Dalkey Archive Press: 193 books

Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, The Truth about Marie revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie—the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continues...

Poetic, comic, obsessed with minutiae, My Beautiful Bus is a welcome dose of serious frivolity at the expense of the contemporary novel. Based on an actual bus trip across France taken by Oulipo-member Jacques Jouet in the late '80s, his fictional reconstruction of the experience twenty years later focuses...

"Dolly City—a city without a base, without a past, without an infrastructure. The most demented city in the world." 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...

With its echoes of fellow Austrian novelist Robert Musil's novella Young Törless, and of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Florjan Lipuš's Young Tjaž, first published in 1972, helped moved the critique of Germanic Europe's fundamental social conformity into the postwar age. But Lipuš, a member of the...

One of the late Carlos Fuentes's final projects, this compendium of his criticism traces the evolution of the Latin American novel from the discovery of America to the present day. Combining historical perspective with personal and often opinionated interpretation, Fuentes gives us a tour from Machado...

In the same spirit as his novels, O'Brien's plays are speculative, inventive, wickedly funny, and a delightful addition to his collected works—now available at last: this volume collects Flann O'Brien's dramatic work into a single volume, including Thirst, Faustus Kelly, and The Insect Play: A Rhapsody...

“Myths do not flow through the pipes of history,” writes Viktor Shklovsky, “they change and splinter, they contrast and refute one another. The similar turns out to be dissimilar.” Published in Moscow in 1970 and appearing in English translation for the first time, Bowstring is a seminal work,...

This intriguing novel brings us to a future in which electricity is scarce and Dublin has gone to seed. Hawk-eyed octogenarian Monk is keeping assorted desperate characters under strict surveillance -- among them Schroeder, recently sacked from Trinity College, now stalking a reporter in the days leading...

The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the "ur-text of postwar fiction" and the "first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”—The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly...

Winner of the 1976 National Book Award, J R is a biting satire about the many ways in which capitalism twists the American spirit into something dangerous, yet pervasive and unassailable. At the center of the novel is a hilarious eleven year old—J R—who with boyish enthusiasm turns a few basic lessons...

The gunning down of her mother in a Richmond street sets young Helen Stockton Defoe on a journey of self-discovery. A physical feature she had first noticed when she was nine years old has made her feel apart and she has quietly capitalized on the privilege, never mind the aura, which surrounds her....

One of the defining texts of twentieth-century Catalan fiction, written by one of its most innovative and cherished writers, Salvador Espriu's Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth is a collection of thirty-four short stories in which the twists and turns of action, character, and place are as winding and...

On a hot, insomniac night at the Hotel Metropol, the novelist Carlos Fuentes steps onto his balcony only to find another man on the balcony next door. The other man asks for news of the social strife turning into revolution in the unnamed city below them. He reveals himself as the 19th-century philosopher...

A memoir and meditation on the themes of separation and silence, The Summer of the Elder Tree was Marie Chaix's first book to appear in fourteen years, and deals with the reasons for her withdrawal from writing and the events in her life since the death of her mother (as detailed in Silences, or a Woman's...