Bøger udgivet af Dalkey Archive Press

Be it known that The Tar Baby, while just as jovial but much randier, has nothing to do with Uncle Remus. It's the quarterly of a little, very literary magazine of Galapagos Junior College (California) and this book will appear with some eye-catching visual effects beginning with the little black bare-assed boy with cheeks who is just as well off without a diaper considering the number of referrals to what it might have been loaded with. This particular issue is a memorial to Anatole Waxman-Weissman, 1931-1972, a lexicographer and logomachist who devoted his life to variant versions of a work (full of "cloacal musings") on Wittgenstein before he ended it by walking into a bus (deliberately?). The issue contains comments on both the contribution of this "booby hatch philosopher" as well as his early on rite de passage in the hands of the ladies in a nearby motel bordello - he marries the daughter of its housemother who runs off with a plumber. Along with a good deal of infighting among departmental thick heads as well as the brawling of the natives, this is tilled in via bits and pieces - pieces which might include anything from a recipe for turtle pie to an account of the Tong War of 1858. Will there be any exegetes? It's hard to say since the level is quite high and quite low at the same time - think of it as both scatologica slapstick and an academic sendup which is funny, in spots. (Kirkus Reviews)

This is the final novel of one of the most innovative, comic Brazilian writers of this century. It takes the form of an anonymous high school science teacher's journal about an unpublished novel written by his deceased lover, a young woman named Julia Marquezim Enone. Her novel's central character, Maria da Franca, is a destitute and mentally unstable woman at odds with the Brazilian social welfare system, from which she is trying to claim benefits for time spent in a psychiatric hospital. The journal represents the science teacher's attempt to understand Julia's novel and, the process, Julia herself and the relationship they once shared. Rather than providing him with comfort and a better understanding of his beloved, the teacher's explorations create an ever-widening circle of questions and fears about himself, her, and finally any attempt to understand anything about anyone. But the narrator's failures become the reader's comic delights.

History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third world, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases those boundaries in her punning monologue, blurring the texts of Herodotus with the callers to a talk-radio program, and blending contemporary history with ancient: fairy-tale and literal/invented people (the kidnappers of capitalism, a girl-warrior from Somalia, a pop singer, a political writer), connected by an elaborate mock-genealogy stretching back to the Greek gods, move in and out of each other's stories. The narrator sometimes sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature with modern crises to produce a powerful novel about the future of culture.

A densely written "stream-of-consciousness" novel that explores the idea "that the loss of love is always painful for everyone and surely much more so for women." Spanish writer Tusquets, a committed feminist and student of female sexuality, focuses here - in this third volume of a trilogy (her first US publication) - on heterosexual eroticism. The story itself is relatively conventional, but the treatment is not. Elia, a writer and poet, has joined longtime friends Pablo and Eva for their annual summer holiday at the beach. Beloved husband Jorge is usually there, but this year he has walked out, and Elia is trying to get through this usually happy period with pills, drink, and an anonymous young man she picks up in the bar. Eva, a lawyer and social-justice activist, has also invited deeply troubled adolescent Clara, who is in love with Eva. Meanwhile, Pablo - who feels that Eva doesn't appreciate him, that life is passing him by, and that things are certainly not the same now that Jorge has left Elia - takes up with a young woman he meets on the beach. When Clara, angered by Pablo's betrayal, tells Eva of his infidelity, Eva - previously thought to be strong and self-reliant - crumbles, suddenly aware of her dependency on Pablo. A reconciliation of sorts takes place, and Elia on her way to pick up her son from camp realizes that no one can live through another person: "never in all my life have I been so blank, so free...but I'm alive and I'm running in the race and I'll keep on going alone or accompanied." And, once again, the ultimate solitude of the individual is reaffirmed. Places, emotions, and characters are all vividly evoked, but the "stream-of-consciousness" - claustrophobic and relentless - is far too much for so conventional a theme. (Kirkus Reviews)

Comprised of 150 poems, with a title taken from Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal", this collection skips from the strict form of the sonnet to the freedom of prose poetry. It contains a variety of forms and tones that work together to describe Paris, its people, its writers, its monumental past, and its unsteady response to change.

Koula falls in love with a young man she meets routinely on the tube ride home to her husband and kids. Attracted to older women, the young man introduces her to a different life than she's used to, a life filled with cigarettes, seedy bars and illicit meetings in a rundown flat. This novel charts the emotional fluctuations of these characters.

June Akers Seese's second novel is about books and the people who read them: it's about a rare-book dealer and his mistress, set in that era when words like "mistress" were still used, and recalling the years when Lenny Bruce, Edith Piaf, and Freud might share the same paragraph in an after-hours night spot. Seese writes movingly, tightly, without recourse to adjectives, from the gut and to the gut.

Coleman Dowell's "Southern Gothic" is a novel about sexual repression. Miss Ethel, a spinster school teacher, decides to write what she calls a "perverse tale" about one of her former students, a Kentucky farmer named Jim Cummins. Endowing him with unnaturally large genitals, she spins a tawdry tale of his frustrated relationship with his petite wife. Expressing all the bitterness of "an old woman's revenge," Miss Ethel's tale is nonetheless a sensitive depiction of rural life in the early years of World War II.Dowell's masterful use of the tale-within-a-tale to explore psychological states makes "Too Much Flesh and Jabez" a memorable achievement.

Hino's novels have been compared to the work of J. G. Ballard. Available for the first time in English: his masterpiece Island of Dreams.

This issue of the "Review of Contemporary Fiction" is, for the first time, devoted to--but not devotional toward--contemporary British fiction. Bringing together writers, literary critics, and academics with the aim of challenging fossilized approaches to British contemporary fiction, and attesting to the vitality (or otherwise) of the British novel today, contributors such as Stewart Home, China Mi?ville, Maureen Freely, and Patricia Waugh pose difficult questions about the status of the literary in contemporary Britain--where it's been, and where it's going.

