Bøger udgivet af Dedalus Ltd

On the face of things, Mastro Don Gesualdo is a success. Born a peasant but a man' with an eye for everything going', he becomes one of the richest men in Sicily, marrying an aristocrat with his daughter destined, in time, to wed a duke. But Gesualdo falls foul of the rigid class structure of mid-19th century Sicily. His title Mastro Don, 'Worker Gentleman', is ironic in itself. Peasants and gentry alike resent his extraordinary success. And when the pattern of society is threatened by revolt, Gesualdo is the rebels' first target.

The first novel from Mauritania to be translated into English, in which Rayhana leaves her Bedouin tribe with metal-mining outsiders, with complications ensuing.

A broad selection of Estonian women's writing on a timeline of influence and context spanning from the late-nineteenth century to the present. Elisabeth Aspe, Betti Alver and Maarja Kangro all feature.

Andrew Crumey's novels are renowned for their unique blend of science, history, philosophy and humour. Now he brings the same insight and originality to this story cycle whose title offers an ironic twist on the ancient doctrine of connectedness, the great chain of being. Here we find a blind man contemplating the light of an atom bomb, a musician disturbed by a conspiracy of radio waves, a visitor to Moscow caught up in a comic case of mistaken identity, a woman on a Greek island trying to become a different person. We range across time, from the Renaissance to a globally-warmed future, across light-years in search of hallucinogenic space-plankton, and into magical worlds of talking insects and bottled fire. Fans of Crumey's acclaimed novels will occasionally spot hints of themes and figures that have recurred throughout his fiction; readers new to his work will delight in finding subtle links within the pieces. Are they all part of some larger untold story? We have nothing to lose but the chains of our imagination: what lies beyond is a great change of being.

"Of the volumes available to the English public, The Green Face, first published in 1916, is the most enjoyable. In an Amsterdam that very much resembles the Prague of The Golem, a stranger, Hauberisser, enters by chance a magician's shop. The name on the shop, he believes, is Chidher Green; inside, among several strange customers, he hears an old man, who says his name is Green, explain that, like the Wandering Jew, he has been on earth 'ever since the moon has been circling the heaven.' When Hauberisser catches sight of the old man's face, it makes him sick with horror. The face haunts him. The rest of the novel chronicles Hauberisser's quest for the elusive and horrible old man." Alberto Manguel in The Observer

Toomas Nipernaadi is one of the more peculiar works in the Estonian literary canon, and its eponymous male protagonist is without doubt one of the most exciting characters in the language. First of all he seems merely to be a man who travels from place to place charming people and telling stories, only to forget it all in the blink of an eye. But perhaps, more than anybody, it is precisely he who remembers. Perhaps all the hearts he touches will remain dear to him. The idea of Toomas Nipernaadi is said to have come to Gailit when he heard a man's echoing footsteps in a Berlin theatre, and those who wish to will hear this sound in the text of his novel. In many ways the protagonist can be seen as the writer's alter ego. Those close to Gailit knew that beneath his self-confidence and brio, a tender and melancholy soul was hiding, which the reader will no doubt be able to recognise in Toomas Nipernaadi. Since it was first published in 1928, the book has conquered one heart after another, and it will charm many coming generations. Besides other things, it captures the dream-like summer of Estonia: brief yet eternally recurring.

This anthology illustrates the evolution of Russian women's writing over the 20th century. Women produced literary texts as early as the Middle Ages, but it was only in the 1900s that women authors finally made a notable breakthrough on the Russian literary scene. Despite a brilliant start further development of women's writing in Russia was crudely interrupted by Soviet censorship and only resumed after the downfall of the USSR. Whereas critics unanimously recognise the greatness of such literary stars as Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva, opinions differ about other celebrities of the time such as Teffi and Lydia Ginzburg who reached wide readerships only in the 1990s, when most of the formerly banned books were published. Mid-century, women were almost invisible in Russian literature, but they were still writing, including such world-famous authors as Ludmila Ulitskaya, Galina Scherbakova, and Svetlana Alexiyevich. In the latter decades women were increasingly dominating publishing programmes and are represented here by Olga Slavnikova, Ludmila Ulitskaya, Irina Muravyova, and Margarita Khemlin.

