Bøger udgivet af Dalkey Archive Press

Editor's note/An interview with Gerald Murnane by Antoni Jach/Looking for Writers Beyond Their Work by John Griswold/Five Silhouettes by Luis Chitarroni (translated by Sarah Denaci)/Seven and a Half Studies by S.D. Chrostowska/Nine Suppositions Concerning "Bouvard and Pecuchet" by Jacques Jouet (translated by E.C. Gogolak)/Irrationality, Situations, and Novels of Inquiry by Thalia Field/Margins and Mirrors by Warren Motte/The Colon by Lily Hoang and Bhanu Kapil/The Fragile Shelter of the Declarative: On Edouard Leve by Adrian West/Transgressive Autofictions by Jacques Houis/Contributors/Translators/Acknowledgments/Book Reviews/Books Received/Annual Index

The "Review of Contemporary Fiction" proudly presents the English language-debut of Austrian master Gert Jonke's absurd, revealing, and groundbreaking autobiographical essay/novella "Individual and Metamorphosis." It tells the story of Jonke's life as a writer by citing, examining, and even rewriting texts by authors whose work inspired his own: Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cort?zar, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Ernst Jandl, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Robert Musil, Peter Weiss, and others.

A moving contribution to the tradition of the metaphysical novel as exemplified by Dostoyevsky and Bernanos, and likewise a worthy counterpart to the vibrant and polyphonic work of fellow Iberians Camilo Jos? Cela and Juan Goytisolo, "The Sea" is a cornerstone of postwar Catalan literature. Set in a tubercular sanatorium in Mallorca after the Spanish Civil War, it tells the story of three children sharing a gruesome secret who are brought together again by chance and illness -- two patients and one nurse. A love triangle, a story of retribution, and an exploration of evil, "The Sea" is "a profound and radical descent into the depths of the human soul." (Gerard de Cortanze)

Both a sense of urgency and a goodly amount of patience are required for any writer to produce a novel. Moving between these two poles, Jean-Philippe Toussaint here collects a series of short essays on the art of writing, both his own and that of writers he's admired, for example Kafka, Beckett, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. As Toussaint himself has said, "It's only natural for writers... to say a word about how they write and what they owe to great authors."

On Wing, the first published work of fiction by the Slovak poet-philosopher Robert Gal, is a constellation of hundreds of aphorisms, dreams, anecdotes, and inquiries, all written in a restless, searching, "improvisational" prose whose techniques reflect those of Bernhard, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, not to mention the saxophonist and composer John Zorn, who makes a brief cameo as a character.

According to his contract, the old man has five months to sit on his bench and reminisce about his childhood, but all that comes out are curious stories--about leprous dominos, amorous concrete towers, chaste call girls, and more. In other words: the old man twaddles on and on. A virtuoso novel that reveals what language can do when it serves no purpose but its own proliferation, Swiss provocateur Urs Alleman's "The Old Man and the Bench" is a comedy of mangled verbosity.

How do writers and filmmakers use repetition? It is useful when accenting an idea, but, in this original and thought-provoking book, Bruce F. Kawin argues that it serves a more important function as a manipulator of our sense of time and of the timeless. Brilliantly pitching the aesthetics of novelty against those of repetition, Kawin shows that the connections and rhythm of repetition offer revelations about literature and film, nature and memory, and time and art.

In An Eochair (The Key), one of Máirtín Ó Cadhain's most Kafkaesque short stories (and one of his longest), J., a 'paper-keeper,' one of the more junior civil servant positions, accidentally locks himself in his office when the key breaks in the lock. The story -- a mixture of satire, farce, black comedy and, ultimately, tragedy -- relates the efforts of J. and various other characters, his wife, civil service colleagues and superiors and others, to extricate himself from his predicament. However, all efforts to free J. must be in accordance with civil service protocols, and no such protocol exists for J.'s unique dilemma.

Farley, a seventy-five year old man, lies on his bathroom floor, having just suffered a stroke. As his mind sifts through his past, we are introduced to the loyal friend he once was, his loving wife, the city of Dublin, and the question of how this very ordinary man has become so lonely at the end of his life. Told in reverse, from Farley's penultimate day to decades before, Christine Dwyer Hickey's bestseller is a jarring look at a life up close. First published in 2011, The Cold Eye of Heaven shows Dwyer Hickey's lyrical prose at its best: rendering sorrow, joy, wisdom, and humor in equal measure. Acutely insightful, this is an eerily accurate portrait of what it's like to grow old.

"Vano and Niko" resembles a catalogue of all the relationships that are possible between people. It is a parable that demonstrates that not only humans but all living beings are engaged in the search for the other. Peter Handke, who met Erlom Akhvlediani in 1975, described the parables as "exhilarating and at the same time paradoxical"; in his view they show us the redemptive "third way," that of waylessness. Travelling this third way calls for courage and the Vano and Niko parables therefore have something ominous about them. "Vano and Niko" was one of Akhvlediani's earlier works, written in the 1950s. Today "Vano and Niko" has cult status and the book is famous throughout Georgia, even forming part of the philosophy curriculum.This edition of "Vano and Niko" includes the two other parts to Akhvlediani's trilogy of parables: "The Story of the Lazy Mouse" and "The Man Who Lost His Self and Other Stories."

Exercises in Criticism is an experiment in applied poetics in which critic and poet Louis Bury utilizes constraint-based methods in order to write about constraint-based literature. By tracing the lineage and enduring influence of early Oulipian classics, he argues that contemporary American writers have, in their adoption of constraint-based methods, transformed such methods from apolitical literary laboratory exercises into a form of cultural critique, whose usage is surprisingly widespread, particularly among poets and ¿experimental¿ novelists. More, Bury¿s own use of critical constraints functions as a commentary on how and why we write and talk about books, culture, and ideas.

"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.

This groundbreaking classic of Korean modernism tackles the shattering effect of the division of Korea. Taking place just before the Korean War, it follows its protagonist as he travels to the North hoping to escape what he sees as the repressive right-wing regime in the South... only to find that a different sort of lie reigns in the so-called worker's paradise. Implying that both communism and capitalism are pernicious infections from without, "The Square" is a dark and complex story of the ways ideologies can destroy the individual.

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."