Dalkey Archive Essentials
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Impossible Object
by Nicholas Mosley
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
The object of life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended. In these closing lines from “Impossible Object”, one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley's subject of love and imagination, as well as his unmatched lyric style. In eight carefully connected stories that are joined by introspective interludes on related subjects, the author pursues the notion, through the lives of a couple seen by different narrators, that "those who like unhappy ends can have them, and those who don't will have to look for them."
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Family of Pascual Duarte
by Camilo Jose Cela
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Confined to a prison cell, thrice-murderer Pascual Duarte recounts his journey from a violent childhood to a life of pain and misfortune; juxtaposing tableaus of country poverty against scenes of bare brutality, Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela crafts a po
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Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine
by Stanley Crawford
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine is a masterpiece of modern domestic life, a comic novel of closeness and difficulty, miscommunication and stubborn resolve.
"Forty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas . . ."
So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as "Mrs. Unguentine," the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas together, alone on a giant land-covered barge of their own devising. They tend their gardens, raise a child, invent an artificial forest-all the while steering clear of civilization.
Rarely has a book so perfectly registered the secret solitude of marriage, how shared loneliness can result in a powerful bond.
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The Planetarium
by Nathalie Sarraute
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
A young writer has his heart set on his aunt's large apartment. With this seemingly simple conceit, the characters of The Planetarium are set in orbit and a galaxy of argument, resentment, and bitterness erupts. Telling the story from various points of view, Sarraute focuses below the surface, on the emotional lives of the characters in a way that surpasses even Virginia Woolf. Always deeply engaging, The Planetarium reveals the deep disparity between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us.
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Phosphor in Dreamland
by Rikki Ducornet
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet's dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity. Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland, the novel takes the form of a series of letters from a current resident to an old friend describing the island's seventeenth-century history that brings together the violent Inquisition, the thoughtless extinction of the island's exotic fauna, and the amorous story of the deformed artist-philosopher-inventor Phosphor and his impassioned, obsessional love for the beautiful Extravaganza. The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet's novel that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was described by one reviewer as "Jane Austen meets Angela Carter via Lewis Carroll." Phosphor in Dreamland can be described as Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges. This is Ducornet at her magical best.
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Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
by Ishmael Reed
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
"Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so onery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner's swine." And so begins the HooDoo Western by Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo and one of America's most innovative and celebrated writers. Reed demolishes white American history and folklore as well as Christian myth in this masterful satire of contemporary American life. In addition to the black, satanic Loop Garoo Kid, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down features Drag Gibson (a rich, slovenly cattleman), Mustache Sal (his nymphomaniac mail-order bride), Thomas Jefferson and many others in a hilarious parody of the old Western.
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Ryder
by Djuna Barnes
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
From the author of Nightwood, Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still be vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad.
Told as through a kaleidoscope, the chronicle of the Ryder family is a bawdy tale of ec
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Jade Cabinet
by Rikki Ducornet
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's own Dragon of Industry. The novel travels from Oxford to Egypt where one million ibis mummies wait to be transformed into fertilizer, where Baconfield the architect will cause a pyramid to collapse, and where a scorned and bloated hunger artist who speaks in tongues will plot a bloody revenge. The fourth element in a tetralogy of novels - Earth (The Stain), Fire (Entering Fire), Water (The Fountains of Neptune) and Air - The Jade Cabinet is both a riveting novel and a reflection on the nature of memory and desire, language and power. Following the novel is an afterword, "Waking to Eden, " in which Ducornet reflects on the sources for her writing and on the quartet of novels completed by The Jade Cabinet.
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Angel in the Forest
A Fairy Tale Of Two Utopias
by Marguerite Young
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Angel in the Forest is Marguerite Young's fascinating chronicle of two attempts to establish utopian communities in nineteenth-century America.
In it, she recounts the strange tale of New Harmony, Indiana, a community originally founded in 1814 by the German mystic Father George Rapp, who wanted to apply Scriptural communism to daily life in order to bring about the New Jerusalem. It was sold in 1825 to Robert Owen, the father of British socialism who, with a group of English immigrants, implemented his own theories for a perfect community, this time based on rationalism.
Both experiments failed, but Young finds in both a distinctively American yearning for utopia, which continues to characterize the American spirit to this day: a tradition of faith and folly can be traced from Owen's New Moral World to George Bush's New World Order.
Written with the same elegance, wit, and lyric beauty that distinguishes her fiction, Angel in the Forest was widely praised upon its first publication in 1945. This edition includes Mark Van Doren's introduction to Scribner's 1966 reprint.
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Cobra
by Severo Sarduy
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
The late Severo Sarduy was one of the most outrageous and baroque of the Latin American Boom writers of the sixties and seventies, and Cobra was his finest creation. Cobra (1972) recounts the tale of a transvestite named Cobra, star of the Lyrical Theater of the Dolls, whose obsession is to transform his/her body. She is assisted in her metamorphosis by the Madam and Pup, Cobra's dwarfish double. They too change shape, through the violent ceremonies of a motorcycle gang, into a sect of Tibetan lamas seeking to revive Tantric Buddhism. In its first edition from Dalkey Archive Press, Cobra was bound with Sarduy's novel Maitreya (1978) which continues the theme of metamorphosis. Transgressing genres and genders, reveling in literal and figurative transvestism, Sarduy's work is among the most daring achievements of postmodern Latin American fiction.
