News
A year after Carlos Fuentes' death, his translator, friend, and student, Ethan Shaskan Bumas, remembers the writer and his work.
Scott Bradfield at The New York Times encourages you to relax with THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM GADDIS. After all, "You don't need a Ph.D. to read J R," just a sense of humor and the same kind of dedication that Gaddis gave to his writing.
Dalkey Archive is proud to welcome new staff members:
Benedicte Bianchini, doing a mentorship in international business, from Marseille.
Una Brogan, doing a mentorship in translations, from Paris, studying literary translation.
Nathalie Hamilton, Development Associate, from Canada where she was formerly a literature professor.
Audrey Petit, Operations Manager Europe, from Paris.
John O'Brien, Dalkey Archive's publisher, just returned from a three-day trip to Baghdad, where he had participated in a 3 day-translation conference, Baghdad Third International Conference for Translation. O'Brien had been invited to participate by the Ministry of Culture. "While the damage that the United States did to this country continues to be evident, it is slowly recovering after its ten years of being liberated," O'Brien said. O'Brien was also looking for books that Dalkey Archive should be considering for publication.
Tobias Carroll at Vol. 1 Brooklyn finds comedy, philosophy, and a baroque sensibility in Charles Newman's IN PARTIAL DISGRACE.
Writer Monica Carter raves about Gert Jonke's AWAKENING TO THE GREAT SLEEP WAR at Three Percent.
Read an excerpt from Álvaro Enrigue's HYPOTHERMIA at n+1.
GEORGE ANDERSON: NOTES FOR A LOVE SONG IN IMPERIAL TIME has been reviewed at HTMLGiant, The American Reader, Bookslut, and recently received a starred review at Publishers Weekly.
HTMLGiant recommends Rainer Maria Rilke's NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE, translated by Burton Pike.
THE NO WORLD CONCERTO, by A.G. Porta and translated from Spanish by Darren Koolman & Rhett McNeil, is reviewed at Publishers Weekly.
The same day the New York Times was making Heidi Julavits's review of GEORGE ANDERSON available online, Brooklyn blogger Jim Supanick posted this breathtaking essay on the book.
"Peru's truth lies not in its correspondence to reality, but in its consistency with itself. And this kind of consistency. . . is what allows an artwork to stand alone . . ." David Winters on Gordon Lish's PERU at 3:AM Magazine.
"[IN PARTIAL DISGRACE] contains exquisitely crafted sentences of lambent beauty." Douglas Field on Charles Newman's IN PARTIAL DISGRACE at the Times Literary Supplement.
Read about Harry Mathews and Oulipo in 2013 at Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Charles Simic's introduction to AMERICAN ODYSSEYS is serialized at The Daily Beast.
"George Anderson is unlike anything most readers will ever have encountered." Heidi Julavits reviews GEORGE ANDERSON: NOTES FOR A LOVE SONG IN IMPERIAL TIME at The New York Times.
"[I]f you're a Gaddis devotee, you should definitely acquire this superbly edited collection of his letters." Michael Dirda reviews THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM GADDIS at The Washington Post.
"[W]ildly imaginative and innovative work, ranging from broadly comic to devastatingly tragic . . . to piquant, hilarious and instantly rewarding." The Irish Examiner reviews BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2013.
Viktor Shklovsky's BOWSTRING is named an Essential Book for Writers by The Center for Fiction.
Spotlight on Jacques Roubaud's THE LOOP, including video interviews and excerpts at DC's.
"One of the big draws on the programme for Cork World Book Festival . . . will be Aidan Higgins: A Writer's Life, a tribute to his contribution to literature." The Irish Examiner on Aidan Higgins.
AUTOPORTRAIT, by Edouard Levé and translated from the original French by Lorin Stein, has been nominated as a fiction finalist for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award.
THE FASTER I WALK, THE SMALLER I AM, written by Kjersti Skomsvold and translated by Kerri A. Pierce, has been short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
"I don't think the past is beautiful, but it's just the way it is. . . And you're still able, even now, to make it more beautiful. . . Or to make books with it. I think the best thing I did was make books with the past. . ." Marie Chaix is interviewed by Sarah Gerard at the Paris Review.
"[W]e have not as a culture yet truly grappled with the inadequacy of the language we have available to us for the history we are living . . ." Peter Dimock, author of GEORGE ANDERSON: NOTES FOR A LOVE SONG IN IMPERIAL TIME, is interviewed by Eugene Lim at Bookslut.
"[A]fter Charlie died, I found the story of Felix and the Professor, a novel that was alive in its language, arresting in its ideas, and humanly engaging . . . The question was how to disentomb it." Ben Ryder Howe - writer, editor, nephew of Charles Newman - writes about IN PARTIAL DISGRACE in The Millions.
