DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS

(P/B) WITTGENSTEIN'S MISTRESS
Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to ...
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(P/B) NORMANCE
A landmark event: The last of Ce'line's novels to be translated into English, this account of an air attack on Paris during World War II shows a hallucinatory, altered space in which human aggressions, appetites, and suspicion come boiling to the surface in preposterous dimensions. A frantic narrator, in search of complicity, relates the story of an apocalyptic ballet that leaves reason and order in shreds, as bombing turns Montmartre into an underworld teeming with dirty deeds, while our guide resists the inhumanity with animal desperatio...
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(P/B) SOME THING BLACK
In 1983 Jacques Roubaud's wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem ("Nothing"), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud - poet, novelist, mathematician - composed a series of prose poems, a collection that is a profound mediation on the experience of death, the devastation it brings to the lover who goes on living, and the love that remains. Despite the universality of this experience, no other writer has so devoted himself to exploring an...
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(P/B) SUICIDE
Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel - it is, in a sense, the author's own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend - perhaps real, perhaps fictional - more than twenty years earlier, Leve gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favor of oblivion. Gradually, through Leve's casually obsessive, pointill...
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(P/B) KOULA
At its heart, Koula is the story of an improbable love affair. It is the story of Koula, a middle-aged married woman who falls in love with a young man that she meets routinely on the subway ride home to her husband and kids. Attracted to older women (in fact, he occasionally accepts money to sleep with them), the young man in question introduces Koula to a different life than she's used to, a life filled with cigarettes, seedy bars, and illicit meetings in a rundown apartment. Filmed for Greek television, Koula is a stylistically bold boo...
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(P/B) THOSE BARREN LEAVES
Aldous Huxley spares no one in his ironic, piercing portrayal of a group gathered in an Italian palace by the socially ambitious and self-professed lover of art, Mrs. Aldwinkle. Here, Mrs. Aldwinkle yearns to recapture the glories of the Italian Renaissance, but her guests ultimately fail to fulfill her na?ve expectations. Among her entourage are: a suffering poet and reluctant editor of the Rabbit Fanciers' Gazette who silently bears the widowed Mrs. Aldwinkle's desperate advances; a popular novelist who records every detail of her affair...
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(P/B) THE TUNNEL
Thirty years in the making, William Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive historical study, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, finds himself writing a novel about his own life instead of the introduction to his magnum opus. The Tunnel meditates on history, hatred, unhappiness, and, above all, language. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) I'D LIKE
The thirteen short stories that make up Amanda Michalopoulou's I’d Like read like versions of an unwritten novel: each riveting tale resonates with the others, and yet a sense of their connectedness remains tantalizingly out of grasp. Instead, we are presented with a kaleidoscope of characters and events, signs and emotions, linked by the uncanny repetition of certain details: blossoming almond trees, red berets, bleeding feet, accidents small and large. Michalopoulou’s characters are both patently fictitious and profoundly real, as they m...
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(P/B) A NOVEL OF THANK YOU
This is the first paperback edition of one of Stein's most revealing novels. Written in 1925-26 (but not published until 1958), it is Stein's midcareer assessment of herself, her writing, and her relationships, composed in the unique style for which she is celebrated. In place of a traditional narrative, Stein explores the nature of narrative, its possibilities, the various genres (historical novels, the novel of manners, adventure stories) available to the writer, the conventions of novel-writing, and the novelist's relations to her mater...
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(P/B) HEARTSNATCHER
Vian's final and most serious novel begins with an elegant psychiatrist arriving in a remote town, where he helps deliver the triplets of a woman whose husband is locked up in a bedroom because she abhors him for causing the pain and discomfort of her pregnancy. As the triplets age and Clementine becomes hysterically obsessed with their safety, Timortis spends most of his time searching for patients (he finds only a neutered cat to identify with) and visiting the bizarre village nearby where townspeople attack the local priest at their wee...
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(H/B) ARVO PART IN CONVERSATION
This collection of essays and interviews is an ideal guide to the work and thought of one of the world's greatest and most original living composers. In Enzo Restagno's extensive interview, Part gives an intimate description of his work and life in Soviet Estonia, his emigration, his artistic odyssey, and his worldview. Then, Arvo Part's compositional technique is the focus of a musicological essay by Leopold Brauneiss. Finally, Saale Kareda explores the spiritual aspects of the composer's approach to his works. Two acceptance speeches, de...