A remarkable work of horror, half-way between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Mike Mitchell has revised his translation and a new introduction has been added. 'A superbly atmospheric story set in the old Prague ghetto featuring the Golem, a kind of rabbinical Frankenstein's monster, which manifests every 33 years in a room without a door. Stranger still, it seems to have the same face as the narrator. Made into a film in 1920, this extraordinary book combines the uncanny psychology of doppelganger stories with expressionism and more than a little melodrama... Meyrink's old Prague -- like Dickens's London -- is one of the great creation of city writing, an eerie, claustrophobic and fantastical underworld where anything can happen.' Phil Baker in The Sunday Times

Passionate, calculating, only sometimes honourable but always honest, Fanny Legrand is one of the great female characters in literature. Nothing could be more shocking to Jean Gaussin, a serious young student from the provinces, than the moral swamp his mistress has been living in before they met. Sculptor's model, poet's muse, Fanny Legrand has seen and done it all in the twenty years since her first lover, Caoudal, cast in bronze the girl from the Paris gutter and named her Sappho. But revulsion is no match for lust; and little by little, despite continual outbreaks of rage and jealousy, Jean is able to live with Fanny's disgraceful past, to find a certain pleasure in the degraded domesticity of their life together and even to feel a degree of pride in his new connections with famous men. The arrival on the scene of a marriageable young girl seems to offer Jean the escape route he needs: but he cannot bring himself to deal his ageing mistress a potentially fatal blow. Alphonse Daudet's waspishly good-humoured but chilling novel takes Jean on a journey he could never have foreseen.

The Black Cauldron is not a war novel as such, but a work of magic realism which traces a series of boisterous, tragi-comic events in one of the more unusual western European societies. Spanning the tragedy of war, the clash of sectarian interests, the interplay of religion and sex, The Black Cauldron develops into a presentation in mythical form of the conflict between life and death, good and evil.

A captivating and heartrending novel that tells of emerging political awareness in an African country beginning to challenge Portuguese colonial rule.

New Jerusalem Monastery, seventeenth-century Moscow. Patriarch Nikon has instructed an itinerant French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming. But this will be a strange form of theatre. The actors are untrained, illiterate Russian peasants, and nobody is allowed to play Christ. They are persecuted, arrested, displaced, and ultimately replaced by their own children. Yet the rehearsals continue... A stunning reflection on art, history, religion and national identity, Rehearsals is the seminal work in the unique oeuvre of Vladimir Sharov, Russian Booker Prize winner (2014) and author of Before & During (Read Russia award for best translation, 2015).

The murder of his Professor by a postgraduate Physics student during a lecture at Crete University in November 1990 shocked Greece. Many found Yatromanolakis' novel based on the event equally shocking, as he seemed to have more sympathy for the murderer than the victim and transposed his crime to the world of myth. A Report of a Murder has the same teasing style as Tristram Shandy as we enter the author's labyrinth and share in the novel's sense of tragic inevitability and eternal recurrence.

''''The greatest book by Portugal''s greatest novelist.'' Jose Saramago. The Maias is part of Dedalus'' project to make all of Eca de Queiroz'' major works available in English. Margaret Jull Costa''s translation of The Maias won both The Pen and The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prizes. According to Publishers Weekly, ''This novel stands with the great achievements of fiction.''

Cousin Bazilio is a tale of sexual folly and hypocrisy and vividly depicts life in nineteenth-century lisbon. Eca gives us a whole gallery of characters from Bazilio, the suave villain to Jorge, the smugly uxorious husband, from Luiza, the bored empty-headed wife to Juliana, the plain, ailing maidservant desperate, by whatever means, to grab some of life's little luxuries, from Leopoldina, nicknamed' the Ever-Open Door', to Joana the cook and her affair with the tubercular carpenter who lives opposite, and the voluminous Dona Felidade who nurses an entirely unrequited passion for the unbearably pompous Acacio, who lives in concubinage with his much younger housekeeper, who is also having an affair... 'Adultery, blackmail, sentimentality and lust all come under Eca's scrutiny. Sins are scattered amid a gallery of vivid characters, central of which are the adulterous heroine, her first love, the cuckolded husband, and most importantly, the maid. This cunning portrayal of life below stairs casts a cold eye across the hypocrisy of 'respectability, ' recreating the sultry summer heat of Lisbon and the tensions and passions underlying both the refinements of the wealthy and the loyalty of the servants. Sheer brilliance.' The Good Book Guide

A welcome return for Pat Gray's classic tale of friendship between the Cat, Mouse and Rat. The Cat finds himself abandoned without food in an unfurnished house. At first he consorts with his old friends, Mouse and Rat; the one addicted to cheese and philosophy, the other to flashy Italian suits and style, but gradually the Cat gives way to his normal cat-like urges. At first guilty, then elated at his new freedom, and the beneficial impact this has on the other residents, the Cat falls prey to a new and troubling vision of how the house might be, with more initiative and enterprise, and more discipline for the likes of Mouse and Rat. Gradually the Cat unleashes new forces on the house and the gardens beyond, achieving ever greater things, except that, as he does so, he finds himself more and more alone.