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Langrishe, Go Down
by Aidan Higgins
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
An eminently poetic book, Langrishe, Go Down (Higgins's first novel) traces the fall of the Langrishes-a once wealthy, highly respected Irish family-through the lives of their four daughters, especially the youngest, Imogen, whose love affair with a self-centered German scholar resonates throughout the book. Their relationship, told in lush, erotic, and occasionally melancholic prose, comes to represent not only the invasion and decline of this insular family, but the decline of Ireland and Western Europe as a whole in the years preceding World War II. In the tradition of great Irish writing, Higgins's prose is a direct descendent from that of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and nowhere else in his mastery of the language as evident as in Langrishe, Go Down, which the Irish Times applauded as "the best Irish novel since At Swim-Two-Birds and the novels of Beckett."
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Mulligan Stew
by Gilbert Sorrentino
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Widely regarded as Sorrentino's finest achievement, Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very book we are reading) turns into a literary "stew" an uproariously funny melange of journal entries, erotic poetry, parodies of all kinds, love letters, interviews, and lists-as Hugh Kenner in "Harper's" wrote, "for another such virtuoso of the List you'd have to resurrect Joyce." Soon, Lamont's characters (on loan from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, and Dashiell Hammet) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative. Sorrentino has vastly extended the possibilities of what a novel can be in this extraordinary work, which both parodies and pays homage to the art of fiction.
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Europeana
by Patrik Ouředník
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Tracing the Great War through the Millennium Bug, 1999 through 1900, Dadaism through
Scientology through Sierra Leonean bicycle riding and back, award-winning Czech author Patrik
Ourednik explores the horror and absurdity of the twentieth century in an ex
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Dolly City
by Orly Castel-Bloom
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Gruesome, unhinged, and hilarious, Dolly City is widely recognized as one of the most disconcerting-and brilliant-literary works ever to come out of Israel.
"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 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.
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Shutter of Snow
by Emily Holmes Coleman
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
A tragic, visceral portrayal of motherhood and mental illness.
In a prose form as startling as its content, The Shutter of Snow portrays the postpartum fever dream of Marthe Gail, who after giving birth to her son, is committed to an insane asylum. Believing herself to be God, she maneuvers through an institutional world that is both sad and terrifying, echoing the worlds of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Bell Jar.
Based upon the author's own experience after the birth of her son in 1924, The Shutter of Snow retains all the energy it had when first published in 1930.
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Chapel Road
by Louis Paul Boon
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
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.
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Suicide
by Edouard Levé
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
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, Levé 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 Levé's casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Levé himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend; it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life.
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Pierrot Mon Ami
by Raymond Queneau
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Pierrot Mon Ami, considered by many to be one of Raymond Queneau's finest achievements, is a quirky coming-of-age novel concerning a young man's initiation into a world filled with deceit, fraud, and manipulation. From his short-lived job at a Paris amu
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La Batarde
by Violette Leduc
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Bâtarde relates Violette Leduc's long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women.
When first published, La Bâtarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir-like that of Henry Miller, Leduc's brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.
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The Making of Americans
by Gertrude Stein
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Gertrude Stein's monumental novel, back in print a century after its first publication.In The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein sets out to tell "a history of a family's progress," radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships. As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America itself.
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Miss Macintosh, My Darling
by Marguerite Young
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
This novel is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel-a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare
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Trilogy
by Jon Fosse
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Trilogy is Jon Fosse's critically acclaimed, luminous love story about Asle and Alida, two lovers trying to find their place in this world. Homeless and sleepless, they wander around Bergen in the rain, trying to make a life for themselves and the child they expect. Through a rich web of historical, cultural, and theological allusions, Fosse constructs a modern parable of injustice, resistance, crime, and redemption. Consisting of three novellas (Wakefulness, Olav's Dreams, and Weariness), Trilogy is a haunting, mysterious, and poignant evocation of love, for which Fosse received The Nordic Council's Prize for Literature in 2015.
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Zoo, or Letters Not About Love
by Viktor Shklovsky
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary novel born of this constraint, and although the brilliant and playful letters contained here cover everything from observations about contemporary German and Russian life to theories of art and literature, nonetheless every one of them is indirectly dedicated to the one topic they are all required to avoid: their author's own unrequited love.
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Nobodaddy's Children
by Arno Schmidt
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
“Nobodaddy's Children” is a trilogy of novels that traces life in Germany from the Nazi era through the postwar years and into an apocalyptic future. “Scenes from the Life of a Faun” recounts the dreary life of a government worker who escapes the banality of war by researching the exploits of a deserter from the Napoleonic Wars nicknamed “The Faun”. “Brand's Heath” deals with the chaos of the immediate postwar period as a writer joins a small community of "survivors" to try to forge a new life, and “Dark Mirrors” is set in a future where civilization has been virtually destroyed. Dark Mirrors' narrator fears he may be the last man on earth until the discovery of another creates new fears. All three novels are characterized by Schmidt's unique combination of sharply observed details, sarcastic asides, and wide erudition.
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Point Counter Point
by Aldous Huxley
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Aldous Huxley's lifelong concern with the dichotomy between passion and reason finds its fullest expression both thematically and formally in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. By presenting a vision of life in which diverse aspects of experience are ob
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Morning and Evening
by Jon Fosse
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023
A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes's fathe
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Chimera
by John Barth
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
A National Book Award winner, this bawdy, comic trio of novellas finds John Barth injecting his signature wit into three tales many times told: that of Scheherazade, storyteller of the Thousand and One Nights; of Perseus, slayer of Medusa; and of Bellerop
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Sot-weed Factor
by John Barth
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting . . . to roam the world since Candide."
"A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly i
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Wittgenstein's Mistress
by David Markson
Part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series
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 eart
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