated hidden camera show, he goes along with the variety of setups he’s faced with, which continue to get more involved and absurd. As the show develops, he becomes more and more paranoid and distrustful, but he keeps up the ruse to its thrilling conclusion.

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Together these two novels comprise the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary Frech fiction. Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's fiction explores the connections between the mind and the body through a lens of sexuality. Both of these novels feature Octave, an elderly cleric; his striking young wife Roberte; and their nephew, Antoine in a series of sexual situations. But Klossowski's books are about theology as well, and this merging of the sexual with the religious makes this book one of the most painstakingly baroque and intellectual novels of our time.

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"A bloody marvelous book." Harold Pinter

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On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley's most outlandish characters--from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his "subconscious," to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive HISTORY OF CROME. Denis's stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, CROME YELLOW is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, "is too irnonic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony."

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A man and a woman meet in Lisbon and fall in love. City of Ulysses is their story, and the city’s love story besides. It is a story that leads readers down multiple paths, through myth and history, reality and fantasy, literature and the visual arts, the past and the present, male and female relations, the crisis of civilisation and the need to reimagine the world.

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In Search of the Grail continues Svetislav Basara’s “Cyclist Conspiracy,” a fantastical exploration of civilizational decline told through an array of strange and esoteric documents. Readers are introduced to a secret history of the twentieth century, shown that behind the well-known wars and political revolutions of the period numerous secret organizations vied for supremacy through the control of books, knowledge, and dreams. With appearances by Sigmund Freud, Salvador Dali, the Marquis de Sade, Karl Marx, and Josef Stalin, among many others, Basara’s novel presents a singularly playful, imaginative portrait of modernity and of the human condition.

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French Fiction Today focuses on the French novel in the twenty-first century, examining a series of works that are exemplary of broader currents in the genre. Each of these texts wagers insistently upon our willingness to speculate about literature and its uses, in an age when the value of literature is no longer taken as axiomatic. Each of these texts may be thought of as a critical novel, a form that calls upon us to engage with it in a critical manner, promising that meaning will arise in the articulation of writing and reading. Each of these authors participates in a debate about what the novel is as a cultural form in our present—and about what it may become, in a future that begins right now.

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March Hares collects thirty years of Aidan Higgins’s essays, papers, and diaries, offering reflections on modern literature, modern readers, and Higgins’s own experience of the literary life in the twentieth century. In witty, insightful, often musical prose, Higgins discusses and draws connections between a wide array of major literary figures, including Melville, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, Olson, and Pinter.

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A mysterious character from the city arrives at a peaceful country village, attracting the interest of Josu, a young adolescent. José Luis, the newly arrived vicar, is the ideal mentor for any rebellious boy with a curious heart. More comfortable sneaking around and spying on people from the rooftops than playing with others in the mud, Josu delves into the memories of the newly arrived vicar’s troubled past. Julio José Ordovás’s skillfully woven and fearless narrative tells of an unlikely friendship between two rebellious characters at different times in their lives. His debut novel promises an unrestrained, uncensored narration, leaving nothing untold. Taken from the adult Josu’s perspective, this nostalgic narration demonstrates the author’s striking ability to present a spectrum of human emotions with distinct ironic undertones.

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“Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so onery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner’s swine.” And so begins the HooDoo Western by Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo and one of America’s most innovative and celebrated writers. Reed demolishes white American history and folklore as well as Christian myth in this masterful satire of contemporary American life. In addition to the black, satanic Loop Garoo Kid, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down features Drag Gibson (a rich, slovenly cattleman), Mustache Sal (his nymphomaniac mail-order bride), Thomas Jefferson and many others in a hilarious parody of the old Western.

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Drawing on O’Brien’s experience of cancer and of childhood abuse, and on his ongoing collaboration with a war reporter, the four essays in A Story that Happens—first written as craft lectures for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the US Air Force Academy—offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, "afraid and hopeful," we begin to tell them.

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Amongst Those Left is a long-overdue study of experimental literature in Britain from the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1980s. Undertaken with the aim of refuting the idea that “while American and French fiction was exciting and groundbreaking, British novels were all dull, realist, and provincial,” Booth’s book takes us on a tour through the captivating work of such writers as Ann Quin, Stevie Smith, Nicholas Mosley, Stefan Themerson, B. S. Johnson, Anna Kavan, J. G. Ballard, and many, many others. In doing so, Booth effectively reimagines the twentieth-century literary landscape of Britain. Amongst Those Left is sure to add a few books to your reading list and considerably expand your library.

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