New Village Press Books
15 Journeys
Warsaw to London
Warsaw to London
These fifteen journeys—fourteen of them within Poland—take six years, 1940–1946. The distances vary. Sometimes they are minimal, as short as a two-stop bus ride in a city, or a twenty-minute walk, and sometimes they are longer—much longer. The traveler...
20 Lines a Day
For a period of just over a year, Harry Mathews set about following Stendhal's dictum for writers of "twenty lines a day, genius or not." What resulted is a book that is part journal, parts writer's manual, and part genius. First undertaken as a kind...
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Poems
Poems
These poems by Carlos Fuentes Lemus (1973-1999), son of the author of Terra Nostra and Christopher Unborn, are an introduction to the unique voice of a sensitive but unsentimental young poet who became aware of his mortality at a very early age . . .
Aberration of Starlight
Set at a boardinghouse in rural New Jersey in the summer of 1939, this novel revolves around four people who experience the comedies, torments and rare pleasures of family, romance and sex while on vacation from Brooklyn and the Depression. Billy...
Accident
Accident, Nicholas Mosley's brilliantly conceived and efficiently structured novel about Oxford University and environs, is a prose poem about marriage and infidelity, as well as the relationship between writing and existence, imagination and action...
Adam in Eden
In this comic novel of political intrigue, Adam Gorozpe, a respected businessman in Mexico, has a life so perfect that he might as well be his namesake in the Garden of Eden—but there are snakes in this Eden too.
The Age of Wire and String
In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as "the most audacious literary debut in decades," Ben Marcus welds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the...
Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form
Drawing together a wide range of focused critical commentary and observation by internationally renowned scholars and writers, this collection of essays offers a major reassessment of Aidan Higgins’s body of work almost fifty years after the...
Aliss at the Fire
In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out...
Alix's Journal
A collection of private notebooks kept by Canadian photographer Alix Cleo Roubaud during the last four years of her life, before her death at the age of 31.
Am I a Redundant Human Being?
For the first time in English, a contemporary and friend of Virginia Woolf and Stefan Zweig gives us the definitive portrait of a woman lost on the margins of modern life.
I Am Istanbul
An introduction not only to the city of a thousand names but to the very spirit of its inhabitants, their daily worries as well as the grand tapestry in which they all labor to find happiness.
I Am Otherwise: The Romance between Poetry and Theory after the Death of the Subject
I Am Otherwise: The Romance between Poetry and Theory after the Death of the Subject examines the contemporary poet's relationship with language in the age of theory. As the book works through close readings and interpretations...
Amalgamemnon
A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty, and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called "brilliant" (The Listener), "dazzling" (The Guardian), "elegant, rueful and witty"...
American Odysseys
Writings by New Americans
Writings by New Americans
American Odysseys is an anthology of twenty-two novelists, poets, and short-story writers drawn from the shortlist for the 2011 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature . . .
The American Woman in the Chinese Hat
Carole Maso's stunning, erotic fourth novel chronicles the dark, irresistible adventures of an American writer named Catherine who has come to France to live. Set into motion by a single act of abandonment—Catherine's lover of ten years has left...
America's Magic Mountain
A contemporary version of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Curtis White's novel begins with Mann's "unassuming young man," Hans Castorp, visiting his cousin at a health retreat. In this book though, the retreat is a spa for recovering...
Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States
For half of the twentieth century, there were two superpowers in the world and a gulf of silence between them. Americans' knowledge of Russian culture was based on propaganda and rumor, and their knowledge of America was no better. When the Soviet...
Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias
This is the first paperback edition of Marguerite Young's fascinating chronicle of two attempts to establish utopian communities in nineteenth-century America. Angel in the Forest recounts the strange tale of New Harmony, Indiana. The original...
Annihilation
Annihilation is about a day in the life of a Polish-Jewish town shortly before World War II and the Holocaust, a town that soon will be annihilated by Nazi atrocities. With grace, wit, and love for the people and place that will be destroyed, Piotr...
Anonymous Celebrity
What if a man were so shallow that he couldn't believe his life had meaning unless he was loved and desired by millions of people? What if everything he learned from his television, from the movies, from what he heard on the radio, was treated as an...
Antic Hay
London life just after World War I, devoid of values and moving headlong into chaos at breakneck speed—Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, portrays a world of lost souls madly pursuing both pleasure and meaning.
Approaching Disappearance
Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century French literature, produced a wide variety of essays and fictions that reflect on the complexities of literary work.
Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth
One of the defining texts of twentieth-century Catalan fiction, written by one of its most innovative and cherished writers, Salvador Espriu's Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth is a collection of thirty-four short stories in which the twists and . . .
