Böcker utgivna av Dalkey Archive Press

"Another Man's City "is structured as a virtual-reality narrative manipulated by an entity referred to variously as the Invisible Hand or Big Brother. The scenario is reminiscent of Peter Weir's 1998 film "The Truman Show" and Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "The Unconsoled." The novel begins with a series of seemingly minor juxtapositions of the familiar and the strange, as a result of which the protagonist, K, gradually finds himself inside a Matrix-like reality populated with shape-shifting characters.

A failed professor, Samuel Taylor is haunted by the premonition that in attempting to write out of his system the circumstances surrounding his failure, he'll only find himself at the mercy of another system, language itself. Each iteration of his creative effort, whether centered around seemingly mundane activities such as driving or manual labor, or scrutinizing the current cachet of rock climbing, illustrates that while experience might preempt artistic aspiration, those who are wedded to the demands of literary art are at its beck and call. By turns comic and tragic, Samuel Taylor's Last Night asks us to consider what it means to be a writer first and last.

The narrator of this novel is Ballerina, a fifteen-year-old with the cognitive faculties of a child, and each of its fifteen chapters begins with her first wetting her bed and thereby greeting a new day. Drawing comparison to William Faulkner in its expressionistic depiction of Ballerina's interior world, this is a classic of contemporary Slovenian literature: a hugely popular exploration of a character whose world is so divorced from what we think of as reality.

The novel of the famous Georgian writer, poet and playwright Tamaz Chiladze focuses on moral problems/issues, arisen as a result of too great a self-assuredness of psychologists. Its main character is an up-to-now successful psychotherapist, whose wife has left him. One day she suddenly realised that her marriage is nothing more than "fact/reality born out of habit" and her family is a branch of a hospital. For her husband she wasn't a beloved wife but just a patient. The heroine finds an exit from the vicious circle of misunderstanding and insensitivity.

"Learning Cyrillic" presents a selection of fiction by Serbian master David Albahari written since his departure from Europe. In these twenty short stories, written and published in their original language over the past twenty years, Albahari addresses immigrant life--the need to fit into one's adopted homeland--as well as the joys and terrors of refusing to give up one's essential "strangeness" in the face of an alien culture.

?ric Chevillard here seeks to clear up a persistent and pernicious literary misunderstanding: the belief that a novel's narrator must necessarily be a mouthpiece for his or her writer's own opinions. Thus, we are introduced to a narrator haunted by a deep loathing for cauliflower gratin (and by a no less passionate fondness for trout almondine), but his monologue has been helpfully and hilariously annotated in order to clarify all the many ways in which this gentleman and ?ric Chevillard are nothing alike. Language and logic are pushed to their farthest extremes in one of Chevillard's funniest novels yet.

Scenes from the Enlightenment: A Novel of Manners was published in 1939, toward the end of the Japanese colonial period in Korea, and depicts seemingly trivial events in the lives of the residents of a small town northeast of Pyongyang: a wedding between two local families, the arrival of box upon box of fascinating new Western products at the Japanese-run general store, a long-awaited athletics meet held at the local school. But in these events, and in the changing familial and social relationships that underpin them, we see a picture of a changing Korea on the cusp of modernity. When two boys decide to cut their hair in the Western fashion, the reader sees the conflict between tradition and modernity presented not in abstract terms, but in one of the myriad ways it affected the lives of those who lived through this time of change.

Wolfgang Koeppen is the most important German novelist of the past seventy years: a radical, not to say terrifying, stylist; a caustic, jet-black comedian; a bitter prophet. His late, autobiographical work--the short, intense autofiction, Youth, translated here for the first time--is a portrait of the little north German town of Greifswald before World War I, and is a miracle of compression: this is not historical fiction, but a kind of personal apocalypse. Also included here, in Michael Hofmann's brilliant translation, is one of Koeppen's very last works: a short, fragmentary text spoken over a 1990 German television program depicting his return visit to the town of his schooldays.

A forlorn traveler is taken in by three suffering orphans, who, in the midst of their pain, give him food and shelter. The first, orphaned by history, still mourns a father who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp, never to return. The second, orphaned by pathology, has a rare disease, and is facing madness alone in a mountain chalet. The third, orphaned by philosophy, is a teenager who has decided to cut all ties with his parents.Never one to avoid challenging questions, in this poignant triptych Laroche examines the relationship between a writer and his words: suggesting that, perhaps, he is the orphan of his own work.

