Bøger udgivet af Dalkey Archive Press

Like many of the great Irish writers before him, Dermot Healy first announced himself as a writer of intricate and innovative short stories. Healy¿s stories are set in small-town Ireland and its rural environs, and in the equally suffocating confines of the Irish expat communities in London. Throughout these texts, Healy demonstrates a deep sense of compassion towards the marginalized and the dispossessed, without ever becoming sentimental or clichéd. The language is earthy and imagistic by turn, and he continually seeks to extend the formal boundaries of the genre.Gathering all of Healy¿s stories together for the first time, this collection includes the long prose-drama ¿Before the Off¿ and Healy¿s final short works, ¿Along the Lines¿ and ¿Images.¿

A professor of semiotics who doubles as a psychologist in Barcelona visits (always in disguise) a prostitute in the early morning hours on Mondays and Thursdays in order to analyze her without her knowing it. The story moves from Barcelona to Mexico to Buenos Aires, but above all it is about Argentina: its recent history, its 30,000 missing children, its stunned middle class, its writers in exile. He Who Searches is multifaceted in structure, combining narrative references to old-fashioned storytelling, realism, psychoanalysis, feminism, politics, and suspense, all of them tinged with a patina of eroticism that reflects a feminist perspective. Ultimately the disguises of the plot--transvestism, transsexualism, differing sexual points of view--become pieces in a puzzle tha can be taken apart to create other figures, other puzzles. It ends with its narrator back in Buenos Aires: "He who searches, finds."

Written when he was only twenty-five, before embarking on the masterpieces that would make him an integral figure in twentieth-century letters, Psalm 44 shows Kis at his most lyrical and unguarded, demonstrating that even in "e;the place of dragons . . . covered with the shadow of death,"e; there can still be poetry. Featuring characters based on actual inmates and warders-including the abominable Dr. Mengele-Psalm 44 is a baring of many of the themes, patterns, and preoccupations Kis would return to in future, albeit never with the same starkness or immediacy.

"A luminous parable...A masterpiece."--The New York Times

Mexico, 1991: Black acid rain falls on "Makesicko City", the most polluted, most populated city in the world. Amid this apocalyptic landscape a prize is being offered to the first child born on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. That child is the narrator of this passionate, savage novel by one of the world's preeminent writers.

Octave Mirbeau, author of The Torture Garden and Diary of a Chambermaid, wrote this scathing novel on the cusp of the twentieth century. Driven mad by modern life, Georges Vasseur leaves for a rest cure, where he encounters corrupt politicians, amnesiac coquettes, cheerfully sadistic killers, imperialist generals, and quack psychiatrists. Hypocrites are eternal, and not much has changed since Mirbeau wrote this acid portrait of his era.

The Barnum Museum is a combination waxworks, masked ball, and circus sideshow masquerading as a collection of short stories. Within its pages, note such sights as: a study of the motives and strategies used by the participants in the game of Clue, including the seduction of Miss Scarlet by Colonel Mustard; the Barnum Museum, a fantastic, monstrous landmark so compelling that an entire town finds its citizens gradually and inexorably disappearing into it; a bored dilettante who constructs an imaginary woman-and loses her to an imaginary man!-and a legendary magician so skilled at sleight-of-hand that he is pursued by police for the crime of erasing the line between the real and the conjured. Ingeniously written and orchestrated, each exhibit in The Barnum Museum will compel you to continue, each story becoming a lure to the next.

"No one is better than William H. Gass at communicating the sublime and rapturous excitement of reading." Washington Post

According to the author, Chapel Road is the book about the childhood of Ondine [. . .] about her brother Valeer-Traleer with his monstrous head wobbling through life this way and that. But the book is about a lot more than that. It is also the story of Louis Paul Boon, an author working on a novel entitled Chapel Road, surrounded by his colorful group of friends. His readers and companions include the painter Tippetotje, who habitually works a naked woman into her paintings, and Johan Janssens, the journalist and poet who is fired from the paper for refusing to agree with the Capitalists, the Socialists or the Ultra-Marxists. Beyond that, Chapel Road includes a retelling of the myth of Reynard the fox and Isengrinus the wolf, a tale that underscores the greed, stupidity, hypocrisy, pride and lust motivating the other characters of the book. Chapel Road is a pool, a sea, a chaos: it is the book of all that can be heard and seen in Chapel Road, from the year 1800-and-something until today.

"Readers cannot but feel the force of what remains one of the most important novels of the post-war years." Times Literary Supplement

Martereau is narrated by a tubercular young man driven by a compulsion to discover what lies behind faades, especially in relation to the adults around him. He's particularly interested in Martereau, his uncle's devoted friend and business associate. All in all, Martereau seems like a trustworthy, benign, self-sufficient man, but under the narrator's intense scrutiny--and Martereau's suspect behavior concerning a shady real-estate deal--his motives seem much more complex and seedy. In a subtle, skillful way, Nathalie Sarraute explores the difference between those who are wealthy and those who pretend to be so, and the manipulative way in which some people get ahead in the world.