Arriving in Avignon
What seems at first like a cross between a memoir and a guidebook comes in time to be the story of a young man's dogged yet futile quest to know his own mind--unless it's the ancient city of Avignon itself that is our real protagonist...
The Arts of the Beautiful
With his usual lucidity, Etienne Gilson addresses the idea that "art is the making of beauty for beauty's own sake." By distinguishing between aesthetics, which promotes art as a form of knowledge, and philosophy, which focuses on the presence of the...
Arvo Pärt in Conversation
This collection of essays and interviews is an ideal guide to the work and thought of one of the world's greatest and most original living composers.
As You Were Saying: American Writers Respond to their French Contemporaries
At a time when the dialogue between America and France is strained by political and cultural forces, As You Were Saying provides a space for an important and riveting exchange between writers from these two countries.
Assassins
As one of the characters in Assassins says, "Tolstoy was right, you can't beat the Gods. It's the small things—the warp and woof—that make up the pattern. And how much influence do we have over the small? Now that's a theme for a modern...
Assisted Living
Assisted Living presents us with a series of queasy anecdotes concerning an eleven-year-old boy and his grandfather, a monster for whom murder, violence, incest, drunkenness, and philosophy all pass as equally valid ways to spend one's . . . [continued]
At Swim-Two-Birds
A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of...
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
A Casebook
A Casebook
This casebook investigates Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds.
At War
Like The Best of Myles and Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn (both available from Dalkey Archive Press), At War is a collection of Flann O'Brien's columns written for the Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen. Taken from the war years...
The Attic
The Attic is Danilo Kiš's first novel. Written in 1960, published in 1962, and set in contemporary Belgrade, it explores the relationship of a young man, known only as Orpheus, to the art of writing; it also tracks his relationship with a colorful . . .
Autoportrait
Édouard Levé's unusual and uncompromising autobiography, translated by Lorin Stein . . . [continued]
AVA
Ava Klein, thirty-nine, lover of life, world traveler, professor of comparative literature, is dying. From her hospital bed on this, her last day on earth, she makes one final ecstatic voyage. People, places, offhand memories, and imaginary things...
Avalovara
A work remarkable for both its form and execution, Avalovara belongs to the tradition of contemporary writing that Gregory Rabassa calls "the inventive novel." These novels include such works as Julio Cortzar's Hopscotch and Italo...
Awakening to the Great Sleep War
One of the loveliest riddles of Austrian literature is finally available in English translation.
Back
One-legged Charley Summers is finally home from the war, after several years in a German prison camp, only to find he must now deal with the death of his lover Rose. A shell-shocked romantic—slow, distant, and dreamy—he begins to have...
A Bad Man
Sentenced to a year in jail for providing his customers with everything they needed—drugs for the nervous, abortions for the unintending, guns for the crazed—department store owner Leo Feldman finds himself in a Kafka-esque prison. Labeled...
Bad News of the Heart
In Bad News of the Heart, a seeing-eye dog leads a blind man into a frozen river, a southern Baptist loses his memory and finds true love in Bel Air, an obese dot.com executive has anorgasmic latex sex with her CEO, a homeless man in New York...
Balcony of Europe
Aidan Higgins's novel has long been unavailable, and is here reissued in a new and revised edition. Balcony of Europe tells the story of a young Jewish wife from San Francisco and a middle-aged Irish painter who meet in Spain...
The Bamboo Bed
Written shortly after William Eastlake's return from Vietnam where he was a reporter for Nation magazine, The Bamboo Bed was one of the first novels to proclaim the insanity of the Vietnam War. The plot revolves around Captain Clancy...
Barley Patch
Barley Patch takes as its subject the reasons an author might abandon fiction—or so he thinks—forever.
The Barnum Museum
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...
La Bâtarde
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...
The Bathroom
First published in France in 1985, The Bathroom was Jean-Philippe Toussaint's debut novel, and it heralded a new generation of innovative French literature. In this playful and perplexing book, we meet a young Parisian researcher who lives...
Berg
"A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. . . ."
So begins Ann Quin's first novel, which has been compared to the fiction of Samuel Beckett and Nathalie Sarraute. Against the backdrop of...
Best European Fiction 2010
Best European Fiction 2010 is the inaugural installment of what will become an annual anthology of stories from across Europe.
Best European Fiction 2011
Best European Fiction 2011 is the second installment of an annual anthology of stories from across Europe. Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur "Genius-Award" winner Aleksandar Hemon, with a preface by Irish novelist Colum McCann ...
Best European Fiction 2012
Now in its third year, the Best European Fiction series has become a mainstay in the literary landscape.
Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction
Sixteen of Mexico's finest fiction writers born after 1945 are collected in this compelling bilingual anthology, offering a glimpse of the rich tapestry of Mexican fiction, from small-town dramas to tales of urban savagery . . .
