The Dedalus Book of Estonian Literature offers a wide-ranging selection of fiction from the end of the nineteenth century until the present day, including work by Estonias classic and most important contemporary authors. This is the most important selection of Estonian fiction to have appeared in English and will be essential reading for anyone wanting to gain an idea of Estonian Literature and for the many American visitors to Estonia. Estonia is one of the smallest and least populated countries in the European Union. It has a population of about 1.4 million. For most of its history it has been part of its larger neighbours, Sweden and Russia. It regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.It is really in the nineteenth- century that Estonian Literature develops and a prose tradition established. This anthology features work by significant authors in this period such as Eduard Vilde and Juhan Liiv and extends to the modern day with contributions from leading contemporary authors such as Peeter Sauter and Eeva Park. Estonias most famous and widely-translated author is Jaan Kross, who should have become the first Estonian author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is represented in the anthology by Uncle (1990).
This is the eighth volume in Dedaluss highly acclaimed European literary fantasy series and follows volumes from Austrian, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. During the nineteenth-century, Belgian literature was still largely written in the language of education, French. Then the Flemings, who inhabit the northern half of Belgium, became aware of the value of their own language, whose standardised form is, to all intents and purposes, Dutch. Modern Flemish literature was born. This anthology incorporates fantasy stories from the early twentieth century to the present day. The types of fantasy are various: horror, mysticism and magical realism being the dominant ones. One of the early authors is Felix Timmermans who started out with horror stories, but later ended up writing his inimitable Vitalist novels. Two magic realist authors stand out: Johan Daisne and Hubert Lampo. And horror is well represented by several authors including Hugo Claus, Hugo Raes and Ward Ruyslinck - all household names in Flanders. Interesting new authors include Annelies Verbeke and Peter Verhelst.
Avatars and acolytes Byron, De Quincey, Wilde and more, are here, all at their unwholesome best. English Decadence was not a polite response to French invention, but the hothouse blossoming of long, indigenous researches into the perverse. Like Imperial Rome, England could hardly subdue and rule the globe without becoming corrupt. The Romantics tried rebellion, but amid Victorian industry, terminally-fatigued Decadents concerned themselves with cultivating their addiction to luxury and sensation. This is the most wide-ranging, important collection of English decadent writing ever published.
The story revolves round the angelic and mysterious hermaphrodite Seraphita who seems to inspire love in all she meets. The battle for her affection leads Wilf and Minna past earthly knowledge and into the deeper mysteries of life. Set against the rugged landscape of 18th century Norway, Seraphita is the most unusual and bizarre novel in Balzac's Comedie Humaine.
A complex and ambitious novel which centres on the life of the Elizabethan magus, John Dee, in England, Poland and Prague, as it intertwines past and present, dreams and visions, myth and reality in a world of the occult, culminating in the transmutation of physical reality into a higher spiritual existence. John Dee, through his 20th century descendant, is led by the Green Angel to the 'Other Side of the Mirror'. From the erotically alluring Assja Shotokalungin (in all her incarnations), the pliant Jane, the mischievous Queen Elizabeth 1 to the earless charlatan Kelley, the truly grotesque Bartlett Greene and the sinister Emperor Rudolph1, John Dee heads a cast which lingers in the mind long after the book has been put down.
The Architect of Ruins is considered one of the masterpieces of 20th century German fiction. An archetypal Dedalus novel with its literary game-playing and story-within-a-story technique. It has the labyrinthine brilliance of Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Four men led by the Architect of Ruins construct an Armagedon shelter, in the shape of a giant cigar, so that when the end of the world comes they can enter eternity in the right mood, whilst playing a Schubert string quartet. They amuse themselves by telling stories, which take on a life of their own, with walk on parts for Faust, Don Juan, da Ponte, and G.K. Chesterton etc as the narrative flashes back and forth between the Dark Ages and the Modern Day, like a literary Mobius strip. Although for European readers it will call to mind Jan Potocki's The Saragossa Manuscript, for English readers the wit and humour of The Architect of Ruins will make it read like a 20th century sequel to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
"An intricate, finely crafted and polished tale, The Weeping Woman brings magic-realism to the dimly lit streets of Prague. Through the squares and alleys a woman walks, the embodiment of human pity, sorrow, death. Everyone she passes is touched by her, and Germain skilfully creates an intense mood and feel in her attempt to produce a spiritual map of Prague." The Observer The figure of this bereft woman develops into a memorable symbol: her sudden appearances - on a bridge,in a square, in a room - haunt the book like history, moved to tears." Robert Winder in The Independent "a haunting classic" Madeleine Kingsley in She Magazine
Cruelty, corruption, sensuality, desperation and death: the sensationalism and morbid pessimism that characterized French decadence in the late nineteenth century quickly attracted converts throughout Europe, including Russia. Here are the horrifying, dramatic and erotic short stories and poetry, most of which have never before been translated into English, by the most decadent Russian writers. These explore the depths of the unconscious, as their characters experience sadism, masochism, rape, murder, suicide, and, in a story by Gippius, even passionate love for the dead. * describes the spread of madnessand the collapse of advanced, but decadent, civilizations that indulge in refined pleasures * Andreyev portrays the collapse of all moral values on a personal level in his famous story The Abyss Femmes fatales lure men to destruction, but the most seductive enchantress in the anthology is death itself.
