"Nothing is good save the new… If anything of moment results—so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it."


"English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translations, every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translations, every allegedly great age is an age of translations, beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer."


"Writing is difficult and 'strange,' insofar as its vision of reality is unlike our vision of reality. Some writing is so remote from us that it cannot be read at all—it repels us, or, on the contrary, seduces us. We pretend that this writing is the manifestation of a private vision, that it 'sees' a world, a reality, wholly different from our own. Nothing could be further from the truth. We sequester this writing, we call it exotic, or weird, or skewed, because otherwise we would be faced with the intolerable proposition that the reality such writing offers is, indeed, our own, but that we cannot, though we live in the middle of it, recognize it."


"We know that life is good for nothing."

In the news . . .

We haven't officially announced our Fall 2009 list yet (we're still publishing our Spring 2009 list), but already the first title on it is getting attention, Momus's The Book of Jokes. Read about it Interview and Dossier . . .

New Pages has a review of our most recent contribution to the literary translation discussion: Translation in Practice: a symposium . . .

Our revised edition/new translation of Juan Goytisolo's Juan the Landless reviewed at Front Table . . .

New reviews of Toussaint's Camera at Dossier and Feminist Review . . .

The latest review of  Michal Ajvaz's The Other City is here . . . see also Omnivoracious . . . and also Salonica . . . see also A Journey Round My Skull and Publishers Weekly's review ("truly weird and compelling") . . .

Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction is starting to make the summer reading lists . . . see also the L.A. Times blog . . . and reviews at Readysteadybook . . . see also the San Diego Tribune, Tucson Weekly, Quarterly Conversation, Amazon.com's Ominvoracious, Carpe Libris, and in the Latin American Review of Books . . . and see additional reviews and praise here and here and here and here . . . 

Bernard Share's Transit is also making summer reading lists . . . see also in the Independent . . . see also the Irish Independent and the L.A. Times reviews . . . 

Damion Searls' What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going in the Los Angeles Times . . . see also the interview at at Omnivoracious . . . the book was "Book of the Day" at Time Out New York . . . See also reviews The Brooklyn Rail and Hobart and BookFox . . . 

At Tarpaulin Sky, new looks at Stanley Crawford's Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine and Micheline Aharonian Marcom's The Mirror in the Well . . .

One of Dalkey's own discusses Georges Perec at the NBCC's blog Critical Mass . . . And the new RCF issue on Perec has just come out, just in time for Godine's newly revised edition of Life a User's Manual . . .

A nice article about us in the Chicago Tribune . . .

A smart review of Celine's Normance in the New Statesman . . .

OULIPO featuring Jacques Roubaud on Bookworm June 4 . . . 

Dragomoshchenko in the new International Literary Quarterly . . . Michalopoulou interviewed in the new Quarterly Conversation, also a review of I'd Like . . .

Scotland on Sunday looks forward to Juan Filloy's Op Oloop . . .

Lyn Hejinian on Gertrude Stein's Lucy Church Amiably . . .

A first look at Gerard Gavarry's Hoppla 1 2 3! . . .

The latest review of Fernando del Paso's News from the Empire is in The Nation . . . See also the Los Angeles Times . . . We've already sold out of the first printing, but second printing is on its way . . .

Nicholas Mosley interviewed at the New Statesman on the recent release of his novel God's Hazard and his nonfiction book Paradoxes of Peace . . .

Rikki Ducornet's The One Marvelous Thing at Omnivoracious . . .

Dalkey Archive announces winners of 2009 fellowships in Applied Translation . . . 

Complete Review offers a first look at Mati Unt's Brecht at Night, due out in July . . . 

Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction contributor Alvaro Enrigue is interviewed on NY1 (Spanish-language television) about our anthology . . .

Sandra Kalniete's With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows reviewed at Lively Arts . . .

The latest review of Burton Pike's new translation of Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is at Rain Taxi . . . see also reviews in The Nation and O, the Oprah Magazine . . .

Dalkey Archive is moving to Norton! . . . Read about it in Publishers Weekly and at Conversational Reading . . .

From the PEN World Voices Festival: Read Paul Verhaeghen's "In Walks the Translator" from our panel "Writers who are Translators" . . . and here are photos from our presentation of Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction, featuring Alvaro Enrigue, Daniel Sada, Olivia Sears, Dick Cluster, and Martin Riker . . . 

Antonio Lobo Antunes' Knowledge of Hell featured in the New Yorker . . .

Complete Review's M.A. Orthofer offers a first (very good) look at the terrifically unusual Juan Filloy's wonderful Op Oloop, due out in August . . . More on Filloy (Argentinian lawyer, boxing ref, caricaturist, palindromist, decagenarian) here . . .

3AM magazine has this glowing early review for Normance, the last of Celine's novels to be translated into English, due out in May . . . see also the Publishers Weekly feature . . .

C.S. Giscombe featured in SF Chronicle's review of the newest Norton poetry anthology . . .

The latest on Jacques Roubaud . . . see also Dennis Cooper . . . and here is Charles Bernstein on Roubaud's recent NYC readings from his newly translated The Loop . . . and here is Dan Visel on the same . . . and at Front Table, one of Dalkey's own chimes in . . .

MORE . . .

The first time he dreamed of the place he never imagined that, in time, it would become an obsession. After all, it had been one of those light, condensed dreams, the kind that leave you with a pleasant aftertaste when you wake up because you remember them so completely and then, a few seconds later, forget them just as completely. That morning he opened his eyes and closed them again, stretched, and then, when he was in the bathroom, beneath the cool spray of the shower, recalled everything. He’d been driving an old car, it was white, and he was on a fast-moving road, full of traffic. In the distance, beyond some parched hills, was a cluster of clouds tinged purple and scarlet. Beyond that there was only that sharp yellow light so characteristic of winter. As he sped along he tried to turn on the radio, to pass the time, but after several attempts he realized it didn’t work. Then, bored, searching for some sort of distraction, he decided to watch the other motorists. All of them, even the children, were staring straight ahead, towards the end of the road, as if it were salvation, or a prize. But their focus seemed resigned, not hopeful. That explained, most likely, why nobody realized that, as the road got steeper and dusk’s colors more intense, an exit came into view. T...