The Best of Myles
The Best of Myles brings together the best of Flann O'Brien's newspaper column "Cruiskeen Lawn," written over a nearly thirty-year period. Covering such subjects as plumbers, the justice system, and improbable inventions, O'Brien (whose real...)
A Bestiary
Originally published as three separate volumes—Donkey's Years, Dog Days, and The Whole Hog—A Bestiary relates the life and times of one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers. As in his fiction, Higgins's writing...
Betrayed by Rita Hayworth
Finally back in print, Manuel Puig's celebrated first novel is a startling anatomy of a small town in thrall to its own petty lusts, betrayals, scandals, thefts, and gossip—but most of all, to the movies. Centering around a boy named Toto, privy...
Billy and Girl
Darkly comic and more than a little disturbing, Billy and Girl introduces a version of childhood trauma that is completely original and utterly unnerving. Abandoned years ago by their parents, Billy and Girl live alone somewhere in England.
The Birth of Death and Other Comedies
The Novels of Russell H. Greenan
The Novels of Russell H. Greenan
In The Birth of Death and Other Comedies: The Novels of Russell H. Greenan, Tom Whalen draws widely from the American tradition to locate Greenan's lineage in the work of Hawthorne and Poe, and the fiction of Twain, West, Hammett, Cain, and Thompson.
Blind Man's Bluff
Perversely, but perhaps appropriately, Aidan Higgins—-one of the few contemporary writers worthy of comparison with Beckett and Joyce-—has chosen to wait until his sight has nearly left him to assemble this collection of visual treats . . .
Blindness
Blinded in an accident on his way home from boarding school, John Haye must reevaluate his life and the possibilities for his future. His stepmother—worried that, blind and dependent, he'll spend his life with her—wants to marry him off to...
Blue Pastoral
"I see him now! Somewhere out there in that gloaming that we call the Past that Time forgot—his ratty beard and frizzy hair, his hearty grease sandwiches, his rusted bicycle clips. An unlikely hero, your good faces seem to say . . ."
And so...
The Book of Emotions
In a future Brazil, a blind photographer considers a sequence of his old photographs . . . [continued]
The Book of Intrusions
In the tradition of Flann O'Brien's comic Irish extravaganzas, Desmond MacNamara's novel is a hilarious excursion into Irish history and literature.
The Book of Jokes
Imagine a universe where every joke you’ve ever heard is solid, real, and occasionally dangerous—and all happening, one after the other, to the same small group of people. Detailing a series of filthy and ludicrous episodes in the life of a single...
Bornholm Night-Ferry
During the five years of their adulterous affair, Finn Fitzgerald and Elin Marstrander spend only 47 days and nights together. At each of their meetings—in Spain or London, or on the tiny island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, which serves as...
Boswell: A Modern Comedy
Boswell is Stanley Elkin's first and funniest novel: the comic odyssey of a twentieth-century groupie who collects celebrities as his insurance policy against death.
James Boswell—strong man, professional wrestler (his most heroic match is...
Bouvard and Pécuchet
Although unfinished during his lifetime, Bouvard and Pécuchet is now considered to be one of Flaubert's greatest masterpieces. In his own words, the novel is "a kind of encyclopedia made into farce . . . A book in which I shall spit out my...
Bowstring
On the Dissimilarity of the Similar
On the Dissimilarity of the Similar
Out in English translation for the first time, Bowstring is a seminal work, in which Shklovsky redefines estrangement (ostranenie) as a device of the literary comparatist—the "person out of place," who must search for meaning with a strained sensibility.
Brecht at Night
This "documentary novel," the latest of Estonian author Mati Unt's deadpan and playful works to be translated into English, is about a little-known period in the life of the great Bertolt Brecht, when the writer became stuck in Finland awaiting a visa...
A Brief History of Yes
A Brief History of Yes tells the story of the break-up between a Portuguese woman named Maria and an unnamed American man: it is a collage-like, fragmentary novel whose form perfectly captures the workings of attraction and grief . . .
The Budding Tree
This Naoki Prize–winning work is a personal yet precise account of the lives of working women in the Edo period (1600–1868).
In the latter half of the Edo period, the warrior caste was finding itself pushed out of the top echelons of society by the...
The Buenos Aires Affair
The third of Dalkey Archive's reprints of Puig's novels, The Buenos Aires affair was hailed by the New York Times as "an Argentinian tour de force."
Building Waves
It is the early eighties, and the housing industry is booming. Previously unpopulated mountainous areas of the Japanese countryside are being leveled to accommodate new waves of people. Similarly, a new wave of feminism, particularly a change . . .
But for the Lovers
In the years since its original publication, But for the Lovers has acquired an underground reputation as one of the most remarkable novels about World War II, doing for the Pacific war theater what Joseph Heller's Catch-22 did for the European one...