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(P/B) HYPOTHERMIA
Shocking, erudite, and affecting, these twenty-odd short stories, "micro-novels," and vignettes span a vast territory, from Mexico City to Washington, D.C. to the late nineteenth-century Adriatic to the blood-soaked foothills of California's Gold Rush country, introducing an array of bewildering characters: a professor of Latin American literature who survives a tornado and, possibly, an orgy; an electrician confronting the hardest wiring job of his career; a hapless garbage man who dreams of life as a pirate; and a prodigiously talented P...
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(P/B) BOUVARD AND PECUCHET
Although unfinished during his lifetime, Bouvard and Pecuchet is now considered to be one of Flaubert's greatest masterpieces. In his own words, the novel is "a kind of encyclopedia made into farce . . . A book in which I shall spit out my bile." At the center of this book are Bouvard and Pecuchet, two retired clerks who set out in a search for truth and knowledge with persistent optimism in light of the fact that each new attempt at learning about the world ends in disaster. In the literary tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, thi...
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(P/B) THE BOOK OF JOKES
Imagine a universe where every joke you've ever heard is solid, real, and occasionally dangerous - and all happening, one after the other, to the same small group of people. Detailing a series of filthy and ludicrous episodes in the life of a single family, saddled with a super-eccentric, sexually rapacious father, The Book of Jokes tells the story of the youth and education of a bland young boy doomed to record - in an incongruously serious, autobiographical mode - all the ridiculous incidents befalling his household. With their lives dic...
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(P/B) CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN POETRY
Prominent Moscow poet Evgeny Bunimovich selected representative work from forty-four living Russian poets born after 1945 to be translated and published in this bilingual edition. The collection ranges from the mordant post-Soviet irony of Igor Irteniev to the fresh voices of poets like Marianna Geide and Anna Russ - young women just beginning to make themselves heard. The book includes the work of Booker Prize winner Sergey Gandlevsky and several winners of the Andrey Bely Prize and Brodsky Fellowships. Most of these poems, and many of th...
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(P/B) DISTANT SOUND
A composer who has already given up composing - because of his inability to notate the music of the spheres - becomes increasingly fixated on capturing a mysterious, eerie, distant sound, which he soon equates with all the things he desires most: the perfect woman, the perfect city, the perfect work of art. Obsessed with his impossible quest, the man breaks out of the asylum and begins a series of comic, dreamlike, and ultimately haunting adventures as he tries to locate the source of the sound that consumes him . . . and instead finds the...
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(H/B) MAN + DOG
Painter and art historian Nick Wadley - who has curated exhibitions on Kurt Schwitters, Franciszka Themerson, Gaberbocchus Press, and Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi - here turns his attentive and whimsical eye to one of life's most essential relationships. With deceptive simplicity, and more than a little charm, Wadley's thoughtful drawings and watercolors depict the age-old relationship between men and dogs in surprising and often hilarious ways. Each illustration in this beautiful little book offers a different take on this infinitely varied rel...
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(P/B) EROS THE BITTERSWEET
A book about love as seen by the ancients, Eros is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?", Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view and styles, transcending the constraints of the scholarly exercise for an evocative and lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos William's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue...
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(P/B) CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA
Christ versus Arizona turns on the events in 1881 that surrounded the shootout at the OK Corral, where Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Virgil and Morgan Earp fought the Clantons and the McLaurys. Set against a backdrop of an Arizona influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the westward expansion of the United States, the story is a bravura performance by the 1989 Nobel Prize-winning author. A monologue by the naive, unreliable, and uneducated Wendell L. Espana, the book weaves together hundreds of characters and a torrent of interconnected a...
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(P/B) WHAT DOES MRS FREEMAN WANT?
While lying on a beach in Greece with an accommodating female companion, the narrator of this novel, Petros Abatzoglou (also the name of the author), describes the peculiar life story and marriage of Mrs. Freeman. By turns digressive, tender, humorous, and pedantic, the narrator interrupts his monologue only when he wants something from his companion, usually another drink. In relating the story of Mrs. Freeman - a fiercely independent woman - the narrator exemplifies almost all the characteristics of a self-centered male. Obsessed with fo...
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