Bøger udgivet af Dalkey Archive Press

The Galley Slave is a tour de force of historical fiction centered on the misadventures of an Everyman of indeterminate origins named Johan Ot, who is part picaresque anti-hero, part Josef K."Jancar’s 1978 novel (part of Dalkey Archive’s Slovenian Literature series) is a vivid, dense, atmospheric tale set in the brutal medieval age of the Inquisition. A hapless stranger in a nameless land flees before the “plague commissars,” who put up roadblocks and interrogate travelers, compel him to take refuge in a town where it seems that his every move is being watched. The land is overrun by forces of suspicion and terror, and the stranger, Johan Ot, is likely hiding some darkness from his own past, revealed in nocturnal ravings that alert the neighbors to a guilty conscience—or an inner demon.'Darkness and flames and blood everywhere, with people always concealing evil intentions,' Jancar narrates in the foreboding voice of the omniscient moral police. The net of the Inquisition tightens: Ot is captured, interrogated, and brutally tortured until he confesses to having 'some sort of devil... in me.' Excommunicated from the Church, he vanishes, or is perhaps spirited away by an underground apostate brotherhood, resurfacing amid renegades plotting to bring down the 'snot-nosed little emperor,' Leopold. Yet the doomed Ot is again captured and sentenced to become a galley slave 'for the rest of his natural life.' Jancar depicts the insidious gloom of this society with the intimacy of someone acutely aware of how the repressive tentacles of an authoritarian regime can rob individuals of their destiny." —Publishers Weekly

Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine is a masterpiece of modern domestic life, a comic novel of closeness and difficulty, miscommunication and stubborn resolve. "Forty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas . . ."So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as “Mrs. Unguentine,” the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas together, alone on a giant land-covered barge of their own devising. They tend their gardens, raise a child, invent an artificial forest—all the while steering clear of civilization.Rarely has a book so perfectly registered the secret solitude of marriage, how shared loneliness can result in a powerful bond.

"Lesbianism, its flories and sorows, is the subject and quest of this marvelously perverse sentimental journey by Nightwood's author... A striking lesbian manifesto and a deft parody." —Library JournalBlending fiction, myth, and revisionary parody and accompanied by the author's delightful illustrations, Ladies Almanack is a brilliant modernist composition and arguably the most audacious lesbian text of its time. While the book pokes fun at the wealthy Paris expatriates who were Barnes' literary contemporaries and remains controversial today, it seems to have delighted its cast of characters, which was also the first audience. Arranged by month, it records the life and loves of Dame Evangeline Musset in a robust style taken from Shakespeare and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Published for the first time in decades, this edition features original illustrations by the author.

First reissue in more than aa decade; Reccently retired from Brown University, Maso has a strong cult following; Predecessor to lyrical, feminist, experimental works of today

Icy, intricate, and unflinching, Edy Poppy's Coming. Apart. captures the zeniths and nadirs of the human experience. With the stark, poetic voice that garnered her collection Anatomy. Monotony. cult status in Norway and abroad, the writer-performance artist offers a vision of sexuality and alienation unlike any other. Coming. Apart. is Poppy's first collection of short fiction, and her second to be published in English. Beautifully translated from the original Norwegian by Dr. May-Brit Akerholt, her stories explore moments of labyrinthine intimacy with a cold intensity that proves impossible to forget.

"Torrential and dreamlike, Mauro Javier Câardenas' novel unfurls into a layered, poignant, and unflinching portrait of how family separations have impacted the minds of Latin American deportees in a technology-bound 21st century."--Provided by publisher.

Grotesque, deconstructive, and absolutely genius, Vladimir Sorokin's short story collectionDispatches from the District Committee is a revelatory, offbeat portrait of Soviet life beyond thepropaganda and state-sponsored realism.Celebrated-and censored-for its political satire, literary irreverence, and provocative themes,his work has been recognized across the world for its scathing, darkly humorous commentaryon political and cultural oppression in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. Dispatches from the District Committee brings together stories from Sorokin's incendiary 1992collection The First Subotnik/My First Working Saturday. Skillfully translated by Max Lawton,these stories remain subversive classics, and increasingly relevant in a post-truth informationage.