Cadenza
Like Melies's film The Hallucinations of Baron Munchausen, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza gives us a hero, Desmond, who finds himself caught between two worlds, the night before and the morning after, the past and the present, the world that is and the world...
Camera
In this improbable love story, Toussaint creates a character who is obsessed with himself: how he does things and all the ways he might have done them, how he thinks, why he thinks the way that he thinks, how he might do or think otherwise. What...
Cards of Identity
Cards of Identity is a scathing satire of psychology, identity theory, and class prejudice. The plot centers on an annual meeting of the Identity Club, a group of psychologists who come together to present case histories promoting their chosen...
Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas
From the award-winning author of The Tunnel and A Temple of Texts come four interrelated novellas that explore good and evil, action and thought, redemption and possession. The reader will encounter here a traveling salesman who gets lost...
Case Closed
Patrik Ouředník once again confounds expectations with what seems, on the surface, to be a detective novel...
The Case of the Persevering Maltese
A companion to The Human Country: New and Collected Stories, this volume contains all of Harry Mathews's nonfiction. These astonishing essays cover a wide range of literary topics, including discussion of complex musical forms and Oulipian...
Castle Keep
It is December of 1944, and a detachment of American soldiers has been assigned to guard an ancient castle in Belgium inhabited by an elderly aristocrat, his young wife, and countless valuable artifacts. The soldiers virtually wait out the...
Castle to Castle
It is Germany near the end of World War II, the Allies have landed and members of the Vichy France government have been sequestered in a labyrinthine castle, replete with secret passages and subterranean hideaways. The group of 1,400 terrified...
Catastrophe Practice
In his recent novels—including his award-winning Hopeful Monsters—Nicholas Mosley has investigated the patterns that govern our mental and emotional lives and the possibilities that we have for change, and nowhere has he explored such...
The Cave of Heaven
This extravagant novel marks the English-language debut of one of France's most exciting and controversial writers. At the center is a mysterious excavation site in southwest France, where the skull of a 500,000-year-old man has been discovered...
The Celebration
In the early morning of March 31, 1970 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the annual birthday celebration of a prominent and wealthy young artist is taking place, and a train docked in Plaza Station filled with starving, drought-stricken migrant workers...
Century 21
Century 21, a time machine in literary form, ignores the unity of time, space, and character. This tragicomical idyll of the future past mixes ancient and modern genres: Platonic dialogue and nineteenth-century romance, reportage and science...
Chapel Road
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...
Children of Darkness and Light
Many years ago, during a hiatus between his early more conventional novels and his later inventive novels, Nicholas Mosley wrote books that directly treated religion and philosophy, attempting in them to find a way of speaking about religion in a...
Chinese Letter
Ordered by two mysterious men to write a statement of about 100 pages, the narrator of Chinese Letter—who's not sure of his name, but calls himself Fritz—faithfully records the bizarre occurrences of his daily life: his absurd...
Chopin's Move
With his trademark comically wry phrasing and a sure eye for quirky detail, Echenoz has produced his oddest and most enjoyable novel to date. Chopin's Move interweaves the fates of Chopin, entomologist and recalcitrant secret agent; Oswald, a...
Christ versus Arizona
Christ versus Arizona turns on the events in 1881 that surrounded the shootout at the OK Corral, where Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Virgil and Morgan Earp fought the Clantons and the McLaurys. Set against a backdrop of an Arizona influenced by...
Christopher Unborn
Conceived exactly nine months before the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World, the narrator of Christopher Unborn spends the novel waiting to be born. But what kind of world will he be delivered into?
Chromos
A controversial finalist for the National Book Award in 1990, Chromos is one of the true masterpieces of post-World War II fiction. Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, Chromos anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers...
Cigarettes
Cigarettes is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. As we have come to expect from a Harry Mathews novel, nothing is as simple as it...
The City Builder
An architect in an unnamed city considers his life, his work, and the many-layered history of the city he and his family—architects all—have contributed to building. In the days after World War II—during which American bombers...
Cleaned Out
Cleaned Out tells the story of Denise Lesur, a 20-year-old woman suffering the after-effects of a back-alley abortion. Alone in her college dorm room, Denise attempts to understand how her suffocating middle-class upbringing has brought her to such an...
Cobra and Maitreya: Two Novels
The late Severo Sarduy was one of the most outrageous and baroque of the Latin American Boom writers of the sixties and seventies, and here bound back to back are his two finest creations. Cobra (1972) recounts the tale of a transvestite named Cobra...
The Collaborators
A noir set in the seediest backwaters of the French publishing industry, The Collaborators tells the story of a hapless drifter who, after years of not particularly heroic effort, finally manages to write a book. A good book? A bad book?
