Bøker i Dalkey Archive Essentials-serien

Along with one or two books by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds is the most famous (and infamous) of Irish novels published in the twentieth century.A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading he is composing a mischief-filled novel about Dermot Trellis, a second-rate author whose characters ultimately rebel against him and seek vengeance. From drugging him as he sleeps to dropping the ceiling on his head, these figures of Irish myth make Trellis pay dearly for his bad writing.Hilariously funny and inventive, At Swim-Two-Birds has influenced generations of writers, opening up new possibilities for what can be done in fiction. It is a true masterpiece of Irish literature.

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.

In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman who answers as "Mom." Billy spends his time fantasizing a future in which he will be famous, perhaps in the United States as a movie star, or as a psychiatrist, or as a doctor to blondes with breast enlargements, or as the author of "Billy England's Book of Pain." Together they both support and torture each other, barely able to remember their pasts but intent on forging a future that will bring them happiness and reunite them with the ever-elusive Mom. Billy and Girl are every boy and girl reeling from the pain of their childhoods, forgetting what they need to forget, inventing worlds they think will be better, but usually just prolonging nightmares as they begin to create--or so it seems--alternative personalities that will allow them to survive and conquer and punish. In the end, the reader is as bewildered as Billy and Girl--have they found Mom and a semblance of family, or are, they completely out of control and ready to explode?

Confined to a prison cell, thrice-murderer Pascual Duarte recounts his journey from a violent childhood to a life of pain and misfortune; juxtaposing tableaus of country poverty against scenes of bare brutality, Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela crafts a powerful meditation on cruelty and anomie. The Family of Pascual Duarte follows his upbringing in the poor Spanish province of Extremadura to his eventual imprisonment—and impending death sentence. Death permeates Duarte’s world: his father’s grotesque death to rabies, his young brother’s drowning in an oil vat, and the loss of his children. But it is his wife’s sudden death that condemns him to the darkest path when, losing all faith and driven by blind revenge, he kills her souteneur. Now an alien to the world around him, Pascual Duarte resigns himself to his bloodied fate—yet never gives up his search for peace.Camilo José Cela has been recognized as one of the pioneers of Spanish literary realism, and his masterwork The Family of Pascual Duarte proves the power of his prose. The novel, which birthed the transgressive and groundbreaking tremendismo movement, roils with emotion and unflinching inhumanity, painting the Spanish countryside in bloodshed, eroticism, and an unshakeable feeling of grief. Blending the political with the personal with the philosophic, the result is an unparalleled exploration of the fraught relationship between man and society, and the past’s inescapable hold on the present.

First reissue in more than aa decade; Reccently retired from Brown University, Maso has a strong cult following; Predecessor to lyrical, feminist, experimental works of today

Angel in the Forest is Marguerite Young's fascinating chronicle of two attempts to establish utopian communities in nineteenth-century America.In it, she  recounts the strange tale of New Harmony, Indiana, a community originally founded in 1814 by the German mystic Father George Rapp, who wanted to apply Scriptural communism to daily life in order to bring about the New Jerusalem. It was sold in 1825 to Robert Owen, the father of British socialism who, with a group of English immigrants, implemented his own theories for a perfect community, this time based on rationalism.Both experiments failed, but Young finds in both a distinctively American yearning for utopia, which continues to characterize the American spirit to this day: a tradition of faith and folly can be traced from Owen's New Moral World to George Bush's New World Order.Written with the same elegance, wit, and lyric beauty that distinguishes her fiction, Angel in the Forest was widely praised upon its first publication in 1945. This edition includes Mark Van Doren's introduction to Scribner's 1966 reprint.

"Lesbianism, its flories and sorows, is the subject and quest of this marvelously perverse sentimental journey by Nightwood's author... A striking lesbian manifesto and a deft parody." —Library JournalBlending fiction, myth, and revisionary parody and accompanied by the author's delightful illustrations, Ladies Almanack is a brilliant modernist composition and arguably the most audacious lesbian text of its time. While the book pokes fun at the wealthy Paris expatriates who were Barnes' literary contemporaries and remains controversial today, it seems to have delighted its cast of characters, which was also the first audience. Arranged by month, it records the life and loves of Dame Evangeline Musset in a robust style taken from Shakespeare and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Published for the first time in decades, this edition features original illustrations by the author.

Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine is a masterpiece of modern domestic life, a comic novel of closeness and difficulty, miscommunication and stubborn resolve. "Forty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas . . ."So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as “Mrs. Unguentine,” the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas together, alone on a giant land-covered barge of their own devising. They tend their gardens, raise a child, invent an artificial forest—all the while steering clear of civilization.Rarely has a book so perfectly registered the secret solitude of marriage, how shared loneliness can result in a powerful bond.