War is raging in Georgia, Russian fighter planes are thundering overhead, and yet, for some, the falling bombs cause no more impact than the slight ripple moving through the purified water of their swimming pools, or the rattling of a spoon in their cappuccino cups. Filtered through the bleary and cynical mind of Shako--a journalist famed for his appearance in Georgian Pepsi ads--"Adibas" is a tragic satire describing the progressive falsification of his life, invaded by consumer goods, consumer sex, consumer carnage. A "war novel" without a single battle scene, Zaza Burchuladze's English-language debut anatomizes the Western world's ongoing "feast in the time of plague."

A bevy of mediocre writers are invited to a seminar aboard a specially chartered train, and this novel tracks their progress across Europe: bitter, bickering, and self-absorbed. Aboard this Literature Express is a Georgian author whose love for the wife of his own Polish translator seems as doomed as his hopes for international success; worse still, it seems all the novelists congregated on The Literature Express intend to write their next books about their time on the train... Can our Georgian author compete? Is there any hope for contemporary literature, or, barring that, at least his own little love affair? "The Literature Express" is a riotous parable about the state of literary culture, the European Union, and our own petty ambitions--be they professional or amorous.

One afternoon in December 1992, in Tartu, Estonia, Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman reluctantly sat down to dictate his memoirs to Elena Pogosian, his assistant, over a pot of tea. It was to be the first of twelve dictation sessions during which the initial draft of Non-Memoirs was created. The sessions were spread out over that winter and into the spring of 1993--the last spring of Lotman's life. The result of the process is this book - a book of memories and recollections of a good part of 20th century, divided into seven sections. The five shorter sections concern themselves with a single anecdote or theme (lice on the front, an encounter with a hare, a "totally Bulgakovian" episode, a visit from the KGB, Tartu School politics); the two longer sections provide the narrative backbone of the memoirs, tending to treat the passage of time, rather than a single event (school and frontline life, the end of the war and postwar university life).

Juan Goytisolo's radical revision of his masterpiece Juan the Landless is the starting-point for this new translation by renowned translator Peter Bush. The new text focuses on Goytisolo's surreal exploration and rejection of his own roots, Catholic Spain's repression of Muslims, Jews and gays, his ancestors' exploitation of Cuban slaves and his own forging of a language at once poetic, politic and ironic that celebrates the erotic act of writing and and the anarchic joy of being the ultimate outsider. In Juan the Landless the greatest living novelist from Spain defiantly re-invents tradition and the world as a man without a home, without a country, in praise of pariahs.

In Makbara, Juan Goytisolo--widely considered Spain's greatest living writer--again dazzles the reader with his energetic, stylistic prose, which he himself compares to a snake: cunning, sly, sinuous. But the themes in Makbara are perhaps more universal than in his earlier works. Makbara is full of its own kind of warmth, humor, and love. After all, makbara is an Arab word referring to the spot in North African cemetaries where young couples meet for romantic encounters. Sex, for Goytisolo, is clearly the greatest cosmic joke, the great leveller. "Sex," he says, "is above all freedom."

"Wright invites us to roam the cultures of the transatlantic world, to speak and know many tongues, to partake of the rituals through which we may be initiated into modes of individual and communal enhancement. In yet another age of great uncertainty, Wright enables us to imagine that breaking the vessels of the past is more an act of uncovering than of sheer destruction, and that we need not necessarily choose between an intellectual and a spiritual life, for both can still be had." -- Robert B. Stepto

An investigation into the problem of writing about matter in Nikolai Gogol's work and, indirectly, into the entire Neoplatonic tradition in Russian literature, this book is not intended to be an exhaustive historical survey of the concept of matter, but rather an effort to enumerate the images of matter in Gogol's texts and to specify the rules of their construction. The trajectory of the book is directed by movement from Gogol to Gogol. Its major assumption is that Gogol successfully develops a language for grasping the Neoplatonic concept of matter and subsequently rejects it, abandoning literature. Since then, the Gogolian form [sic!] of the image of a sheer negation of form has recurred frequently in Russian literature. Yet the direction of the movement is always towards Gogol. Somewhere at the margin of this circular trajectory, one can inscribe a Polish writer, Witold Gombrowicz, who established, one hundred years later, a similar rhythm governing Polish literature: from Gombrowicz to Gombrowicz.

The Temple of the Wild Geese, a semi-autobiographical account of Mizukami's childhood, tells the tale of Jinen, a Buddhist monk raised by villagers after his mother, a beggar, abandoned him. Sent to live at a temple at the age of ten, his resentment smolders for years until it explodes in a shocking climax. In Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, no woman is willing to marry the diminutive Kisuke, a bamboo artisan, until Tamae, a prostitute, comes to pay her respects at the grave of Kisuke's father. In Tamae, Kisuke sees shadows of his own mother, who died when he was young, and the two eventually marry. Since Kisuke seeks only motherly affection from Tamae, the two never become lovers. Instead, Tamae devotes herself to caring for Kisuke as a mother would, and he thrives as a renowned maker of bamboo dolls.