Collected Fiction
Best known as one of the most significant poets of the 20th century, Louis Zukofsky was also an accomplished writer of fiction, all of which is collected here for the first time. Included is his only novel, Little (1970), which John Leonard in the New...
Collected Poems
"Markson is regarded as an inventive literary stylist in the manner of James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Malcolm Lowry . . . and many critics have commented that his compressed, highly allusive fiction verges on poetry."
In view of such a judgment...
Collected Prose
Early in his career, Robert Creeley believed that his greatest contributions to literature would be in prose. Although he has since established himself as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, his remarkable body of prose work...
Collected Writings
Olive Moore is one of the great undiscovered novelists of the twentieth century. Between 1929 and 1934 (between the ages of 24 and 29), she published four brilliant books that earned her a reputation as an enfant terrible of British literature. After...
A Community Writing Itself
Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area
Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area
Sarah Rosenthal interviews contemporary experimental American writers about art and life.
Compact
Maurice Roche has been called "the most interesting novelist in France" (TriQuarterly), and Compact "one of the classics of our modernity" (Le Figaro). Certainly, Compact is one of the most compellingly original works of fiction of the postwar period...
The Company of Ghosts
When a process-server arrives at a housing project on the edge of Paris to draw up a routine inventory of goods in view of seizure, the reception he receives from distrainees Rose Mélie and her teenage daughter Louisiane is more than he has...
The Complete Butcher's Tales
In the fantastic tradition of Borges, Bruno Schulz, Angela Carter, and H.P. Lovecraft, here are nearly sixty unforgettable stories that ignore the confines of space and time to offer, among other times and places: a cabinet of curiosities in...
The Complete Fiction of W. M. Spackman
Described by Stanley Elkin as "this country's best-kept literary secret" and "a lost American classic," W. M. Spackman is one of the finest writers of the twentieth century.
This omnibus edition includes all five of the author's previously...
Complete Plays
Complementing Dalkey Archive's edition of Firbank's Complete Short Stories, Complete Plays makes available for the first time in one volume this inimitable British writer's three excursions into drama: The Mauve Tower (1904),...
Concluding
Considered by Henry Green to be one of his best novels, Concluding tells the story of the strange events events that occur in a single day at a State-run school for girls. Retired scientist Mr. Rock, "an old man in love with his goose," lives in...
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
A scathing, razor-sharp satire set on a New Orleans-bound riverboat, The Confidence-Man exposes the fraudulent optimism of so many American idols and idealists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and P. T. Barnum, in particular—and...
Contemporary Georgian Fiction
This volume brings together stories from nineteen of the most influential contemporary authors to have emerged from the Republic of Georgia. Spanning fifty years, but with a particular emphasis on post-independence fiction, this
collection features . . .
Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology
Prominent Moscow poet Evgeny Bunimovich selected representative work from forty-four living Russian poets born after 1945 to be translated and published in this bilingual edition. The collection ranges from the mordant post-Soviet irony of Igor...
Context N°1
- Reading Flann Brian O'Brien O’Nolan
- Reading Beckett’s Fiction
- Reading Diane Williams
- Reading David Markson
- "The Parallels!" Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges
Context N°2
- Reading Carole Maso
- Reading Jacques Roubaud
- Reading Jean Rhys
- From Tristram Shandy, Volume VI, Chapter XL
- From Don Quixote de la Mancha, Book Two, Chapter One
Context N°3
- Reading Manuel Puig: A Biographer's View
- Reading Coleman Dowell’s Island People
- Reading Nathalie Sarraute
- From Gargantua and Pantagruel Book 2, Chapter 7
- From the Letters of Claude Debussy
Context N°4
- Reading Claude Simon
- Reading Thomas Bernhard
- Reading James Joyce
- Reading Carol De Chellis Hill
- "A Bash in the Tunnel"
Context N°5
- Reading Stanley Elkin
- Reading B. S. Johnson
- Reading Elio Vittorini
- Reading John Barth
- From Peri Bathous
Context N°6
- Reading Vladimir Nabokov
- Reading Pierre Guyotat
- Reading Lydia Davis
- Reading Luis Rafael Sanchez
- From Forms and Substances in the Arts
Context N°7
- Reading Jaimy Gordon
- Reading Robert Walser
- Reading Alasdair Gray
- New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea, Part II
- From Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language
Context N°8
- Reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline
- Reading Harry Mathews
- Reading Ben Marcus
