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."
"This is one of the best short books of literary criticism that I know." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
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.
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.
Welcome to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in the not too distant future. Water is scarce, garbage clogs the city, movement is restricted, and the System--sinister, omnipotent, secret--rules its subjects' every moment and thought. Here, middle-aged Souza lives a meaningless life in a world where hope is a lie and all memory of the past is forbidden. A classic novel of "dystopia," looking back to Orwell's "1984" and forward to Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," "And Still the Earth" stands with Loyola Brandao's "Zero" as one of the author's greatest, and darkest, achievements.
When Quentin's lover announces that she's leaving him for his brother and moving to America, he replies spontaneously that he too is leaving the country: but going where? To Tahas, he improvises: "e;a city whose very name sounded exotic."e; Following through on this impulse, Quentin soon finds a job exactly where he claimed to be going . . . and with his departure from familiar Europe, finds himself aimless in a desert country equal parts dull and dreamlike, enclosed in "e;the Ring"e; to which the wealthy expatriate community is confined by its own xenophobia. Stifled within this community and alienated without, Quentin must decide what sort of life is worth living-safe and aloof, or engaged with the deprivation and even danger of what lies beyond the Ring.
The Death of Lysanda collects two macabre novellas by one of Israel's greatest poets. In the title piece, we meet Naphtali Noi, a recently divorced proofreader, critic, and "e;creative"e; taxidermist, given to hallucinations and soon perhaps to add murder to his hobbies. Ants tells the story of a married couple, Jacob and Rachel, who discover that an army of the titular insects is threatening to destroy their rooftop apartment-but Rachel seems to be on their side rather than her husband's. In fragmented prose halfway between the Old Testament and the playful experiments of Julio Cortazar, these tales take to pieces the psyches of two men-and a nation-at war with themselves.
A Day in the Life contains twelve portraits of the vivid and curious realities experienced by a man in his sixties. These stories focus on the tiny paradoxes and everyday ridiculousness we each witness and of which we often take no note. Ranging from a visit to an exhibition of blurry photographs each taken with an exposure time of only a single second, to the story of a man stalked through the streets by a stranger for no greater a crime than making eye contact, A Day in the Life demonstrates why Senji Kuroi is considered one of the leading figures of contemporary Japanese literature.
This book collects two novellas by the noted Japanese painter: "e;Family Business"e; and "e;1,001 Pillars of Flame."e; In the first, Megumi-like the author, a long-time resident of the United States-pays a visit to her now eighty-seven-year-old mother in Japan. After so many years living abroad, Megumi simply can't understand contemporary Japan, and when her nephew runs away from home, and her elderly mother gives chase, Megumi finds herself having to relearn Japanese survival skills in an effort to bring them home safely. In "e;1,001 Pillars of Fire,"e; another Japanese-American woman, Yu, has been living in California for decades-which makes it all the more painful that she's just as subject to discrimination now as ever. When, in the wake of the Rodney King trial, LA's African-American population begins to riot, Yu learns just how much damage exclusion can do-finding it even within her own family.
In ten of her best essay-stories, Giedra Radvilaviciute travels between the ridiculous and the sublime, the everyday and the extraordinary. In the place of plot, which the author claims to have had "e;shot and buried with the proper honors,"e; the reader finds a dense, subtly interwoven structure of memory and reality, banalities and fantasy, all served up with a good dollop of absurdity and humor. We travel from the old town of Vilnius to Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood, from the seaside to a local delicatessen, all in a narrative collage as exquisitely detailed as a bouquet of flowers. As in all of her work, Radvilaviciute plays with the genres of fiction and nonfiction, essay and short story, in which the experiences of life "e;are unrecognizably transformed, like the flour, eggs, nuts, and apples in a cake."e;
Consisting of anonymous e-mail messages sent by the author to an acclaimed visual artist over the course of a year, "Permission" is the record of an experiment: an attempt to forge a connection with a stranger through the writing of a book. Part meditation, part narrative, part essay, it is presented to its addressee as a gift that asks for no thanks or acknowledgement--but what can be given in words, and what received? "Permission" not only updates the "epistolary novel" by embracing the permissiveness we associate with digital communication, it opens a new literary frontier.
Maximilian Sacheverell Hollingsworth is a counterfeiter, sculptor, filmmaker, sound artist, mystic, and terminal recluse, and over the course of fifty years, making use of a vast stockpile of illegitimate currency, he funds a great range of secret, large-scale art projects throughout London-from explorations of the far reaches of the imagination to more civic-minded schemes of an equally radical nature. At once a strikingly original satire of the ways in which art and currency conspire to favor certain voices and forms over others, and a story of surreal anti-capitalist machinations reminiscent of the works of B. S. Johnson and Georges Perec, The Currency of Paper announces the arrival of a great new voice in contemporary fiction.
There is no doubt that Desmond Hogan is one of most remarkable literary talents to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century, and perhaps the best introduction to his work is through his magnificent short stories, widely anthologized and praised throughout the world. Focusing as always on the downtrodden and the eccentric, the misplaced and the dispossessed, Hogan's stories merge past with present, landscape with mindscape-distinctly Irish and burdened by history, while exhilaratingly and wholly universal and modern.
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