Writer and translator, Harry Mathews, writes about meeting his wife and fellow writer, Marie Chaix, in The Paris Review
THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM GADDIS evoke thoughts on writers' correspondences from Benjamin Hedin at The New Yorker's Page Turner: "What you won't Learn from Writers' Letters".
"[Waldrop] sets things down as they are with a perfectly poised and haunted realism" Ben Lerner from The New Yorker's Page Turner on Keith Waldrop's memoir LIGHT WHILE THERE IS LIGHT
The French-American Foundation & Florence Gould Foundation announce W. Donald Wilson's translation of With the Animals, by Noëlle Revaz as a Fiction finalist for the 26th Annual Translation Prize. Winners will be announced on June 5.
Mario Levi talks about Anti-Semitism, Turkey, and the city that inspires and informs his writing in an interview with Ceyda Nurtsch.
Jasia Reichardt's15 Journey's: Warsaw to London and Nick Wadley's Man + Doctor reviewed by David Nice.
Czech Literature Portal interviews Dalkey Archive's Publisher John O'Brien.
Dalkey Archive Press author Shotaro Yasuoka (Glass Slipper and Other Stories) has recently died, aged 92. A brief obituary can be read here.
With extreme sadness, we learned of the passing of Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko on September 12, 2012. Dalkey Archive Press published his collection of essays Dust in 2008. Dalkey's New York Manager Ian Dreiblatt says of Dragomoshchenko "I recall with great fondness Arkadii's tremendous kindness to me when I arrived on his doorstep in Petersburg 10 years ago. A wonderful man and one of his nation's great poets. He will be terribly missed." An interview with Dragomoshchenko appears in CONTEXT No. 20.
Dalkey Archive Press reports the loss of esteemed novelist and critic Eva Figes on August 28, 2012 at age 80. In addition to her critical work in feminism (Patriarchal Attitudes and Sex and Subterfuge), Figes was known for her several novels including Nelly's Version, which Dalkey reissued in 2002.
Dalkey Archive is saddened to report that Carlos Fuentes has died at the age of 83. The Press has had a longstanding relationship with Mr. Fuentes, beginning with our reissue of his masterpiece Terra Nostra in 2003, which Juan Goytisolo called "one of the great monuments of the Spanish-language novel," and moving on to include such works as Christopher Unborn, Where the Air is Clear, and Distant Relations.
We were also fortunate to work with Mr. Fuentes on the English translations of his two recent novellas Vlad (to be published this summer) and Adam in Eden (in the autumn), as well as a project very close to his heart, an edition of his son Carlos Fuentes Lemus's English-language poetry, 4:56. Fuentes's ambitious survey of Latin American fiction, The Great Latin American Novel, will be forthcoming from Dalkey Archive in 2013.
"Like life itself, Replacement is full of both beauty and suffering . . . It's filled with as much of the blind will of the world as any book can capture. But what we learn from it is that we're bound to the world, and that the world is what binds us together." David Winters on Tor Ulven's Replacement, at Full Stop . . .
Video from the Best European Fiction event at this year's PEN World Voices Festival is now online: below, 2012 contributors Noëlle Revaz (Switzerland), Patrick Boltshauser (Liechtenstein), and Róbert Gál (Slovakia) read and discuss their work with series editor Aleksandar Hemon . . .
"A remarkable and peculiar book . . . " Jim Ruland on Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Reticence, at San Diego CityBeat . . .
"Merciless and unwavering . . . fully and brilliantly realized": Roxanne Gay on Noëlle Revaz's With the Animals at Full Stop . . .
Marek Bieńczyk's Transparency reviewed at The Quarterly Conversation . . .
"[A] daring and disturbing first novel . . . whose impact can be felt long after the book is closed . . . " Noëlle Revaz's With the Animals reviewed in the Boston Globe . . .
The Bridge: Dalkey Archive Translators Night
On May 14th, in celebration of Dalkey Archive's National Literature Series, novelist and critic Joshua Cohen will lead a conversation with acclaimed translators Burton Pike, Damion Searls, Todd Hasak-Lowy, and Mary Ann Newman about the challenges and adventures of translating contemporary works from German (Swiss), Norwegian, Hebrew and Catalan. Listen to audio from the event here!
Certainly not your ordinary excerpt . . . Art from Nick Wadley's forthcoming MAN + DOCTOR featured in the March 2012 issue of The Journal of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland . . .
"This book glitters with diversity and crackles with restless activity . . . " BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2012 in the Irish Times . . .