- Reading Ann Quin's Berg
- "The Author’s Prologue" from Gargantua and Pantagruel
Context N°9
- Reading Danilo Kis
- Reading Raymond Queneau
- Reading Kathy Acker
- Reading Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser
- From "A Letter to Edmund Gosse" and "Books Which Have Influenced Me"
Context N°10
- Reading Raymond Roussel
- Reading Marcel Bénabou
- Reading Cesare Pavese
- From "Art as Device"
- Excursus on War
Context N°11
- Reading William Carlos Williams
- Reading Georges Perec
- Reading Aidan Higgins
- Reading André Breton
- Reading Osman Lins's Avalovara
Context N°12
- Reading Douglas Woolf's Ya! & John-Juan
- Reading Dubravka Ugresic Through Six Selected Sentences
- Reading Louis Calaferte
- Reading Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
- Reading Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Context N°13
- Reading Lydie Salvayre
- Reading Viktor Shklovsky with a little bit about Jonathan Franzen
- Reading Ingeborg Bachmann
- Reading José Saramago
- Picasso to the Cows: The Disappearance of Public Art in Chicago
Context N°14
- Reading Jacques Jouet
- Reading Pierre Klossowski
- Reading Violette Leduc's La Bâtarde
- Reading Wilson Harris’s The Mask of the Beggar
- Reading Nicholas Mosley
Context N°15
- Reading Patrik Ouredník
- Letter from Russia: Contemporary Women's Prose
- Interview with Ariel Dorfman
- Interview with Dubravka Ugresic
- Nine-and-a-Half Americas
Context N°16
- Reading Stefan Themerson
- Reading Jean Echenoz
- Reading Danielle Collobert
- Letter from Peru: Pathways of the New Peruvian Narrative
- Letter from Russia: Contemporary Émigré Writing
Context N°17
- Reading Michal Ajvaz
- Letter from France
- Letter from Finland
- Letter from Croatia
- Interview with Jirí Grusa
Context N°18
- Reading W. M. Spackman
- Letter from Finland
- Letter from Sarajevo
- Interview with Mark Binelli
- Interview with Thalia Field
Context N°19
- Reading Piotr Szewc's Annihilation
- Reading Ivan Ângelo’s The Celebration
- Reading Wallace Markfield’s To an Early Grave & Teitlebaum’s Window
- Letter from Bulgaria
- Letter from Russia
Context N°20
- Reading Aidan Higgins
- from Flotsam and Jetsam
- Reading Robert Pinget
- from Trio
- Reading Witold Gombrowicz
Context N°21
- Reading Gérard Gavarry
- Reading Josep Pla's The Gray Notebook
- Revisiting Edward Dahlberg’s Because I Was Flesh
- Five Feuilletons on Sergei Eisenstein
- Translators in Conversation
Context N°22
- Reading Stanley Crawford's Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine
- The Making of John Ashbery and James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies
- Interview with Micheline Aharonian Marcom
- Reading Rikki Ducornet
Context N°23
- Reading Christine Montalbetti
- Reading Gerald Murnane
- Interview with Gerhard Meier
- A List by Roland Topor
- A Conversation with Giovanni Orelli
- Slovenian Literature: Ten (Plus) Novels
Conversations with Professor Y
"Here's the truth, simply stated . . . bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales." So begins the imaginary interview that comprises this novel. Professor Y, the interviewing academic, asks questions that allow Céline, a...
Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde
When Samuel Beckett and the Dutch painter Bram van Velde met in Paris in the 1930s, both were living in abject poverty, and neither could have anticipated that—on the other side of World War II and the brutal occupation of France by the Nazis—they...
The Conversions
At a dinner party hosted by a wealthy New Yorker, a guest receives a gold adze, the coveted prize in a worm race. When the man dies the next day, he bequeaths, according to a stipulation in his will, the bulk of his fortune to the adze's possessor...
The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov
On 23 September 1947, Nikola Petkov, the last significant opposition leader to the Communist takeover in Bulgaria, was hanged in the Central Prison in Sofia, Bulgaria, sentenced to death after a rigged trial: "Petkov was hanged by the neck and was...
The Corpus in the Library: Stories and Novellas
In this collection of two novellas and seven short stories, Alf MacLochlainn comically reduces life's problems to the minute details of everyday existence. Socks, shoes, and trousers suggest perplexing difficulties: how best to put them on, the...
Count Julian
Exiled in Tangiers, cut off from home and country, the narrator of Count Julian rants against the homeland he was forced to leave: Spain. The second novel in Juan Goytisolo's trilogy (including Marks of Identity and Juan the...
The Count of Concord
Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was—as Nicholas Delbanco writes—“world famous in his lifetime,” yet now he has been “almost wholly forgotten.” Like Delbanco himself, Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson—the narrator of this novel and the...
The Counterfeiters
Wide-ranging enough to encompass Buster Keaton, Charles Babbage, horses, and a man riding a bicycle while wearing a gas mask, The Counterfeiters is one of Hugh Kenner's greatest achievements. In this fascinating work of literary and cultural...