"True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by acclaimed playwright and poet Dan O'Brien concerning trauma, both political and personal. The Body of an American speaks to a moment in history when a single, stark photograph--of a US Army Ranger dragged from the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter through the streets of Mogadishu--altered the course of global events. In a story that ranges from Rwanda to Afghanistan to the Canadian Arctic, O'Brien dramatizes the ethical and psychological haunting of journalist Paul Watson. In The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage the playwright applies journalistic principles to an investigation of his childhood unhappiness, as he searches for the reason why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more he learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his sense of self is shaken by rumors regarding his true parentage. The trilogy concludes with New Life, a tragicomedy that finds Paul Watson in Syria and the playwright in treatment for cancer, while together they endeavor to sell a TV series about journalists in war zones. New Life explores the paradox of war as entertainment, and dares to dream of healing after catastrophe. These three gritty yet poetic plays stand as a testament to the value of witnessing, honoring, and perhaps transcending the struggles of living."--

Exploring sanity and insanity, truth and untruth, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease is Svetislav Basara's unblinking and unforgettable deconstruction of the Soviet psyche.Told as an eclectic collection of appropriated testimonies, treatises, missives, and police files, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease follows the progression of the contagion's patient zero, a Soviet citizen (sometimes) named Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, as he ascends from hellish health to the sacred illness. Hailed as one of Serbia's most influential living writers, Svetislav Basara's scathing, irreverent critiques of authoritarianism have twice won him Serbia's prestigious NIN Award. In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson's Disease, Basara lives up to this reputation with a book as formally ambitious as it is intellectually sophisticated. His blend of grotesque absurdism and wry humor evokes the paranoid, vexing worlds of Franz Kafka's novels and the meta-textual assemblages of Paul Auster. Told from a colorful range of perspectives, the novel is a multifaceted, crystalline account of truth, lies, and history, a sprawling case study of humans in an inhuman society.

"Antâonio Lobo Antunes's twenty-fifth novel, Commission of Tears (2011, Comissäao das Lâagrimas) is set during the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002). Angola attained official independence on November 11, 1975 and, while the stage was set for transition, a combination of ethnic tensions and international pressures rendered Angola's hard-won victory problematic. As with many post-colonial states, Angola was left with both economic and social difficulties which translated into a power struggle between the three predominant liberation movements. The People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), formed in December of 1956 as an offshoot of the Angolan Communist Party, had as its support base the Ambundu people and was largely supported by other African countries, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. In this novel, Antunes delves into this traumatic period of Angola's history through the fragmented memories and dreams of a broken woman. The author drew from the story of the commander of the female battalion MPLA who was tortured and killed following the state coup of May 1977. It is said that while they tortured her she did not stop singing. This is the story of Cristina, admitted in to a psychiatric clinic in Lisbon. In her torrent of memories, dialogues and traumatic episodes, Cristina remembers her early childhood in Africa, at the time when everything inside her head was intertwined with her father's voice, who was a former Black priest and became one of the torturers of the "Commission of Tears." Cristina's white mother, a cabaret dancer imported from Lisbon to entertain Portuguese farmers in Angola, marries the Black ex-priest because she finds herself pregnant with Cristina by the man who exploits her, the cabaret manager. The long, twisting narrative weaves together the three voices of daughter, father, and mother as they recall the terrors of their life in Angola, and their own suffering. Their personal tragedies, scarred by racism and abuse, mirror those of the country that is being torn asunder around them"--

Radical and racy, Robert Coover‿s Coover Stories is a new collection of incisive, inventive works from the postmodern master.When Robert Coover‿s first collection Pricksongs & Descants came out in 1969, his shortstory “The Babysitter,â€? took the literary world by storm. Described as “metafiction at its best,â€?his work is taught in classrooms more than half a century later, no less relevant‿andirreverent‿than at its debut. Provocative, experimental, and biting, Coover‿s darkly satiricwriting has pushed the avant-garde to its limits and sired a generation of postmodernists. Coover Stories is the fourth short story collection from Robert Coover. Drawing on decades of experience, the William FaulknerFoundation Award‿winning writer continues to shock and engage his readers with his wit, style,and keen critical eye for the paradoxes of modernity.

In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman who answers as "Mom." Billy spends his time fantasizing a future in which he will be famous, perhaps in the United States as a movie star, or as a psychiatrist, or as a doctor to blondes with breast enlargements, or as the author of "Billy England's Book of Pain." Together they both support and torture each other, barely able to remember their pasts but intent on forging a future that will bring them happiness and reunite them with the ever-elusive Mom. Billy and Girl are every boy and girl reeling from the pain of their childhoods, forgetting what they need to forget, inventing worlds they think will be better, but usually just prolonging nightmares as they begin to create--or so it seems--alternative personalities that will allow them to survive and conquer and punish. In the end, the reader is as bewildered as Billy and Girl--have they found Mom and a semblance of family, or are, they completely out of control and ready to explode?

