Dalkey Archive Press imprint: 193 books

A middle-aged couple takes in a prurient young woman picked up from the side of the road; a single mother struggles against the hostile feelings she harbors towards her precocious son; a man has alternative fantasies of domination and submission involving a fellow commuter; a hotel room is booked by...

A major, never before translated novel by the author of Mujông / The Heartless—often called the first modern Korean novel—*The Soil* tells the story of an idealist dedicating his life to helping the inhabitants of the rural community in which he was raised. Striving to influence the poor farmers...

This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting...to roam the world since Candide." "A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly inventive (and, OK, yes, long-winded) this satire...

Ishmael Reed's sixth novel depicts a zany, bizarre, and all-too-believable future where mankind's fate depends upon a jolly old gent named St. Nicholas and a Ristorasta dwarf named Black Peter, who together wreak mischievous havoc on Wall Street and in the Oval Office. This offbeat, on-target social...

Considered an eccentric in the traditional Korean literary world, Jung Young-moon's short stories have nonetheless won numerous readers both in Korea and abroad, most often drawing comparisons to Kafka. Adopting strange, warped, unstable characters and drawing heavily on the literature of the absurd,...

Complex and hauntingly beautiful, Lygia Fagundes Telles's most acclaimed novel is a journey into the inner lives of three young women, each revealing her secrets and loves, each awaiting a destiny tied to the colorful and violent world of modern Brazil. Sensual and wealthy Lorena dreams of a tryst with...

Taking Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins as its primary subjects, Surface Tension reveals how these later Victorian poets repeatedly imagine the aesthetic moment—charged, variegated, intensely focused—as capable of birthing a new, and newly redemptive, culture. Turning...

Carrer Marsala, which won prizes from the City of Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya—neither of which Bauçà bothered to accept—is a relentless monologue delivered by a paranoid hypochondriac obsessed with dental hygiene, sex, and his own squalid rooms in Barcelona. In The Old Man, the...

A cryptic, self-negating series of notes for an unfinished work of fiction, this astonishing book is made up of ideas for characters and plot points, anecdotes and tales, literary references both real and invented, and populated by an array of fictional authors and their respective literary cliques,...

The nineteenth-century founding of "free settlements" in the Americas serves as a starting point for the new novel by popular Czech author Patrik Ouredník. Simultaneously satiric and philosophical, The Opportune Moment, 1855, opens with an Italian anarchist's missive to his noble former mistress, an...

Moving back and forth between detailed explanation and personal anecdotes, Gérard Gavarry's Making a Novel is partly a memoir of a writer's life and partly a memoir of his work, showing us how every story, no matter how well-planned, could always have been written countless other ways.

This 900-page survey of world literature, "From Confucius' Day to Our Own" (as the subtitle reads), was the last book written by Ford Madox Ford, one of the seminal figures of the modernist period. Written for general readers rather than scholars and first published in 1938, The March of Literature is...

Two minutes into the second act, there is a knock on Nicolas Boehlmer's dressing-room door, just as he's smoking his last cigarette before having to go back on stage . . . and, without thinking, he says, “Come in,” still in character. He quickly finds himself bound, gagged, and stripped by a man...

Finnley Wren: His Notions and Opinions, Together with a Haphazard History of His Career and Amours in These Moody Years, as Well as Sundry Rhymes, Fables, Diatribes and Literary Misdemeanors stands as one of the greatest American responses to the thrown gauntlet that is Tristram Shandy. An innovative,...