The Country Where No One Ever Dies
A young girl’s father is constantly forcing her to kiss him, and her aunt predicts that she will grow up to be a whore. With Albania’s communist regime crumbling around them, sex, dictatorship, and death are inescapable subjects for the girl and her...
Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers
These nine stories reveal a dazzling variety of styles, tones and subject matter. Among them are some of Stanley Elkin's finest, including the fabulistic "On a Field, Rampant," the farcical "Perlmutter at the East Pole," and the stylized "A Poetics...
Critical Dictionary of Mexican Literature
from 1955 to the Present
from 1955 to the Present
The Critical Dictionary of Mexican Literature is a highly subjective and unscientific reference work, collecting the often acerbic, always poetic reviews and essays written on Mexican literature by renowned critic . . . [continued]
Crome Yellow
On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabited by several of Huxley's most outlandish characters—from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his...
Crystal Vision
Both comic and haunting, Crystal Vision invokes the world of magic and the arcane as filtered through a group of characters gathered on the streets and in the stores of their Brooklyn neighborhood to gossip, insult, lust, brag, and argue.
The Currency of Paper
Maximilian Sacheverell Hollingsworth is a counterfeiter, sculptor, filmmaker, sound artist, mystic, and terminal recluse, and over the course of fifty years, making use of a vast stockpile of illegitimate currency, he funds a great range of . . .
The Dalkey Archive
Hailed as "the best comic fantasy since Tristram Shandy" upon its publication in 1964, The Dalkey Archive is Flann O'Brien's fifth and final novel; or rather (as O'Brien wrote to his editor), "The book is not meant to be a novel or anything of the...
Dark Desires and the Others
Dark Desires is the author's autobiographical fantasia on the ten years she spent living in New York City. Valenzuela has called this book her "apocryphal autobiography."
Dark Paradise
A man murders a grocer over fifteen cents—but in the sharp, icy prose and detached tone that defines this collection, his crime seems neither sensational nor entirely reprehensible. Rosa Liksom populates a world of snow-covered landscapes...
Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air
Though best known as the author of a series of brilliant novels, here Higgins turns his writerly gifts to work for the radio. This collection includes ten plays broadcast in England and Ireland between 1973 and 1990, which have had a significant...
A Day in the Life
A Day in the Life features twelve portraits of the vivid and curious realities experienced by a man in his sixties.
The Death of Lysanda
In fragmented prose halfway between the Old Testament and the playful stories of Julio Cortázar, these tales take to pieces the psyches of two men—and a nation—at war with themselves.
Degrees
On Tuesday, October 12, 1954, Pierre Vernier, a teacher in a Paris lycée, begins setting down an account that is to be a complete record of the life lived by himself, his students, and his fellow teachers. He begins by meticulously recording what he...
Demolishing Nisard
Désiré Nisard must be destroyed; the only question is how. But take comfort: with effervescent imagination and blistering wit, Eric Chevillard, one of contemporary France's most dazzlingly singular novelists, has come forward to give us a few ideas.
Diary of a Blood Donor
In this contemporary retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Estonian writer Mati Unt offers a playful yet unsettling mixture of fact and fiction, combining pieces of Estonian political history—in particular the figure of Lydia Koidula (1843-1886)...
The Dick Gibson Show
Look who's on the "Dick Gibson Radio Show": Arnold the Memory Expert ("I've memorized the entire West Coast shoreline—except for cloud cover and fog banks"). Bernie Perk, the burning pharmacist. Henry Harper, the nine-year-old orphan...
Disconnection
In two interconnected, alternating stories, Claude Ollier has written a disturbing, haunting, apocalyptic novel that brings together the end of the Third Reich with the closing of the twentieth century. The first is the autobiographical story of...
Distant Relations
Distant Relations begins in the elegant Automobile Club de France as an elderly Count tells a story to the unnamed narrator. But the book does not remain here in the café, nor even in France. Instead, as the Count speaks, the story moves across...
The Distant Sound
A composer who has already given up composing becomes increasingly fixated on capturing a mysterious, eerie, distant sound...
Do Not Touch
When French mafioso Oscar Lux saved Clovis Baccara from killing himself, he became the boss and something of a mentor to Clovis. Twenty years later, it is no surprise that Clovis is named best man when Oscar decides to settle down and get out of the...
Do You Hear Them?
The setting of Nathalie Sarraute's Do You Hear Them? is a dinner conversation between a father and his old friend about a recently acquired pre-Columbian statue. As they discuss the merits of the piece and art in general, the father hears his...
The Dolls' Room
A classic of contemporary Catalan literature, and a haunting and satirical portrait of a vanishing age, Llorenç Villalonga's The Dolls' Room concerns the decline of Don Toni and Dona Maria Antonia Bearn: aristocrats, cousins, husband and wife . . .
