Bøger udgivet af Dalkey Archive Press

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.

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.

Here we have the anatomy of the contemporary writer, as imagined by the pseudonymous, "post-exotic" Antoine Volodine. His writers aren't the familiar, bitter, alcoholic kind, however; nor are they great, romantic, tortured geniuses; and least of all are they media darlings and socialites. No, in Volodine's universe, the writer is pitted in a pathetic struggle against silence and sickness--that is, when she's not about to be murdered by random lunatics or fellow inmates. Consisting of seven loosely interlocking stories, "Writers" is a window onto a chaotic reality where expressing oneself brings along with it repercussions both absurd and frighteningly familiar.

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

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.

"Originally published in Japanese as Tomoe by SHINSHOKAN Co., Ltd., Tokyo Copyright (c) 2001 by Hisaki Matsuura."

Nicholas Mosley's Whitbread Award-winning novel Hopeful Monsters dealt with the suggestion that if human nature could not be improved by scientific manipulation, perhaps a suitable environment or soil might nonetheless be prepared into which an appropriate seed for change might fall, and not be smothered by weeds. In Metamorphosis, a humanitarian worker and a journalist in a vast refugee camp in East Africa come across a newborn child who for some inexplicable reason gives them the impression that it might be just such a seed. But why? And what to do about it?

Mirror Gazing is a book about reading and looking, about what people seek when they read, and about what stares back at them from the printed page. It is an archival project, based on a wealth of material collected daily by celebrated critic Warren F. Motte over thirty-five years and squirreled away for some eventual winter. It is also a love letter, a confession, a tale of deep obsession, and a cry for help addressed to anyone who takes literature seriously. ¿At heart, this is not just a book about mirror scenes, interesting as they are¿ and they are interesting. It¿s also a look at passion, at collection, at personal taxonomies and the game of creating order from disorder (do we ever win that game?). It¿s about how we read and why we read. And it¿s about the Delphic maxim, ¿Know thyself.¿ Motte explores how characters look for (or suddenly catch) themselves in mirrors, as well as how (or whether) the act of writing is a reflection, distorted or true, of writers themselves.¿¿ Julie Larios, Numero Cinq¿I believe (and I¿m choosing my words carefully) that this is the most extraordinary book about reading I have ever read¿ ¿ Jacques Jouet¿Wonderfully luminous, entertaining, thought-provoking, and wide-ranging¿an essential book¿ ¿ Gerald Prince¿Motte has collected around ten thousand mirror scenes from roughly 1,500 books. This, in and of itself, is noteworthy, but the book is not simply a reprinting of quotes from various books. It is a deeply considered analysis of what it actually means to look into a mirror. For the serious reader, this book will serve as a trip through your reading past. I was reminded¿somewhat nostalgically¿of much of the literature that has defined the early part of my adult life. From Nabokov to Salinger to Rilke to Calvino, the book makes its way into just about every corner of American and European literature.¿ ¿ Nancy Smith, YourImpossibleVoice

Liam O'Donnel, an Irish boy growing up in Scotland, is often the focus of Donal McLaughlin's hilarious and harrowing short stories, and in beheading the virgin mary, he continues this loose narrative, interspersed -- every second story -- with unrelated reports. Here, Liam steps in dog dirt on his way to Sunday Mass; Bloody Sunday is experienced as a series of phone calls to the home of a Scottish neighbor; and the title story introduces the next generation of O'Donnells. With his keen ear and inimitable spirit, the always innovative McLaughlin is one of the brightest lights of contemporary European fiction.

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

This intriguing novel brings us to a future in which electricity is scarce and Dublin has gone to seed. Hawk-eyed octogenarian Monk is keeping assorted desperate characters under strict surveillance -- among them Schroeder, recently sacked from Trinity College, now stalking a reporter in the days leading up to the visit of the U. S. President. When the unthinkable happens and the President is assassinated, Monk sets about discovering what's happened to those in his care and, along the way, to the late President -- but this is not, he insists, the story of an assassination. Nor is it a thriller. It's the truth.

This is the first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time: the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola, whose brilliant, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art.Balthus¿s complexities are clarified and his genius understood in this book that derives its immediacy from Nicholas Fox Weber¿s long and intense conversations with Balthus himself¿who never previously consented to discuss his life and work with a biographer¿as well as Weber¿s interviews with the artist¿s closest associates. This biography was first published by Knopf in 1999 and is now available for the first time from Dalkey Archive Press.