Just as Ezra Pound wrote a "Homage to Sextus Propertius" to pay tribute to an important influence, Julian Rios offers in his new novel a "Homage to Ezra Pound" (as the original Spanish edition is subtitled). On November 1, 1972, news of Pound's death in Venice reaches three Spanish bohemians in London, passionate admirers of "il miglior fabbro" ("the better craftsman", as Eliot called him), who decide to honor Pound's memory by visiting various sites in London associated with him. Filled with allusions to Pound's life and works and written in a style similar to Finnegans Wake, Rios's word-mad novel features the same characters from his first novel, Larva: the poet Milalias, his girlfriend Babelle, and their mentor X. Reis, each of whom writes part of the novel: Milalias writes the Joycean main text, Reis (as Herr Narrator) adds commentary on facing pages, and Babelle furnishes maps and photos. Together, they compile the "Parting Shots" at the end, dazzling short stories that expand upon incidents in the main text. Sound confusing? No more so than the Cantos, and Rios is much funnier.

The Last Days is Raymond Queneau's autobiographical novel of Parisian student life in the 1920s: Vincent Tuquedenne tries to reconcile his love for reading with the sterility of studying as he hopes to study his way out of the petite bourgeoisie to which he belongs. Vincent and his generation are contrasted with an older generation of retired teachers and petty crooks, and both generations come under the bemused gaze of the waiter Alfred, whose infallible method of predicting the future mocks prevailing scientific models. Similarly, Queneau's literary universe operates under its own laws, joining rigorous artistry with a warm evocation of the last days of a bygone world.

The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be "e;The Book"e; a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in "e;The Book,"e; adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even ap- pending "e;footnotes"e; in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text-but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read "e;in order,"e; and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator's orderly treatise.

This book reflects the crude reality of rural Spain in Franco's time. It is full of human power and rich in social insight. Cela writes with great detail, but still maintains simplicity.

Graal Flibuste follows the progress of its narrator and his impudent coachman, Brindon, through a fantastical land peopled by strange creatures and stranger potentates, and filled with tall tales, mysteries, crimes, dilemmas, and deities ... not least among whom is the terrible god Graal Flibuste himself.

With an undercurrent of sensual excitement, C line paints an almost unbearably vivid picture of society and the human condition.

"The best comic writer I can think of." S.J. Perelman

"e;Dolly City-a city without a base, without a past, without an infrastructure. The most demented city in the world."e; In the midst of a futuristic-primitive metropolis, the accumulation of all our urban nightmares, Doctor Dolly (certified by the University of Katmandu) finds a newborn baby in a black plastic bag, and decides to become a mother. Overcome by unfamiliar maternal urges, Dolly dispenses with her private lab of rare diseases and turns all her surgical passion onto her son. Ceaselessly cutting and sewing, Dolly is the scalpel-wielding version of the all-too-familiar Jewish Mother archetype, forever operating upon her son with destructive, invasive love. In this grotesque satire of war and the defensive measures taken to survive it, Orly Castel-Bloom, one of Israel's most provocative and original writers, turns her own scalpel upon that most holy of institutions, the myth of motherhood-and its implications in the life of a nation.

Best European Fiction 2018 is a compendium of stories by both established writers and newcomers, ranging from Ireland to Eastern Europe, ripe for the discovery of curious readers around the world.

Dust tells the story of a librarian terrified by the decay of the world around him. With the help of his wife, the librarian wages a futile war against the dust that coats his surroundings until one day Adrian Bravi, or a character very much like the author, arrives on the scene attesting to the very same fears of decay and decline.

La Belle Roumaine tells the story of Ana, a beautiful and bewitching Romanian woman. Shuttling between the capital cities of Europe. The novel follows Ana as she seduces cafe owners, philosophers, and wandering emigrants alike, each receiving a different version of her life story. To some, she's a former nurse, to others, a former spy.

Selected Poems offers a selection of the award-winning poetess Maja Vidmar, culled from a several volumes: Body Distances (1984), Ways of Binding (1988), At the Base (1998) and Presence (2005), which was awarded the Jenko Prize. She is also the winner of the prestigious Preseren Foundation Award, and her work has appeared internationall

In the fourteen stories that make up A Perfect Disharmony, Sebastien Brebel explores the experiences of isolated women and sexually obsessed men while weaving together digression, daydreams, and an accumulation of detail to create a wholly unique approach to the short story form.

In The Circus of Trust, Mark Tardi implicates us all in a pastoral of detritus where "the same indifferent sun" unflinchingly tracks devastation as part of the most routine actions.

From Laurence Sterne to Flann O'Brien and beyond, this anthology presents both highly familiar and relatively obscure writers from across the history of Irish fiction. It offers a fresh perspectives, and a provocative reshuffling of the literary canon.

Matei Brunul was the first Romanian novel to explore the carceral world of the former regime, but it is also a subtle meditation on Heinrich von Kleist's On the Marionette Theatre and the ways in which a totalitarian state and ultimately fiction itself create and manipulate puppets.