It wasn't until after Dumitru Tsepeneag fled Romania for France in 1971 that he was able to speak frankly about the literary movement that he had helped create.

Memories of My Father Watching TV has as its protagonists television shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience. And in Curtis White's hands, they become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in "Combat", "Highway Patrol", "Bonanza", and other television shows (and one movie) from the 1950s and '60s. Comic in many ways, Memories is finally a sad lament of a father-son relationship that is painful and tortured, displayed against a background of what they most shared, the watching of television, the universal American experience.

Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page is an unconventional study of Robert Coover's work from his early masterpiece The Origin of the Brunists (1966) to the recent Noir (2010). Written in the second person, it offers a self-reflexive investigation into the ways in which Coover's stories often challenge the reader to resist the conventions of sense-making and even literary criticism. By portraying characters lost in surroundings they often fail to grasp, Coover's work playfully enacts a "e;(melo)drama of cognition"e; that mirrors the reader's own desire to interpret and make sense of texts in unequivocal ways. This tendency in Coover's writing is indicative of a larger refusal of the ready-made, of the once-and-for-all or the authoritative, celebrating instead, in its generosity, the widening of possibilities-thus inevitably forcing the reader-critic to acknowledge the arbitrariness and artificiality of her responses.

Mr. West is a writer for whom words are a projectile (if you remember Alley Jaggers) - freewheeling, hectic, rumbustious, percussive and imaginatively prolix. Mandy, his daughter, here glimpsed in a few of her early years, is deaf - also "exceptional" which might mean autistic - and also a hooligan who might be eating nail varnish or drinking from a potty or staring unblinking at 150 watt bulbs or running, everywhere, "heedless of gesticulating and half-felled adults and the sanity of drivers." She has only three words to begin with, baba, more and ish-ish, and Mr. West's "space probe" in the form of an epistle shows her here and there - taking care of a bird, or immersed in a bath, or developing a lexicon of sounds and meanings which will salvage her from the "long emergency" of those who live without words and with a special dependence which is also a special innocence. Some of the earlier parts appeared in the New American Review; a closing chapter relates more directly to those who deal with any disadvantaged child and his naked affection for this helterskelter, demonic creature is everywhere apparent. The book of course is for Mandy who is "as incoherent as daily light, as vulnerable as uranium 235, and (has) an atom where an atom shouldn't be" - it's for others too. (Kirkus Reviews)

Gerald Burns is a leading practitioner of long-lined, thickly textured verse. "These / long lines are long life to us, go back to Kenneth Irby's 'A Set' I saw first in / a flyer from Lawrence, KS where Burroughs chats with Cage whose spitbubbles / may remind us with Zukofsky the heart of the bluebonnet's black. Anyone can learn from anything, " he writes, and as these lines from "For J. R. Here" indicate, Burns has learned much: his long dragnet lines display a lifetime of wide reading and close observation from an astonishing range of subjects.

Imagine, if you can, Freud and Proust sitting down for a chat with Zippy the Pinhead and the marquis de Sade. Then, just when things are starting to get a bit silly, in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe. After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan enters and slips a couch under the narrator, who begins psychoanalyzing himself and his text. Zippy soon prevails, however, and the narrative has turned into a political allegory with characters out of Felix the Cat: a surrealist, graphic (historiographic, geographic, pornographic) version of The Romance of the Rose. Rene Crevel's 1933 novel Putting My Foot in It (Les Pieds dans le plat) has long been considered a classic of the surrealist period, but has never been translated into English until now. Loosely structured around a luncheon attended by thirteen guests, the novel is a surrealistic critique of the intellectual corruption of post-World War I France, especially the capitalist bourgeoisie and its supporter, the Catholic Church. The novel begins with an account of the family of the major character, known as the "Prince of Journalists." This bizarre family - the grandparents a soldier and a sodomized woman, the parents an orphaned epileptic and a hunchback - is matched by Crevel's bizarre syntax and vocabulary: nouns that initially appear legitimate, intact, and respectable, soon decompose into obscene epithets, making other nouns, both common and proper, suspect. The story continues in this way to deconstruct itself on many levels - literary, semantic, psychological, ideological - until the final chapter, when the luncheon degenerates in a way reminiscent of a Bunuel film and all of the novel'scharacters appear in a dirty movie entitled The Geography Lesson, a final metaphor for the corruption of European society between the world wars. This edition also reprints Ezra Pound's well-known essay on Crevel as a foreword, and includes an introduction by Edouard Roditi, who

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century French literature, produced a wide variety of essays and fictions that reflect on the complexities of literary work. His description of writing continually returns to a number of themes, such as solitude, passivity, indifference, anonymity, and absence-forces confronting the writer, but also the reader, the text itself, and the relations between the three. For Blanchot, literature involves a movement toward disappearance, where one risks the loss of self; but such a sacrifice, says Blanchot, is inherent in the act of writing. Approaching Disappearance explores the question of disappearance in Blanchot's critical work and then turns to five narratives that offer a unique reflection on the threat of disappearance and the demands of literature-work by Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Louis-Rene Des Forets, and Nathalie Sarraute.

"Perfect Lives is a seemingly endless and seamless dreamscape of the musicality of the spoken word....It floats in my head like a memorable, ever-changing dream." Spalding Grey

The Review of Contemporary Fiction was founded in 1981 to promote a vision of literary culturethat is not limited to the immediately popular, and to ensure that important world writers outside popular attention continue to be written about and discussed.

Interviews about art and life with contemporary experimental American writers.

Lyrical, provocative, and highly original a groundbreaking book by one of America s smartest young poet-critics.