Confined to a prison cell, thrice-murderer Pascual Duarte recounts his journey from a violent childhood to a life of pain and misfortune; juxtaposing tableaus of country poverty against scenes of bare brutality, Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela crafts a powerful meditation on cruelty and anomie. The Family of Pascual Duarte follows his upbringing in the poor Spanish province of Extremadura to his eventual imprisonment—and impending death sentence. Death permeates Duarte’s world: his father’s grotesque death to rabies, his young brother’s drowning in an oil vat, and the loss of his children. But it is his wife’s sudden death that condemns him to the darkest path when, losing all faith and driven by blind revenge, he kills her souteneur. Now an alien to the world around him, Pascual Duarte resigns himself to his bloodied fate—yet never gives up his search for peace.Camilo José Cela has been recognized as one of the pioneers of Spanish literary realism, and his masterwork The Family of Pascual Duarte proves the power of his prose. The novel, which birthed the transgressive and groundbreaking tremendismo movement, roils with emotion and unflinching inhumanity, painting the Spanish countryside in bloodshed, eroticism, and an unshakeable feeling of grief. Blending the political with the personal with the philosophic, the result is an unparalleled exploration of the fraught relationship between man and society, and the past’s inescapable hold on the present.

Candid and unfettered, Sven Popovic's Last Night is a playfully existential meditation on youth and the search for the self. Acclaimed in his native Croatia, Popovic's unique blend of intimacy and contemplation has garnered him a following in the alternative literary scene of Zagreb-and beyond. With an intellectualism that never takes itself too seriously, an unaffected fluidity of form, and a keen eye for the smallest, strangest moments that color our lives, his stories weave an offbeat tapestry of urban life. Last Night is the first short story collection from Sven Popovic, whose writing was previously featured in Dalkey Archive Press's Best European Fiction 2017, and his first full work to be released in English. Slickly translated by Vinko Zgaga, Popovic's sometimes-dreamlike, sometimes-conversational vignettes offer a shrewd, original outlook on life's absurdities.

The tenth child of a fantasist mother and an absent millionaire, Matty Crickholme is growinginto a sexually bewildered, neurotic young man. Through the collected paraphernalia of anunconventional childhood, Alex Kovacs creates a quirky, kaleidoscopic rumination on family andhow it shapes us—for better or worse.Sexology follows the strange, wonderful, fluxional world of the Crickholmes, wherenonconformism is celebrated, siblings form autonomous republics, and eccentricity reignssupreme. The Crickholme siblings youthful exploits take them on myriad paths: a hermeticpsychic, a dog trainer, an ice cream purveyoress, a missing person. Between memories,factoids, letters, and old photographs, Matty investigates how their offbeat rearing made themthe adults they became, and how fantasy and convention collide.Alex Kovacs’s writings have received acclaim for their invention, wit, and astute observations ofour absurd world. Sexology brings this intellectual playfulness to the story of the Crickholmeswith a unique prose that evokes the complex emotional landscapes of W.G. Sebald’s novels andthe sometimes-gentle, sometimes-devastating style of Susanna Clarke. The result is anentrancing, incomparable medley.

"Once a fãeted literary figure, the former lover of B-list movie star Lucida, but now derelict, incontinent, asexual, ageing poet Harold Lime turns his back on material modernity, withdrawing to a basement in the university town of Cambridge, England. But human connections will prove difficult to sever completely, and he is drawn out of himself by a fox hunt saboteur ("the sab woman"), with whom he forms a poignant, uneasy relationship and who acts as his mutual confessor. In the isolation of his basement, Harold Lime obsessively listens to Mahler, whose nine symphonies, unfinished tenth, and Earth Songs, each corresponding to a separate chapter of this innovative poetic novel, will reawaken the sensitivities he has tried to erase, taking him back to his Australian childhood and youth, fostering a growing awareness of intertwined body and soul, of commitment and connectedness, of the ecology of rootedness and unrootedness in an unjust world"--

While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary novel born of this constraint, and although the brilliant and playful letters contained here cover everything from observations about contemporary German and Russian life to theories of art and literature, nonetheless every one of them is indirectly dedicated to the one topic they are all required to avoid: their author's own unrequited love.

Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train.During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakako are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes.Marshland is a revelation of modern Japanese history and culture, a major novel from the hand of a master well-known in his own country, though only the second to be translated into English: the wealth of Kaga’s work in fiction remains to be discovered by the Anglophone world.