Andrzej Stasiuk's DUKLA reviewed at Three Percent . . .
Read an excerpt from Marek Bieńczyk's TRANSPARENCY (available now!) along with supplementary materials (including a reading in the original Polish and a note from Benjamin Paloff on the translation) in the new issue of Asymptote . . .
Eric Chevillard's DEMOLISHING NISARD reviewed at The Mookse and the Gripes . . .
Jacques Roubaud's Mathematics: reviewed at The Complete Review . . .
"With the "Great Fire" series, Roubaud has built a gothic cathedral of a memoir, where the rib vaults and flying buttresses are visible and the structure is part of the ornamentation . . . " Jacques Roubaud's MATHEMATICS: reviewed in Bookforum . . .
At The Coffin Factory, a review of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's RETICENCE . . .
Kjersti A. Skomsvold's The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am, at Numéro Cinq . . .
Edouard Levé's Autoportrait reviewed at The Quarterly Conversation . . .
Three Dalkey Archive titles have been selected as finalists for the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize: A Thousand Pearls (For a Thousand Pennies) by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Ian Monk; The Truth About Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Matthew B. Smith; and Demolishing Nisard by Eric Chevillard, translated by Jordan Stump. Congratulations to the translators! Read more here.
Kjersti A. Skomsvold's The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am, reviewed at The Rumpus . . .
On March 4, Ben Marcus and Joshua Cohen will discuss their work at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage--click here for more information and tickets . . .
Viktor Shklovsky's Bowstring: On The Dissimilarity Of The Similar in 3:AM Magazine . . .
In the TLS: Paul Vincent has been awarded this year's Vondel Prize for his translation of Louis Paul Boon's My Little War. Read more here.
In the February issue of The Believer, a review of Gabriela Avigur-Rotem's Heatwave and Crazy Birds . . .
"Roussel makes perfect but eccentric sense. This is what is best and most terrifying about his writing—that the fantasies of a madman can seem so lucid." Alice Gregory on Raymond Roussel, at the Poetry Foundation . . .
"Already an infamous bestseller in Sweden, the book seems calculated to offend just about everyone": Nikanor Teratologen's ASSISTED LIVING in Publisher's Weekly . . .
A review of Kjersti A. Skomsvold's THE FASTER I WALK, THE SMALLER I AM at The Mantle . . .
"That power, and how it flows past, held in the pages of a book, makes Assisted Living much more than a shock totem or even a vicious catalog. It is, instead, an object both aware of its world and its own work, less like a mirror or a mural than the shitty part of the skin that itches when you want to sleep." Blake Butler on Nikanor Teratologen's ASSISTED LIVING, at Vice Online . . .
"Emmanuel's prose is elegant and refined, his subject matter heady yet accessible, his execution nearly flawless . . ." INVITATION TO A VOYAGE reviewed at The Rumpus . . .
". . . dark and decadent stuff from a writer who is a master of his craft . . ." Drago Jančar's THE GALLEY SLAVE in the Irish Times . . .
Diane Williams, editor of the journal NOON and author of the fantastic new collection VICKY SWANKY IS A BEAUTY (McSweeney's), as well EXCITABILITY: SELECTED STORIES 1986-1996 and ROMANCER ERECTOR (both available from Dalkey Archive), will be reading at Joe's Pub in New York on January 11th. Click here to read an interview with Williams by Dalkey publisher John O'Brien . . .
Max Frisch's I'm Not Stiller featured on NPR's "You Must Read This": click here to listen . . .
Dalkey Archive's forthcoming reissue of William Gaddis's classic novel The Recognitions is one of the most anticipated books of 2012 at The Millions . . .
"American classics like 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'Catch-22' have a Slovenian equivalent in Vitomil Zupan's 1975 masterpiece . . ." Minuet for Guitar reviewed in the Wall Street Journal . . .
A new review of Gerhard Meier's Isle of the Dead is up at The Rumpus...
Also in The Guardian, Jean-Philippe Toussaint's The Truth About Marie is one of Nicholas Lezard's picks for best paperbacks of the year; click here to read...
Best European Fiction 2012 is on The Guardian's list of the year's best short fiction; click here to read the story...
Chicago PBS station WTTW has done a mini documentary on Dalkey Archive Press, featuring interviews with founder/director John O'Brien and senior editor Jeremy Davies; click here to watch Chicago Tonight's segment on the press . . .
"And the only thing certain about this book that traffics in so many uncertainties is that it proves, in the end, worth getting a little obsessed over" -- Jean-Philippe Toussaint's The Truth About Marie at the BN Review . . .
