Philip Landon, Introduction/ Markku Eskelinen, From Nonstop, or Missing in Fiction: A Synoptic Margin to a Trilogy/Mariaana Jantti, From Amorfiaana/Kari Kontio, From The Last of His Kind/Leena Krohn, Lucilia illustris/Kirsti Paltto, From Run Safely, My Flock/ Petter Sairanen, From Electric Lighting/ Hans Selo, From Cloudcomplexion/ Raija Siekkinen, The Black Sun/Lars Sund, From Colorado Avenue/Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa, From The Sun, My Father
Subtitled "a romance", Sabbatical is the story of Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, a sharp young associate professor of early American literature - part Jewish, part Gypsy, and possibly descended from Edgar Allen Poe - and her husband Fenwick Scott Key Turner, a 50-year-old ex-CIA officer currently between careers, a direct descendant of the author of "The Star Spangled Banner" and himself the author of a troublemaking book about his former employer. Seven years into their marriage, they decide to take a sabbatical, a sailboat journey on which they sum up their years together and try to make important decisions about the years ahead. True to its subtitle, the novel combines the mysterious and marvelous (unexplained disappearances; a fabled sea monster in Chesapeake Bay) with romantic love and daring adventure.
The Red Shoes consists of tatters of a half-dozen tales (The Glass Shoe, The Gingerbread Variations, The Little Match Girl, Don Juan Is a Woman, and the title story, among others), sewn together into a novel by two seamstresses. "Fabric, fabrication - such is the stuff of these lost chronicles come together here", Gordon writes in her introduction. "Swinging their hatboxes, swaying their hips, chapters with torn slips wander in on high heels and blistered feet". Looking back to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, but also casting sidelong glances at metafictional sugardaddies like Queneau, Nabokov, Cortazar, Gass, and Milorad Pavic, The Red Shoes is a Rabelaisian romp through the language of sensuality.
Boswell is Stanley Elkin's first and funniest novel: the comic odyssey of a twentieth-century groupie who collects celebrities as his insurance policy against death. James Boswell--strong man, professional wrestler (his most heroic match is with the Angel of Death)-- is a con man, a gate crasher, and a moocher of epic talent. He is also the hero of one of the most original novel in years ( Oakland Tribune)--a man on the make for all the great men of his time--his logic being that if you can't be a lion, know a pride of them. Can he cheat his way out of mortality?
In this complex novel, a gay man who has fled the violence of the city for an island retreat spends his time keeping a journal and writing stories. He invents a female alter-ego who haunts him, as does the ghost of the murderer who occupied his house in the 19th century; ultimately these hauntings are manifestations of his own psychic disintegration. Considered by many to be Dowell¿s finest achievement, Island People conveys the fragmentation that results from prolonged isolation.
A Star-Bright Lie recounts the age-old story of the young provincial who comes to New York and is dazzled and betrayed by the bright lights of Broadway, but with a few kinks to the story: the provincial in this case was gay and would later develop into one of America's finest novelists. Coleman Dowell left Kentucky for New York in 1950 and spent the next decade trying to "make it" in the big city. With the same stylish verve and searching analysis that illuminate his fiction, Dowell recounts his frustrating experiences in show biz: early success as staff composer for a TV show (to which he was recommended by Tennessee Williams); next, touted as David Merrick's "Golden Boy", a failed attempt to adapt O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! as a musical; several other attempts at a hit on Broadway; and finally, a sabotaged venture at making a musical of Carl Van Vechten's novel The Tattooed Countess. Throughout this memoir are unsparing portraits of Williams, Merrick, Van Vechten, Isak Dinesen, and others of the period. But the real star is Dowell himself: "his paranoia, his bedeviled fascination with glamour, his lyric response to nature, his nostalgia for a Kentucky he'd fled and then reinvented, his Gothic sense of horror, his touchy pride, his passion for black men, his alienation from both heterosexual society and the two forms of gay life he'd known" (from novelist Edmund White's foreword). Illustrated with eight pages of photographs (many, including the cover, by Van Vechten).
A phantasmagorical mixture of religious mysticism and eroticism, bound up with the mythic origins of civilization, and taking in everything from shamanic art to Bach's "Art of the Fugue."
"The Review of Contemporary Fiction "is a tri-quarterly journal that features critical essays on fiction writers whose work resists convention and easy categorization.
Collecting twenty essays written by distinguished scholars from the United States and Germany, The Holodeck in the Garden offers an informative tour of the complex interrelations between science, technology, and contemporary American literature.
Like The Best of Myles and Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn (both available from Dalkey Archive Press), At War is a collection of Flann O'Brien's columns written for the Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen. Taken from the war years of 1940-45, these writings provide plenty of acerbic wit and persistent prodding of "the good people of Ireland." And in typical O'Brien fashion, no one is safe from his opinionated attacks. His oftentimes hysterical musings include discussions of theater, what it means to be Irish, ideas for alternative pubs and liquors, advice for children, and ways to improve the home.
Aldous Huxley spares no one in his ironic, piercing portrayal of a group gathered in an Italian palace by the socially ambitious and self-professed lover of art, Mrs. Aldwinkle. Here, Mrs. Aldwinkle yearns to recapture the glories of the Italian Renaissance, but her guests ultimately fail to fulfill her naive expectations. Among her entourage are: a suffering poet and reluctant editor of the Rabbit Fanciers' Gazette who silently bears the widowed Mrs. Aldwinkle's desperate advances; a popular novelist who records every detail of her affair with another guest, the amorous Calamy, for future literary endeavors; and an aging sensualist philosopher who pursues a wealthy yet mentally-disabled heiress. Stripping the houseguests of their pretensions, Huxley reveals the superficiality of the cultural elite. Deliciously satirical, Those Barren Leaves bites the hands of those who dare to posture or feign sophistication and is as comically fresh today as when first published.
The early fiction of one of the most daring and influential writers of postwar Germany, a man often called the German James Joyce due to the linguistic inventiveness of his fiction.
"Another View" examines the impact of the foreign in the context of non-native prose writing and its implications for literature in translation. Containing significant debut translations into English from such authors as Herta M?ller and Yoko Tawada, " Another View" also serves as an anthology demonstrating the potential for new directions in literary translation, heightening and tracing the originals' textuality, flow, and accent.
What can be said about the silence that precedes a poem or a story? What myths have been thought up to explain the transition from "nothing" to a work of art? And when did the "account of composition" turn into a literary genre of its own? These questions are the heart of Pablo M. Ruiz's excursion into the center(s) of literary creativity. Filled with paradoxes and parables, "Four Cold Chapters" takes in Borges, Perec, and Felisberto Hern?ndez, as well as several suggested but politely avoided doctoral dissertations, on its journey through the universe of writing (and writing about writing).
As species, and as a culture, we recognize ourselves by our capacity for possession, so that personhood is made equivalent to ownership. If, however, the way in which we imagine objects predisposes our behavior toward them, art can encourage us to reorder how we comport ourselves in a world that is not meant to be owned, that is not even meant for us. To frustrate the desolation of avarice, we must enrich our view of things, and "Making Figures" takes the reader through the writing of Virginia Woolf, both the fiction and the nonfiction, at the service of this imperative.
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
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