Featuring ten stories never before translated, dating from 1878 to 1886 (regarded as Joaquim Machado de Assis¿s most radically experimental period), this selection of short fiction by Brazil¿s greatest author ranges in tone from elegiac and philosophical to impishly ironic. Including the author¿s classic essay on world literature¿also appearing in English for the first time¿and with pieces chosen from his vast body of work for their playfulness, pathos, and stylistic subversion, this collection is an ideal introduction to one of world literature¿s greatest talents.¿A prodigy of accomplishment¿deserving of a permanent place in world literature¿ ¿ Susan Sontag¿Everything about Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis seems double. There¿s before and after, domestic and metaphysical, high and low, black and white, erotic and austere, short and long, trapped and free, gentle and cruel, perceived and real. The 200 or so stories he wrote spin out these oppositions into a remarkable variousness.¿¿Peter Robb, Times Literary Supplement¿There is in Machadös prose a playfulness that teases the reader, humor that mocks solemnity and seriousness. He punctures pretentiousness and ridicules received ideas (¿) The range of allusions in his work would have amazed even Nabokov. And as with Nabokov, indeed as with any work of art which gives us what Nabokov calls the shiver between the shoulder blades, what elicits one¿s astonished admiration is not to do with subject matter¿but with that abstract and elusive concept¿which manifests itself in that purely aesthetic thing called style.¿ ¿ Zulfikar Ghose, Context No. 12

C. S. Giscombe's Here is a long, single poem that takes place in three settings, three "unlikely locations": the edges of the urban south, the edges--just beyond and just within the city--of rural Ohio, and the places where upstate New York forms the border with Canada, "the next country." Here is racial in its knowledge and acknowledgment of the great geographic archetype, the journey north; yet the work's nature denies the closure of destination. The poem's interest instead is in statement(s) of situation, in "the path traced by a moving point."

Lying on a beach, the narrator of this novel, Petros Abatzoglou, is reminded when he starts drinking of his old friend Mrs. Freeman, whose story he forces upon the female companion who's accompanying him, as if he were testing out his next novel on her. Between reminiscences about other travels and the food he ate there, and breaks to get more food or drink, the narrator tells of Mrs. Freeman's love for Mr. Freeman, her linguistics professor and eventual husband. Told with numerous funny digressions, this book perfectly depicts the emotions of falling in love and the devastating effects of time on relationships and life itself. As the narrator says, "But I've wandered away from my subject again, from Mrs. Freeman, who seems to have become a symbol for us all. I don't know why, but she's gradually assuming the aspect of an endless nightmare: the nightmare of a life made up of senseless details and repetitions."

Claude Ollier / Carlos Fuentes Number

"Mobile is not only a memorable experience, accomplishing that rich task of all true art providing the reader with new eyes but it is also work which fellow writers and artists can profit from because it supplies the best of all ingredients: stimulation." New York Herald Tribune

Mary Campbell-Sposito, CANIS MAJOR: Introducing Raymond Queneau/Gilbert Sorrentino, Variations for Raymond Queneau/* Raymond Queneau, Interviews with Georges Charbonnier -- No. 5?/Raymond Queneau, Technique of the Novel/Raymond Queneau, From Children of Clay/Harry Mathews, Charity Begins at Home/Gilbert Pestureau, The Art of the Novel in Saint Glinglin/Jacques Jouet, 'Interludes' from Raymond Queneau/Claude Debon, Queneau and Poetic Illusion/Barbara Wright, Translating Queneau/Andre Blavier, Droles de Drames/Jacques Roubaud The Birth of a Form: Elementary Morality/Selected Bibliography/Selected Translations of Queneau's Works into English/Victoria Frenkel Harris, Carole Maso: An Introduction and an Interpellated Interview/Carole Maso, Except Joy: on Aureole/Carole Maso, Traveling Light from The Bay of Angels/Louise DeSalvo, 'We Will Speak and Bear Witness': Storytelling as Testimony and Healing in Ghost Dance/Charles B.Harris, The Dead Fathers: The Rejection of Modernist Distance in The Art Lover/Victoria Frenkel Harris, Emancipating the Proclamation: Gender and Genre in AVA/Nicole Cooley, 'There's Not One Story That Will Change This': The American Woman in the Chinese Hat/Jeffrey DeShell, Between the Winding Sheets: The American Woman in the Chinese Hat/Steven Moore, A New Language for Desire: Aureole/A Carole Maso Checklist

The Review of Contemporary Fiction is a tri-quarterly journal that features critical essays on fiction writers whose work resists convention and easy categorization.