In the current issue of BOMB Magazine, Mark Polizzotti discusses his new translation of Raymond Roussel's Impressions of Africa with poet (and fellow Roussel translator) Mark Ford...
The Golden Age and The Other City by Michal Ajvaz are two of Kevin Brockmeier's books of the year at The Millions...
Hebrew Literature Now: Symposium on Contemporary Israeli Literature
March 4-6, 2012, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in collaboration with Dalkey Archive Press, is pleased to announce Hebrew Literature Now: an international symposium bringing together fourteen of the foremost young scholars in contemporary Hebrew literature, and the first scholarly event of its kind in either in the United States or Israel. The authors who will be discussed are all members of the generations born after 1970, and all began publishing during the twenty-first century. Though much of their work has had an enormous impact on the Israeli reading public, and has shaped the translation, publication, and marketing of Israeli fiction and poetry in the United States, this "new wave" has received no scholarly attention to date. Hebrew Literature Now will bring together scholars, writers, translators, and publishers, many of whom also hold academic positions at leading Israeli, American, and British universities, to present papers concerning a variety of authors (including Asaf Schurr and Eshkol Nevo, whose English-language debuts were recently published by Dalkey Archive), the issues their work investigates, and the challenges now being faced by literature in Hebrew both at home and in translation. The keynote speaker, Dan Laor, is a renowned critic, scholar, and editor focused upon Hebrew literature, and served as the Dean of Humanities at Tel Aviv University, fostering the creative talent of the new Israeli fiction and providing venues and other opportunities for their publication and success.
Not only will Hebrew Literature Now serve the scholarly community, including graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, but it will also offer the general public an opportunity to be introduced to writers who are already guiding lights in both Israeli literature and its translation worldwide. Preceding the opening reception, there will be a public reading of a sampling of relevant works, provided (and translated) by many of the participants.
This event was made possible by support from The Israel Project, through the Program in Jewish Culture and Society; the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature; the Office of Cultural Affairs, Consulate General of Israel in New York; and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Confirmed Participants:
Shai Ginsburg, Duke University
"Now and Then, History Re-imagined: Alon Hilu's Historical Novels"
Shiri Lev-Ari Israel
"Return to Zionism"
Adriana Jacobs, Yale University
"Contemporary Poetry: Journals and Translations"
Dan Laor, Tel Aviv University
Keynote Address: "Writing the Holocaust: Is it Still Relevant?"
Adam Rovner, University of Denver
"Writers, Writing, and Publishing"
Philip Hollander, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"From Periphery to Center: The Development Town in Shimon Adaf's Fiction"
Yehezkel Rahamim, Tel Aviv University
"Black Diamonds: Literature from South Tel Aviv"
Yaron Peleg, Cambridge University / George Washington University
"Hebrew Literature in a Neo-national Age"
Eran Tzelgov, New York University
"Taking Back the Streets: Israeli Poetry in the 2000s"
Todd Hasak-Lowy, University of Illinois, Chicago
"Motti, Writing, and Translating"
Dan Friedman, Arts and Culture Editor, Jewish Daily Forward
"Israeli Literature in the US"
Ranen Omer-Sherman, University of Miami
"Paradoxes of Identity: Jewish/Muslim Interpenetration in Almog Behar and Sayed Kashua"
Rachel Harris, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
"Homecoming, Zionism, and the New Dream in the Novels of Eshkol Nevo"
February 26th, 2012: Yoram Kaniuk (author of Life on Sandpaper) in conversation with Joshua Cohen (Witz) at The Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California Street, San Francisco, CA 94118. For further information, contact Stephanie Singer at ssinger@jccsf.org.
A "strange and unsettling novel that upholds its author's status as one of the most exciting figures in contemporary fiction..." At The Millions, Mark O'Connell on Jean-Philippe Toussaint's The Truth About Marie...
"A mini masterpiece. Strange, poignant, and utterly compelling." Kjersti A. Skomsvold's The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am in the Irish Examiner...
On RTÉ Radio's arts program Arena, a rave review of Kjersti Skomsvold's The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am ... (the segment begins at around minute 17 of the online broadcast) ...
Drago Jančar, author of The Galley Slave, has been awarded the 2011 European Prize for Literature ...
At The Winnipeg Review, a review by Jeff Bursey of Kjersti Skomsvold's The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am ...
Also, on Ireland's RTÉ Radio 1, Kjersti Skomsvold discusses The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am...
Kjersti Skomsvold's The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am reviewed on the November 8th episode of RTÉ TV's program, The View...
Joseph McElroy ponders where a story can take the reader (and the writer), at The Story Prize Blog...