Light-Headed is a zany, anarchic black comedy which satirises life in contemporary Russia. At its heart is the question what is important in life and what sacrifices an individual should be expected to make for the good of others. Maxim T. Yermakov was born with an empty space in his head above his brain. As a child this led to him being four kilos less than the normal weight until his mother force-fed him. Always aware of feeling light-headed Maxim was good at school, acquiring information not from books but out of the air. He left the provinces for Moscow where he worked as a brand manager for a chocolate manufacturer. He was contemplating buying his first flat when one day two sinister individuals turned up at the factory to see him. His light head was causing all sorts of problems, it was an alpha object which created natural disasters, terrorist outrages and buildings to collapse. Maxim T. Yermakov's existence threatened the well-being of the state and its citizens. He should do the decent thing and commit suicide. Maxim T. Yermakov refused and began his unequal struggle with the organs of the state.

Following on from "Codename Xenophon", this is a 2nd adventure for private investigator George Zakiris, in crisis-torn Greece.

Courage is one of most indomitable women in European literature and a feminist icon for our times. The Life of Courage (first published in 1670), one episode from whose life Brecht used as the basis for his Mother Courage, is the female counterpart to Simplicissimus. A young girl caught up in the turmoil of the Thirty Years War, she survives, even prospers, by the use of her native cunning and sexual attraction. Completely amoral, she flits from man to man, having a succession of husbands and lovers, and ends her life with a band of gypsies. Courage supposedly tells her story to get her own back on Simplicissimus, who treats her rather dismissively in his memoirs. Her method is to reveal the truth about herself, including the fact that she was recovering from the pox at the time of their affair, so that he will be tarred with the same brush. The result is a lively account of lechery, knavery and trickery told with disarming frankness and a complete lack of remorse. It will appeal to anyone who likes a rollicking good yarn and a bit of knavery in their reading.

The anonymous narrator of Ink in the Blood has long been fascinated by tattoos, by the symbols and emblems people choose, and by the physical aspect, even pain, of a needle injecting ink under the skin. As an artist who makes his living by drawing illustrations, he starts making designs for Dimitri, a skilled tattooist, and eventually decides to undergo the process himself. He chooses a Latin phrase in the form of a cross: vulnerant omnes, ultima necat - 'they all (the hours) wound, the last one kills'. Once it has been done, his whole being seems to change, his feelings about himself and, especially, his attitude to women. Soon however, the first two words of the tattoo fade and ultima necat becomes a threat dominating his life. Ink in the Blood was published in France in 2013.

The Dedalus Book of Slovak Literature offers a wide-ranging selection of fiction from the end of the nineteenth century until the present day, including work by Slovak's classic and most important contemporary authors such as Rudolf Sloboda, Dominik Tatarka, Opavel Vilikovsky, Monika Kompanikova and Balla. This is the most important selection of Slovak fiction to have appeared in English and will be essential reading for anyone wanting to gain an idea of Slovak Literature.

Katinka is the stationmaster's wife in a sleepy Danish provincial town and her domestic languor is disrupted by the arrival of Huus, the new foreman on a nearby farm. Unlike her boorish husband Huus is attentive and sensitive and despite her best efforts Katinka falls in love with him. Her whole life is turned upside down by an intense passion she had never expected to experience and which has unforeseen consequences. Katinka is another of Herman Bang's tragic heroines. In its impressionistic almost cinematic style it is a novel ahead of its time.

Our Musseque is a tale of growing up in one of the vibrant shanty towns (musseques) of Luanda during the 1940s and 1950s. Weaving back and forwards through his half-remembered childhood, the narrator draws us into a close-knit world of labourers, shopkeepers, drunks, prostitutes and determined women battling to bring up their families, as Angola hurtles towards the beginning of its armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. Meanwhile the children laugh, play, squabble and fight, puzzle at racial taunts and move rapidly through adolescence towards sexual awakening and a greater awareness of political realities around them. Written in prison in 1961-62 but not published until over 40 years later, the novel is shot through with a sense of nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood and a community swept away by the encroaching city, together with the exhilaration, hopes and fears for what is about to come.

Domingo Salazar is a Dominican monk and Vatican secret agent in a near future theocratic Italy ruled by the Vatican. A cell of dissidents is helping sufferers commit euthanasia. His job is to root out such non-believers and heretics.

"First published in 2004 by Picador"--Title page verso.