Bøker utgitt av Dalkey Archive Press

"True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by acclaimed 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 an investigation 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."--

Exploring sanity and insanity, truth and untruth, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease is Svetislav Basara's unblinking and unforgettable deconstruction of the Soviet psyche.Told as an eclectic collection of appropriated testimonies, treatises, missives, and police files, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease follows the progression of the contagion's patient zero, a Soviet citizen (sometimes) named Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, as he ascends from hellish health to the sacred illness. Hailed as one of Serbia's most influential living writers, Svetislav Basara's scathing, irreverent critiques of authoritarianism have twice won him Serbia's prestigious NIN Award. In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease, Basara lives up to this reputation with a book as formally ambitious as it is intellectually sophisticated. His blend of grotesque absurdism and wry humor evokes the paranoid, vexing worlds of Franz Kafka's novels and the meta-textual assemblages of Paul Auster. Told from a colorful range of perspectives, the novel is a multifaceted, crystalline account of truth, lies, and history, a sprawling case study of humans in an inhuman society.

"Antâonio Lobo Antunes's twenty-fifth novel, Commission of Tears (2011, Comissäao das Lâagrimas) is set during the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002). Angola attained official independence on November 11, 1975 and, while the stage was set for transition, a combination of ethnic tensions and international pressures rendered Angola's hard-won victory problematic. As with many post-colonial states, Angola was left with both economic and social difficulties which translated into a power struggle between the three predominant liberation movements. The People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), formed in December of 1956 as an offshoot of the Angolan Communist Party, had as its support base the Ambundu people and was largely supported by other African countries, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. In this novel, Antunes delves into this traumatic period of Angola's history through the fragmented memories and dreams of a broken woman. The author drew from the story of the commander of the female battalion MPLA who was tortured and killed following the state coup of May 1977. It is said that while they tortured her she did not stop singing. This is the story of Cristina, admitted in to a psychiatric clinic in Lisbon. In her torrent of memories, dialogues and traumatic episodes, Cristina remembers her early childhood in Africa, at the time when everything inside her head was intertwined with her father's voice, who was a former Black priest and became one of the torturers of the "Commission of Tears." Cristina's white mother, a cabaret dancer imported from Lisbon to entertain Portuguese farmers in Angola, marries the Black ex-priest because she finds herself pregnant with Cristina by the man who exploits her, the cabaret manager. The long, twisting narrative weaves together the three voices of daughter, father, and mother as they recall the terrors of their life in Angola, and their own suffering. Their personal tragedies, scarred by racism and abuse, mirror those of the country that is being torn asunder around them"--

Radical and racy, Robert Coover's Coover Stories is a new collection of incisive, inventive works from the postmodern master.When Robert Coover's first collection Pricksongs & Descants came out in 1969, his shortstory "The Babysitter," took the literary world by storm. Described as "metafiction at its best,"his work is taught in classrooms more than half a century later, no less relevant-andirreverent-than at its debut. Provocative, experimental, and biting, Coover's darkly satiricwriting has pushed the avant-garde to its limits and sired a generation of postmodernists. Coover Stories is the fourth short story collection from Robert Coover. Drawing on decades of experience, the William FaulknerFoundation Award-winning writer continues to shock and engage his readers with his wit, style,and keen critical eye for the paradoxes of modernity.

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.

Candid and unfettered, Sven Popovic's Last Night is a playfully existential meditation on youth and the search for the self. Acclaimed in his native Croatia, Popovic's unique blend of intimacy and contemplation has garnered him a following in the alternative literary scene of Zagreb-and beyond. With an intellectualism that never takes itself too seriously, an unaffected fluidity of form, and a keen eye for the smallest, strangest moments that color our lives, his stories weave an offbeat tapestry of urban life. Last Night is the first short story collection from Sven Popovic, whose writing was previously featured in Dalkey Archive Press's Best European Fiction 2017, and his first full work to be released in English. Slickly translated by Vinko Zgaga, Popovic's sometimes-dreamlike, sometimes-conversational vignettes offer a shrewd, original outlook on life's absurdities.

The tenth child of a fantasist mother and an absent millionaire, Matty Crickholme is growinginto a sexually bewildered, neurotic young man. Through the collected paraphernalia of anunconventional childhood, Alex Kovacs creates a quirky, kaleidoscopic rumination on family andhow it shapes us—for better or worse.Sexology follows the strange, wonderful, fluxional world of the Crickholmes, wherenonconformism is celebrated, siblings form autonomous republics, and eccentricity reignssupreme. The Crickholme siblings youthful exploits take them on myriad paths: a hermeticpsychic, a dog trainer, an ice cream purveyoress, a missing person. Between memories,factoids, letters, and old photographs, Matty investigates how their offbeat rearing made themthe adults they became, and how fantasy and convention collide.Alex Kovacs’s writings have received acclaim for their invention, wit, and astute observations ofour absurd world. Sexology brings this intellectual playfulness to the story of the Crickholmeswith a unique prose that evokes the complex emotional landscapes of W.G. Sebald’s novels andthe sometimes-gentle, sometimes-devastating style of Susanna Clarke. The result is anentrancing, incomparable medley.