Best European Fiction 2012—edited by Aleksandar Hemon, with a preface by Nicole Krauss—will be released on November 8th! All month long we'll be posting statements by this year's authors here. Today, five more from Arno Camenisch [Switzerland], Marie Darrieussecq[France],Danila Davydov [Russia], David Dephy [Georgia], and Agustín Fernández Paz [Spain]...
The New York Times Magazine excerpts Gerhard Meier's Isle of the Dead. . .
"An intensely imagined exploration of war..." A starred review for Vitomil Zupan's Minuet For Guitar in Publisher's Weekly...
"Skomsvold's offbeat, open-eyed vision rings true..." The Irish Times on The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am...
The November issue of Harper's includes two great Dalkey features: a story from Best European Fiction 2012 - "Sez Ner," by Arno Camenisch (translated by another BEF '12 contributor, Donal McLaughlin) - and Ben Marcus's fantastic long essay on the new translation of Impressions of Africa . . .
In Asymptote, a review and excerpt from Toussaint's The Truth about Marie . . .
Kjersti Skomsvold's The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am reviewed at the Harvard Crimson . . .
"A Harrowing, Self-Referential Exploration of Creativity" -- Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch in the Harvard Crimson . . .
At The Awl, translator Kerri Pierce interviewed about Kjersti Skomsvold's forthcoming The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am . . .
Kazushi Hosaka's Plainsong in Japan Times . . .
Gabriel Gudding interviewed at MAKE magazine . . .
A new review of Kazushi Hosaka's Plainsong . . .
Great review of McElroy's Night Soul at Numéro Cinq . . .
At Ploughshares, an interview with Dalkey's associate director . . .
Piece in the New York Times about Robert Ashley. His PERFECT LIVES is forthcoming from Dalkey . . .
Interesting piece on Nicholas Mosley in The Telegraph . . .
At HTMLGiant, Parts 1 and 2 of a 2-part article on Michel Butor's extraordinary Degrees . . .
Dalkey Archive Press's senior editor Jeremy M. Davies interviewed in Forbes . . .
Gonçalo M. Tavares's Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique is featured this week at Read This Next . . .
Joshua Cohen's Witz has been shortlisted for the $50,000 St. Francis College Literary Prize . . .
Boris Pahor's Necropolis at the LA Review of Books (scroll down) . . .
David Single reviews Andrzej Stasiuk's Dukla, forthcoming from Dalkey, at MediaCulture . . .
At Full Stop, a review of João Ubaldo Ribeiro's House of the Fortunate Buddhas . . .
Tom Whalen, author of The Birth of Death and Other Comedies: The Novels of Russell H. Greenan, is interviewed at criticalfiction.net . . .
Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, edited by Sara Crangle, has been reviewed at Bookslut and Publishers Weekly . . .
An article on Dalkey Archive's republication of Nicholas Delbanco's Sherbookes trilogy at Publishers Weekly . . .
Our two newest Japanese Series (JLPP) titles are now available . . . Naoyuki Ii's The Shadow of a Blue Cat was reviewed by Publishers Weekly and the Baltimore Sun, and Kazushi Hosaka's Plainsong is reviewed by Publishers Weekly as well . . .
Hervé Le Tellier is interviewed by BookForum . . . and his The Sextine Chapel is reviewed by Publishers Weekly, BOMB Magazine, and Effluvia Magazine . . . while A Thousand Pearls is one of the LA Times's French books to read this summer . . .
An insightful review of Viktor Shklovsky's Bowstring at Numéro Cinq . . .
Hugo Wilcken writes about Jouet's Upstaged, Chevillard's Demolishing Nisard, and Ollier's Wert and the Life Without End at Frieze . . .
Reviews of Éric Chevillard's Demolishing Nisard have appeared at Publishers Weekly, The Complete Review, and Quarterly Conversation . . .
Juan Goytisolo's Exiled from Almost Everywhere has been reviewed at The Guardian by Alberto Manguel . . . and futher coverage at Publishers Weekly, Cadaverine,and Bibliodrome . . .
Motti by Asaf Schurr garners glowing reviews at Publishers Weekly, Slant Magazine, and The Forward . . .
Luisa Valenzuela's Dark Desires and the Others reviewed at Publishers Weekly, NPR, Spectrum Culture, and Belletrista . . .
Procession of Shadows by Julián Ríos is reviewed at The Collagist . . .
Gabriela Avigur-Rotem, author of Heatwave and Crazy Birds, is interviewed at Kirkus Reviews . . . and her book is covered at Tablet and Belletrista . . .
Reviews of Patrik Ouředník's The Opportune Moment, 1855 at