Böcker utgivna av Dalkey Archive Press

Where the Air Is Clear, Carlos Fuentes's first novel, is an unsparing portrayal of Mexico City's upper class. Departing from a traditional linear narrative, Fuentes constructs his novel around a series of encounters with members of this world, including Federico Robles, an ambitious self-made millionaire; Rodrigo Pola, a writer whose father was executed in the Mexican Revolution; and Norma Larragoiti, a social climber striving to erase her humble past. At the center of these events is Ixca Cienfuegos, an enigmatic figure who views the dramas enacted around him with unusual clarity, and who, with the aid of an Indian priestess, plots the destruction of the group. Overlaying Mexican myths onto contemporary settings, Fuentes shows that even the rich and powerful must succumb to the indomitable spirit of Mexico, which undermines all institutions and shapes all destinies.

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.

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.

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.

This is, in brief, the story of a swindler, a Georgian Felix Krull, or perhaps a cynical Don Quixote, named Kvachi Kvachantiradze: womanizer, cheat, perpetrator of insurance fraud, bank-robber, associate of Rasputin, filmmaker, revolutionary, and pimp. Though originally denounced as pornographic, Kvachi's tale is one of the great classics of twentieth-century Georgian literature--and a hilarious romp to boot.

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.

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 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.

The Irish Sea meditation on the paradox of nostalgia, which always seems to pine for what never was. A fevered search for order through writing, of truth through literature, of the nodal point where life and literature intersect. A strange personal gallery curated by a razor-sharp reader and his other, unknown self.

The Dogs of Inishere collects stories from across Alannah Hop-kin's thirty-year career as a fiction and travel writer. The stories presented here move from adolescence to middle age, sensitive always to the particular social, emotional, and intellectual challenges of the different phases of a life.

The narrator of the novel has just been released from an extended stay at a psychiatric hospital where he developed an obsession with Cathie, a young woman. Desire drives him from his bedroom one night in search of a telephone, which leads him two floors below into the apartment of his neighbor, Sauvage, whom with he develops a bizarre relationship

When Kjersti A. Skomsvold was seventeen years old and about to start engineering studies at college, she found herself almost unable to move. "Laid out like a relic" - she begins to compose a novel on Post-it notes that she sticks on the wall above her bed.

Mixing the most private fragments of theirfamilial saga with the turbulent recent history of post-Yu-goslav transition, the book connects seemingly divid-ed fields of private and public and suggests a strong linkbetween the two facets of trauma: individual and collective.

When Albert Jackson, a middle-aged school teacher, catches a glimpse of the infinite universe and his own tiny insignificance he cannot shake himself free of regret for a life all but squandered. In a blind and demented attempt to salvage something from his life, he sets off, half-lucidly, on a mission to reclaim life, to live it on his terms.