This novel is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel¿a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American life. Marguerite Young¿s method is poetic, imagistic, incantatory; in prose of extraordinary richness she tests the nature of her characters¿and the nature of reality.Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is written with oceanic music moving at many levels of consciousness and perception; but the toughly fibred realistic fabric is always there, in the happenings of the narrative, the humor, the precise details, the definitions of the characters. Miss MacIntosh herself, who hails from What Cheer, Iowa, and seems downright and normal, with an incorruptible sense of humor and the desire to put an end to phantoms; Catherine Cartwheel, the opium lady, a recluse who is shut away in a great New England seaside house and entertains imaginary guests; Mr. Spitzer, the lawyer, musical composer and mystical space traveler, a gentle man, wholly unsure of himself and of reality; his twin brother Peron, the gay and raffish gambler and virtuoso in the world of sports; Cousin Hannah, the horsewoman, balloonist, mountain-climber and militant Boston feminist, known as Al Hamad through all the seraglios of the East; Titus Bonebreaker of Chicago, wild man of God dreaming of a heavenly crown; the very efficient Christian hangman, Mr. Weed of the Wabash River Valley; a featherweight champion who meets his equal in a graveyard¿these are a few who live with phantasmagorical vividness in the pages of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.The novel touches on many aspects of life¿drug addiction, woman¿s suffrage, murder, suicide, pregnancy both real and imaginary, schizophrenia, many strange loves, the psychology of gambling, perfectionism; but the profusion of this huge book serves always to intensify the force of the central question: ¿What shall we do when, fleeing from illusion, we are confronted by illusion?¿ What is real, what is dream? Is the calendar of the human heart the same as that kept by the earth? Is it possible that one may live a secondary life of which one does not know?In every aspect, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands by itself¿in the lyric beauty of its prose, its imaginative vitality and cumulative emotional power. It is the work of a writer of genius.

In The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein sets out to tell "a history of a family's progress," radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships. As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America.

Dead as Doornails, first published in 1976, brings back into print a true classic of Irish memoir. Anthony Cronin’s account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colorful as one would expect from an intimate of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh l, and Myles na Gopaleen (aka Flann O’Brien); but it is also a clear-eyed and bracing antidote to the kitsch that passes for literary history and memory in the Dublin of today. Cronin writes with remarkable subtlety of the frustrations and pathologies of this generation: the excess of drink, the shortage of sex, the insecurity and begrudgery, the painful limitations of cultural life, and the bittersweet pull of exile. We read of a comical sojourn in France with Behan, and of Cronin’s years in London as a literary editor and a friend of the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross and the painters Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. The generation chronicled by Cronin was one of wasted promise. That waste is redressed through the shimmering prose of Dead as Doornails, earning its place in Irish literary history alongside the best works of Behan, Kavanagh, and Myles.

This scrupulously edited and annotated collection throws extraordinary light on the genesis, composition and publication of The Ginger Man, a masterpiece that censors and critics could not stop, going on to sell 50 million copies worldwide. The riveting backstory of the classic novel set in post-war bohemian Dublin is finally told in 220 intimate and revealing letters between author J.P. Donleavy and his Trinity College Dublin friends Gainor Steven Crist and Arthur Kenneth Donoghue, inspirations for the main characters, Sebastian Dangerfield and Kenneth O’Keefe.Spanning the late 1940s to the early 1980s, the letters create a compelling narrative, told in three distinct voices, that reads like Donleavy fiction – hilarious, reflective and brawling by turn, always revealing of these colourful individuals, the special time and place they shared and what came after as they ventured into the wider world. Among the many interesting people popping up in the letters are: Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Trinity pals James Hillman and George Roy Hill, Maurice Girodias who published The Ginger Man becoming embroiled in a 21-year legal battle with the author, Seymour Lawrence who published Donleavy’s second novel and lost his job because of it. Making appearances are film director John Huston who took Donleavy fishing and ‘a pop star’ (Mick Jagger) who failed in his attempt to be inconspicuous at a Donleavy party. This unique collection is richly illustrated with period photos and facsimiles of letters and pages from the first draft of what became The Ginger Man. Mariana Crist contributed a loving reminiscence of her father. She presents the real man behind the fictional character. She also recalls being babysat by Brendan Behan, making her the only toddler then permitted in the pubs of Dublin. The Ginger Man Letters is essential reading for fans of the author and his masterpiece, as well as literary scholars and those interested in bohemian Dublin days and is sure to attract a new generation of readers.