"Once a fãeted 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"--

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.

Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train.During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakako are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes.Marshland is a revelation of modern Japanese history and culture, a major novel from the hand of a master well-known in his own country, though only the second to be translated into English: the wealth of Kaga’s work in fiction remains to be discovered by the Anglophone world.

This novel is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel¿a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American life. Marguerite Young¿s method is poetic, imagistic, incantatory; in prose of extraordinary richness she tests the nature of her characters¿and the nature of reality.Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is written with oceanic music moving at many levels of consciousness and perception; but the toughly fibred realistic fabric is always there, in the happenings of the narrative, the humor, the precise details, the definitions of the characters. Miss MacIntosh herself, who hails from What Cheer, Iowa, and seems downright and normal, with an incorruptible sense of humor and the desire to put an end to phantoms; Catherine Cartwheel, the opium lady, a recluse who is shut away in a great New England seaside house and entertains imaginary guests; Mr. Spitzer, the lawyer, musical composer and mystical space traveler, a gentle man, wholly unsure of himself and of reality; his twin brother Peron, the gay and raffish gambler and virtuoso in the world of sports; Cousin Hannah, the horsewoman, balloonist, mountain-climber and militant Boston feminist, known as Al Hamad through all the seraglios of the East; Titus Bonebreaker of Chicago, wild man of God dreaming of a heavenly crown; the very efficient Christian hangman, Mr. Weed of the Wabash River Valley; a featherweight champion who meets his equal in a graveyard¿these are a few who live with phantasmagorical vividness in the pages of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.The novel touches on many aspects of life¿drug addiction, woman¿s suffrage, murder, suicide, pregnancy both real and imaginary, schizophrenia, many strange loves, the psychology of gambling, perfectionism; but the profusion of this huge book serves always to intensify the force of the central question: ¿What shall we do when, fleeing from illusion, we are confronted by illusion?¿ What is real, what is dream? Is the calendar of the human heart the same as that kept by the earth? Is it possible that one may live a secondary life of which one does not know?In every aspect, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands by itself¿in the lyric beauty of its prose, its imaginative vitality and cumulative emotional power. It is the work of a writer of genius.

In The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein sets out to tell "a history of a family's progress," radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships. As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America.

In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable specificity: loneliness, family angst, memory loss—from a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucatán Peninsula. Mayo’s unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucatán culture and community that Marrufo Huchim describes through her narrator’s fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers.

The ugly side of superheroesWhat if you suddenly had superpowers? What would you do? How would your friends and family react? What would your obligations to society be?The superheroes’ first missions— combating terrorists or rescuing disaster victims— are a boon to France. Yet while these actions bring the country pride, unity quickly starts to unravel. These superheroes, ultimately, are human. Paparazzi are everywhere. One has an affair with another’s wife. Another questions following the government’s imperialist agenda. Meanwhile the public carps on social media. Molia takes our fascination with superheroes and adds a cutting portrayal of contemporary social mores to create an entertaining and disturbing work with deep dystopian underpinnings.

Sally Mara’s Intimate Diary, dating from 1950, is exceptional; a salacious, black humorous andmeaningful story by the influential and erudite French novelist, Raymond Queneau. When ‘Sally Mara’begins her diary in January 1934, she is 17 years old and lives with her mother, older brother andyounger sister in south central Dublin. The everyday language is, of course, English, but she is writingin ‘newly-learned’ French to impress her beloved and just departed French tutor, a professional polyglotlinguist. To impress him even more, she decides to learn Irish in order to write a novel of some kind inIrish. However, the action throughout is determined by Sally’s resolution to overcome her ignorance ofthe mysteries of sex and reproduction. The often sensual and dark humour of Sally Mara’s Journal intime is founded on language andlanguages, so this translation, while prioritizing clarity, aims to maintain ‘Frenchness’, tinged of coursewith Dublinese. Surprisingly, for a French author, Irish words and phrases occur throughout; these arenot translated but, like some challenging French phrases, are supported by footnotes.In 1949, when Raymond Queneau wrote Journal intime, published anonymously under thepseudonym Sally Mara, he was, as always, greatly influenced by James Joyce and fascinated by thelimitations of language. He was also in need of the ready money provided by Éditions du Scorpion,publishers of erotic and violent pulp fiction, and of Journal intime.

An indispensable companion to Gertrude Stein’s masterpiece, The Making of Americans.One of the great works of 20th-century American fiction, Stein’s novel represents a peak of modernist literature: filled with repetition, overlapping and disintegrating plots, innumerable characters, and sentences stretching over pages. It is an immensely rewarding book, but also a potentially frustrating one.At last, Cecilia Konchar Farr and Janie Sisson offer a reader’s guide—the first of its kind. As I Was Saying is proof that The Making of Americans is not unreadable as charged, and offers accessible entry to the experimental writing Stein valued and promoted most—the original modernist novel by the era’s most influential author.

