Dalkey Archive Press: 193 books

A Day in the Life contains twelve portraits of the vivid and curious realities experienced by a man in his sixties. These stories focus on the tiny paradoxes and everyday ridiculousness we each witness and of which we often take no note. Ranging from a visit to an exhibition of blurry photographs each...

"My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind." Thus begins Rikki Ducornet's brilliant lyric novel about Nicolas...

A madman recalls his first erotic encounter, a priest loses sleep over a heretic, a scholar searches for the anomaly that inspired the Hindu divinities, a spinster hallucinates her own seductions, a pope suckles a wet nurse. Erotic and fiercely funny, these stories range across many centuries and...

Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle,...

When Quentin's lover announces that she's leaving him for his brother and moving to America, he replies spontaneously that he too is leaving the country: but going where? To Tahas, he improvises: "a city whose very name sounded exotic." Following through on this impulse, Quentin soon finds a job exactly...

Recounting surveys the social history of Barcelona and Catalonia, primarily since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The novel follows the youth and education of Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, son of a well-connected, middle-class Catalan family that embraces Franco and Spanish Nationalism. The novel’s...

A musty bar in off-season Cannon Beach, Oregon, provides the setting for an unsuspecting Frenchman’s introduction to the many ways life can go wrong for the unlucky in America. He listens as the barflies nightly recount their tales of woe—betrayal, broken families, financial ruin. Though they seem...

Domingo Notaro’s poems struggle to fix an innocent gaze on a contemporary world that appears more and more fraught with inhumanity and cruelty. They explore themes of exile, fertility, the human body’s connection to the wider cosmos, and the corrupting influence of power. Often literally scattered...

Maximilian Sacheverell Hollingsworth is a counterfeiter, sculptor, filmmaker, sound artist, mystic, and terminal recluse, and over the course of fifty years, making use of a vast stockpile of illegitimate currency, he funds a great range of secret, large-scale art projects throughout London—from explorations...

Sonia meets Knut in an online literary forum and begins a long-distance relationship with him that gradually turns to obsession. Though Sonia needs to create distance when Knut becomes too absorbing, she also yearns for a less predictable existence. Alternately attracted to and repulsed by Knut, Sonia...

The narrator of Volatile Texts: Us Two falls in love with Pierre, the book’s secret protagonist. During their trysts she rediscovers Switzerland, a place where every valley has its own language and every person is translated. It’s a perfect microcosm of Europe—a collection of accents, languages,...

A man and a woman meet in Lisbon and fall in love. City of Ulysses is their story, and the city's love story besides. It is a story that leads readers down multiple paths, through myth and history, reality and fantasy, literature and the visual arts, the past and the present, male and female relations, the crisis of civilisation and the need to reimagine the world.

The Death of Lysanda collects two macabre novellas by one of Israel's greatest poets. In the title piece, we meet Naphtali Noi, a recently divorced proofreader, critic, and "creative" taxidermist, given to hallucinations and soon perhaps to add murder to his hobbies. Ants tells the story of a married...

Micheline Marcom describes her newest novel, A Brief History of Yes—her first since 2008's scathing and erotic The Mirror in the Well—as a "literary fado," referring to a style of Portuguese music that, akin to the American blues, is often melancholic and soulful, and encapsulates the feeling...