Writers have been killing themselves for centuries. From Petronius in ancient Rome to the 20th Century Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, writers, more than any other kind of artist, have taken their own lives in an extraordinary number of ways. With bullets, poison, drugs and swords, poets, playwrights, novelists and philosophers have sent themselves off into the big sleep. Others, one step shy of that last exit, have made great literature about the urge to self-destruction. For the first time, Gary Lachman investigates the many links between self-death and the written word, bringing together an unusual gallery of literary greats and a host of other fatal characters. Typically for Dedalus, the covers gorgeous. Sasha Selavie in QX International Dead Letters ultimately proves to be at once stimulating and thought-provoking and the section devoted to various suicidal writings is most diverting. Peter Burton in One80 Reviews
Set in the Faroese town of Torshavn at the beginning of the 20th century, this is the story of a group of musicians - the Boman Quartet - who find sanctuary in their music amid a series of dramatic and tragic events.
Brian Murdoch provides an alternative view of the Middle Ages, showing the anarchy and decadence which lurked below the surface of a devout and conformist society. The grinning gargoyle, which mocked the solemnity of Gothic cathedrals, symbolises the violence, depravity and irreverence inherent in man which could not be suppressed by the church. Texts translated from the prose, chronicles and verse of the period, such as the Trial of Gilles de Rais, Boccaccio's Decameron, I Have a Gentil Cok, A Black Mass and Metrical Verses on the Subject of his Prick, reveal the wilder aspects of medieval man. Brian Murdoch has assembled and translated texts from Medieval Latin, Old French, Italian, Scots Gaelic, Cornish, Old and Middle English, Old Irish and Welsh which will redefine the Middle Ages for the modern reader.
Mike Mitchell's new translation replaces S. Goodrich's 1912 version of the first German bestselling novel. Simplicissimus is the eternal innocent, caught in the middle of the Thirty Years War. The novel follows a boy from the Spessart named Simplicius in the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years War as he grows up in the depraved environment and joins the armies of both warring sides, switching allegiances several times. Born to an illiterate peasant family, he is separated from his home by foraging dragoons and is eventually adopted by a forest hermit. He is conscripted at a young age into service, and from there embarks on years of foraging, military triumph, wealth, prostitution, disease, travels to Russia, and countless other adventures.
The ghoulish misdeeds and conflicted psychology of the undead are memorably explored in this classic supernatural thriller, published in England in 1983 and previously unavailable in the US. In the terse, atmospheric opening pages, an unnamed narrator finds a partially charred manuscript in the vicinity of an abandoned country house in Cornwall that has mysteriously burned to the ground. It's the "Narrative of John Richard Le Perrowne," born in 1830 to middle-aged parents, sickly and reclusive throughout a lonely childhood-and the chosen victim of his ancestress Helena, a vampire whose seductive presence leads John into a thrilling new anti-world of empowerment and glamour. But the initiate vampire retains a conscience, and Farrington expertly contrasts his reluctant surrender to the lure of the night with the amoral Helena, a coven of inordinately bloodthirsty fellow creatures, and the young farm girl (Elizabeth) who becomes John's creation, far outdistancing him in calculated villainy. The story is exactly as baroque and lurid as it needs to be, and its most effective set pieces (John awakening in bed to find Helena lying beside him; a feverish dream that's prelude to an equally appalling reality) have a truly cinematic intensity. Farrington's prose is pitched agreeably high, and his protagonist's increasingly fearful intuitions are expressed with vivid emotion and mordant irony ("Death . . . seems much sweeter when you know you cannot have it"). And the closing sequences build impressively, as Perrowne discovers the truth of the ancestral secret that has shaped his fate, travels to Ireland in search of the "Master Revenant" rumored to be the father of them all, undertakes a climactic "journey to Hell," and experiences a grotesque parody of the Resurrection. Thus summarized, it sounds egregiously flamboyant; in fact, it's smashingly effective. Far superior to most of Anne Rice's empurpled Gothicism, and, quite possibly, the best vampire novel since Dracula. (Kirkus Reviews)
The latest volume in the Dedalus European fantasy series, this anthology of short stories includes a wide range of texts covering the period from nineteenth century until today. The richness and diversity of the stories reflects the long tradition of fantasy in Finnish literature, ranging from the classics to experimental literature, from satire to horror. This is the first collection of Finnish short stories of its kind and almost all are translated into English for the first time.