Razor-sharp social commentary, Jane Austen for contemporary feminists unafraid to confront a dark worldIn her latest translated volume of collected short fiction, Rumena Bužarovska delivers more of what established her as “one of the most interesting writers working in Europe today.” Already a bestseller across her native Macedonia, I’m Not Going Anywhere is an unsentimental and hyperrealist collection in which Macedonians leave their country of origin to escape bleakness—only to find, in other locales, new kinds of desolation in theses dark, biting, and utterly absorbing stories.

A Spanish-gothic version of a Patricia Highsmith novel Jon and Katharina spend the winter in Jon’s childhood home on the Cantabrian coast, lonely and bored, ambivalent about their precarious freelance jobs and disconnected in their relationship. Yet the couple’s routine will soon be disturbed when one rainy night, they witness strange lights in the sky over the village. The next morning, ufologists begin to arrive in the village, anxious to make extraterrestrial contact. The morning brings other unexpected guests: Jon's distant cousin, Markel, and his companion, the silent, alluring Virginia. The visit becomes increasingly uncomfortable as—like the ufologists camped out in view of the house—the strangers stay on and show little sign of planning to leave. Days stretch into weeks, even as the cousins can't remember ever having met, Virginia’s behavior becomes subtly threatening, and Jon begins doubt that Markel is who he says he . . .  A deliciously tense and darkly humorous novella that explores the border that separates love from routine and offers a twist on theme of “the other” and how to live with the unknown, The Strangers introduces English readers to singular talent.

A rumination on authority and its limitations, about what we think we know - and the spaces in between. In Confessions of Narcissus, Scully suggests that our demand for narrative coherence is one of the things that makes our lives so difficult to bear, that when William Hazlitt declared, "It is we who are Hamlet", he was telling us something about Shakespeare’s universality that is worth considering: Hamlet does not just give voice to our own fears and anxieties, he also calls them into being. In the process of trying to find cures for ourselves, that is to say, we become creators, to some extent, of our own misfortunes. Confessions of Narcissus builds from the idea that stories are what we require and also (partly) what we suffer from. In this series of observations and aphorisms about literature and life, Scully makes the case that uncertainty isn't an ailment that we should necessarily try to overcome. Following in the tradition of Keats and others, uncertainty may be something that we have good cause to be more curious about, that uncertainty has artistic merit and is a state of being that we might even come to enjoy.

Aldous Huxley's lifelong concern with the dichotomy between passion and reason finds its fullest expression both thematically and formally in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. By presenting a vision of life in which diverse aspects of experience are observed simultaneously, Huxley characterizes the symptoms of "the disease of modern man' in the manner of a composer—themes and characters are repeated, altered slightly, and played off one another in a tone that is at once critical and sympathetic.First published in 1928, Huxley's satiric view of intellectual life in the '20s is populated with characters based on such celebrities of the time as D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Sir Oswald Mosley, Nancy Cunard, and John Middleton Murray, as well as Huxley himself. A major work of the twentieth century and a monument of literary modernism, this edition includes an introduction by acclaimed novelist Nicholas Mosley (author of Hopeful Monsters and the son of Sir Oswald Mosley).Along with Brave New World (written a few years later), Point Counter Point is Huxley's most concentrated attack on the scientific attitude and its effect on modern culture.

small pieces is a collaboration between novelist, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and writer and visual artist Fowzia Karimi, pairing Marcom’s short stories, or “miniatures” as Marcom calls them—prose pieces of one page or less—with watercolors done by Karimi. The work is a conversation between two artists in text and image, side by side.

Widely regarded as Sorrentino's finest achievement, Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very book we are reading) turns into a literary "stew" an uproariously funny melange of journal entries, erotic poetry, parodies of all kinds, love letters, interviews, and lists—as Hugh Kenner in "Harper's" wrote, "for another such virtuoso of the List you'd have to resurrect Joyce." Soon, Lamont's characters (on loan from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, and Dashiell Hammet) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative. Sorrentino has vastly extended the possibilities of what a novel can be in this extraordinary work, which both parodies and pays homage to the art of fiction.

Proving himself yet again a master of every form, Barth conquers in his latest the ruminative short essay—“​​jeux d’esprits,” as Barth describes them. These mostly one-page tidbits pay homage to Barth’s literary influences while retaining his trademark self-consciousness and willingness to play.

In a small village on the southern coast of Crete, the narrator meets a young man who tells him a history of his journey which took him from Prague as far as to the Libyan sea. It is a voyage to uncover mysterious deaths of two brothers: one was murdered during the ballet performance, the body of the second one was found by Turkish fishermen at the Asia Minor shores. On the move, the amateur detective is accompanied by one of the brothers´ girlfriend. They have to work out a lot of traces, clues and rebuses – seemingly meaningless clusters of letters in the picture of a Hungarian painter, fragments of words created in the sea by bodies of phosphorescing worms, puzzling shapes of jelly sweets found in a small shop in Croatia or the plot of an American sci-fi thriller movie, which the protagonists watch in the cinema in Rome suburb. Such leads send the heroes from town to town, the plot takes part on night trains and many places in Europe - in Bratislava, Budapest, Lublan, on the islands of Mykon and Crete… With the search for the murderer of both the brothers many other stories are interconnected, and they take the readers to even more distant places of the Earth: Moscow, Boston, Mexico City…