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.

Curtis White and Milorad Pavic Number

"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

This delightful tour of a site full of both history and mythology, populated by men and women with lives and problems that are entirely real, down to earth, and by no means romantic, serves as an introduction not only to the city of a thousand names but to the very spirit of its inhabitants, their daily worries as well as the grand tapestry in which they all labor to find happiness.

This riotous collection at last gathers together an expansive selection of Flann O'Brien's shorter fiction in a single volume, as well as O'Brien's last and unfinished novel, Slattery's Sago Saga. Also included are new translations of several stories originally published in Irish, and other rare pieces. With some of these stories appearing here in book form for the very first time, and others previously unavailable for decades, Short Fiction is a welcome gift for every Flann O'Brien fan worldwide.

The influential, daring, and lacerating novels of Ann Quin were very much products of their time-but Quin herself had more than a little influence upon shaping the era in which she lived. Her works bracket the '60s and embrace their drive to experiment and break through to another form of consciousness, and so another means of telling stories, as J. G. Ballard, and B. S. Johnson were doing, and as, later-in many ways following directly in Quin's footsteps-Kathy Acker would as well. In reading Quin we are taught to question the very enterprise of fiction itself; to read Quin one must be prepared to lose one's way. Re: Quin is an unabashedly personal and partisan critical biography of one of the greatest and yet most neglected fiction writers of the so-called "e;experimental"e; wave of British novelists of the 1960s.

Legendary publisher and writer John Calder said of Barbara Wright that she was "the most brilliant, conscientious and original translator of 20th century French literature." Wright introduced to an English-speaking readership and audience some of the most innovative French literature of the last hundred years: a world without Alfred Jarry's "Ubu," Raymond Queneau's "Zazie," and Robert Pinget's "Monsieur Songe" scarcely bears thinking about. This wonderful collection of texts about and by Barbara Wright--including work by David Bellos, Breon Mitchell, and Nick Wadley, as well as a previously unpublished screenplay written and translated by Wright in collaboration with Robert Pinget--begins the work of properly commemorating a figure toward whom all of English letters owes an unpayable debt.

First published in 1936, and considered one of the most innovative and significant novels written in Catalan, Waltz tells the tale of an idle, introspective, and somewhat oblivious young "e;man without qualities"e; as he stumbles through a milieu of civic upheaval and bourgeois tragedy as he waltzes from one prospective bride to another, never willing to compromise his ideals, and so never quite becoming an adult. With one foot in the romanticism of Goethe or Kleist, and another in the wildly differing takes on the modern novel provided by Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, respectively, Waltz is an occasionally absurd comedy of indecision and indolence structured in imitation of the dance from which it takes its title.

Dentist Karl Meyer's worst nightmare comes true when his son, Ole-Jakob, takes his own life. This tragedy is the springboard for a complex novel posing essential questions about human experience: What does sorrow do to a person? How can one live with the pain of unbearable loss? How far can a man be driven by the grief and despair surrounding the death of a child? A dark and harrowing story, drawing on elements from dreams, fairy tales, and horror stories, the better to explore the mysterious depths of sorrow and love, Through the Night is Stig Saeterbakken at his best.

Warrenpoint is a memoir, and more than a memoir: with moments of novelistic narrative and lyricism wedded to musings on the aesthetic and theological themes of the author's coming of age-filial piety, original sin, a child's perceptions, and then the nature of terrorism, and of reading itself-it demonstrates the same insight and lucidity that have contributed to Denis Donoghue's fame as one of our most important critics. Taking its title from the seaside town in Northern Ireland whose police barracks served as the residence for the Catholic Donoghues, it has been described as a family romance, dealing not only with the author's love for his strong-willed, taciturn, policeman father, but his love for literature and how it shaped his life to come.