In normal, everyday tones, a story is told by the perpetrator of triple incest: first with his mother as a child and a young man, then with his daughter as he grows into mature manhood, and finally with his sister in middle age. This primeval fairytale burns with an icy passion as the narrator switches roles along with familial relationships. The quasi-metaphysical lucidity with which he pursues his odd fate is eerie, particularly in light of his apparent innocence as to the perverse nature of his taboo attachments, and the theatrical artifice with which he pursues them. In the end, his passionate desire is so earnest that the reader is left to wonder if he is truly a monster or an innocent: who is directing whom?

I Am Otherwise: The Romance between Poetry and Theory after the Death of the Subject examines the contemporary poet's relationship with language in the age of theory. As the book works through close readings and interpretations of Adrienne Rich and Harold Bloom, John Ashbery and Paul de Man, Jorie Graham and Maurice Blanchot, and Barrett Watten and Jacques Lacan, it shows how the main psychological modes of contemporary poetry and the postmodern poet are anxiety, irony, abjection, and destitution. The book ultimately concludes that the new theoretical poetry self-consciously renders the effect of critical theory in its own construction. Whereas poets of the past tarried with nature, self, or philosophy, poets of our time unite lyric feeling with literary theory itself.

Aged twenty, and with no war experience, Nicholas Mosley found himself in charge of a platoon of men positioned along the Italian front during the Second World War. With his father in prison on charges of treason, he had enlisted primarily in an effort to improve his family image. But the war left Mosley a radically changed man: he had gone in out of personal convenience, and left with a sense of greater purpose. Saved from death by one of his men, holed up in barns and trenches and tents, and marching across Europe, Mosley found in war a certainty that eluded him in peacetime. "War is both senseless and necessary, squalid and fulfilling, terrifying and sometimes jolly," he writes. "This is like life. Humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this). They feel they know what they have to do." In an interview conducted between 1977 and 1978, Nicholas Mosley said, "When I was young William Faulkner was my great love, not just because of the density of style, but because he seemed to be dealing with the question not of what will happen next but what is happening now. The first Faulkner novel I read was The Sound and the Fury, which I got hold of when we liberated a POW camp in Italy in 1944 and I liberated the Red Cross Library. I was about twenty.... What in god's name, after all, was I doing aged twenty in Italy in a war?"

Over the past twenty-five years, the Review of Contemporary Fiction has earned a reputation for being one of the most important journals covering contemporary literature. Through essays, excerpts, and an extensive book review section, the Review is dedicated to the discussion and celebration of innovative fiction, and some of the most influential authors of the twentieth century have been featured in its pages. (See page 46 for a full list of available issues.)

A retired academic and writer is becoming a media celebrity of sorts, appearing on various talk shows to voice his controversial views on human nature and war. While in New York to make such an appearance, he becomes the victim of a hit-and-run--set up by the CIA? the FBI? terrorists?--and ends up confined to a hospital bed. This forced inactivity allows him to reflect on his life--the work he has done, the women he has known--as various people from his life gather around him, including both his first and second wives. Reminiscing about his past while dealing with his present, the man begins to see his provocative ideas about fidelity, sin, and grace play themselves out in a virtuosic way that could only be conceived by Nicholas Mosley.

Twelve startlingly original stories about erotic desire. Each story focuses on a pivotal erotic moment in the lives of men and women who narrate them. Only a few are overtly sexual in content, but each explores the many strange reverberations that occur when desire is present, whether acted upon or kept inside.

Hidden behind a cloak of exotic mystery, Cuba is virtually unknown to American citizens, G. Cabrera Infante--in Infante's Inferno and several of his other novels--allows readers to peek behind the curtain surrounding this island and see the vibrant life that existed there before Fidel Castro's regime. Detailing the sexual education and adventures of the author, Infante's Inferno is a lush, erotic, funny book that provides readers with insight into what it was like to grow up in pre-revolutionary Havana. Viewing every girl as a potential lover, and the movies as a place both for entertainment and potential sexual escapades, Cabera Infante captures the adolescent male mindset with a great deal of fun and self-consciousness. With his hallmark of puns and wordplay--excellently translated by Suzanne Jill Levine--Cabrera Infante has a hilariously updated of the Don Juan myth in a tropical setting.