"Two people meet on a train: the young man is imagining a novel, and imagining the life of the young woman. A waiter rushes out to find a girl he fancied who hasn't paid her bill, only to find a diary in which their fictitious flirtation is anatomised. But the story actually begins with a man taking a leak after making love to his wife. He has the inklings of a novel, but thoughts will keep intruding, with all their seductive possibilities. The man on the train is living in an England that has decided, with characteristic diffidence and lack of fuss, that it no longer wants to live under a totalitarian regime which has lasted for 40 years. I say totalitarian, but think more of Brazil, a world of terribly genial tyranny, where officialdom tries so hard to be accommodating. And Duncan has another story, one prompted by the memory of his father's car crashing down a slope. As with all good postmodernist novels, the endless digressions are more soothing than jarring." Murrough O'Brien in The Independent on Sunday The strikingly inventive structure of this novel allows the author to explore the similarities between fictions and history. At any point, there are infinite possibilities for the way the story, a life, or the history of the world might progress. The whole work is enjoyably unpredictable, and poses profound questions about the issues of motivation, choice and morality." The Sunday Times "A writer more interested in inheriting the mantle of Perec and Kundera than Amis and Drabble. Like much of the most interesting British fiction around at the moment, Music, in a Foreign Language is being published in paperback by a small independent publishing house, giving hope that a tentative but long overdue counter-attack is being mounted on the indelible conservatism of the modern English novel.With this novel he has begun his own small stand against cultural mediocrity, and to set himself up, like his hero, as ' a refugee from drabness. From tinned peas, and rain.'" Jonathan Coe in The Guardian
Covering the first 24 hours of the teaching career of Theodoros P., The Spiritual Meadow is set on the Greek island of Porphyri upon which the central character will witness both his past and future life through a distortion of time and space
An accidental meeting between two old acquaintances turns into a long evening of bitter, drunken humiliations for both. In her second novel, Deambrosis (Milagrosa, 2002), a French author of Greek and Spanish descent, offers a brief, almost parable-like tale that's bent on exposing the arrogance that accompanies success and the neuroses that pollute a life full of failures. Dorita and Carmen knew each other in high school, but when they accidentally meet again on a winter's day outside a bustling Spanish department store, they're 50-somethings who've settled into very different lifestyles: Carmen is a mousy, timid schoolteacher caring for her sister's family instead of starting one of her own, while Dorita married up, to a cardiologist, and enjoys a ladies-who-lunch lifestyle of nice clothes and shiny jewelry. Dorita's proud enough-and insecure enough-to tell anybody who'll listen just how fortunate she is, and soon after the two decide to go out for drinks, Dorita turns Carmen into her punching bag, criticizing Carmen's beverage choices, her coat, her purse, even the handkerchief she uses to clean her glasses. Dorita becomes only more verbally abusive as the night drunkenly drags on, which of course only reveals the depths of her neediness; by the time Dorita attempts to seduce a young man in a dive bar, she's a thoroughly grotesque, hollowed-out creature. The familiar, hackneyed version of a story with two characters like these would end with Dorita's comeuppance and Carmen's sudden acquisition of a backbone. But Deambrosis resists the impulse to fall into cliches; though Dorita's actions are contemptible, she's not entirely wrong about Carmen, and as we learn more about Carmen's history (including a long-kept secret relating to the title of the book), she becomes as pitiable as she is goodhearted. Though it's a relatively unambitious novel-more like a one-act play than a full-bodied narrative-it accomplishes quite a bit within its limited boundaries. Slim but potent. (Kirkus Reviews)
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