Dolly City
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 . . .
Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New York School
The essays in this book focus attention on the vibrant New York poetry scene of the 1960s and '70s, on the poets who came after what is now known as the New York School. Bernadette Mayer, Hannah Weiner, Clark Coolidge, Anne Waldman, and Ron Padgett...
Doting
Written almost completely in dialogue, Henry Green's final novel is a biting comedy of manners that exposes the deceptive difference between those who love and those who "dote." Arthur Middleton is a middle-aged member of the upper-middle class living...
Dukla
At several points in the haunting Dukla, Andrzej Stasiuk claims that what he is trying to do is "write a book about light."
Dumitru Tsepeneag and the Canon of Alternative Literature
Dumitru Tsepeneag and the Canon of Alternative Literature is not just the study of one man's work, but of an entire nation's literary history over the latter half of the twentieth century. The first monograph to appear in English on Tsepeneag.
Duras: A Biography
This is the first full-length biography of one of the best-known and most influential French writers of our time, as celebrated for her films (Hiroshima Mon Amour) as for her novels (The Ravishing of Lol Stein, The Lover). It takes Duras from colonial...
Dust
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Russia’s leading founder of Language poetry, in his new collection of essays fuses seemingly disparate elements of poetry, philosophy, journalism, and prose in an attempt to capture the workings of memory. At stake is not what...
Dying
Take several genre novels telling similar stories of love and death—a spy novel, a romance, an adventure tale—mix them together so that items and images from each start popping up in the others, add playful asides and a collagist's sensibility . . .
Efforts at Truth: An Autobiography
Nicholas Mosley brings the unblinking probing of a scientist to bear on the workings of the writer's imagination. The result is a constantly stimulating, frequently startling, and always cheerfully unorthodox autobiography.
As a novelist...
Embracing Family
Set during the U.S. Occupation following World War II, Embracing Family is a novel of conflict—between Western and Eastern traditions, between a husband and wife, between ideals and reality. At the opening of the book, Miwa Shunsuke and his wife...
The Enamoured Knight
This book is filled with passion and love for the art of writing and is a celebration of reading. Through the prism of the great Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, Douglas Glover provides a scrupulous reading of Cervantes's Don Quixote.
Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot
One of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, Viktor Shklovsky writes the critical equivalent of what Ross Chambers calls "loiterature"—writing that roams, playfully digresses, moving freely between the literary work and the...
The Engineer of Human Souls
The Engineer of Human Souls is a labyrinthine comic novel that investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant to Canada. As the novel begins, he is a professor of American literature at a college in Toronto.
Eros the Bittersweet
A book about love as seen by the ancients, Eros is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.'
Essays on Poetry
Taken from throughout Mills's career, the essays collected in this volume delve into the work of such influential writers as Wallace Stevens, Denise Levertov, Samuel Beckett, Galway Kinnell, Edith Sitwell, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Richard...
Europeana
Patrik Ouredník's first novel to be translated into English is a unique version of the history of the twentieth century. Told in an informal, mesmerizing voice, Ouredník represents the twentieth century in all its contradictions and...
Everyday Life
The hiring of a new secretary shouldn't be a big deal—just a slight a change in the office environment. But for the protagonist of this novel, it is a declaration of war, a call to arms: "The new secretary has only been here two days," she says...
Excitability: Selected Stories, 1986-1996
Excitability collects the best of Diane Williams's bold, often hilarious, stories of love, sex, child-rearing, death, and space aliens—stories that are (in the words of Bradford Morrow) "wry, sensuous, spiritual, wise, raunchy, familial...
Exiled from Almost Everywhere
In Exiled from Almost Everywhere, Juan Goytisolo's perverse mutant protagonist—the Parisian "Monster of Le Sentier"—is blown up by an extremist bomber and finds himself in the cyberspace of the Thereafter with an infinite collection of computer monitors.
Experience and Religion
"Religion," this book begins, "is a mistrusted word now," and Nicholas Mosley, in this engaging meditation, seeks to repair that trust. Rather than trying to convince or compel the reader to accept his beliefs, he describes how religion functions in...
The Explosion of the Radiator Hose
(and other mishaps, on a journey from Paris to Kinshasa)
(and other mishaps, on a journey from Paris to Kinshasa)
In this nominally true story of an epic, transcontinental road trip, Jean Rolin travels to Africa from darkest France, accompanying a battered Audi to its new life as a taxi to be operated by the family of a Congolese security guard.
Fables of the Novel
Readers of the contemporary novel in France are witnessing the most astonishing reinvigoration of narrative prose since the New Novel of the 1950s. In the last few years, bold, innovative, and richly compelling novels have been written by a variety of...
Faction
The second of Argentinean eccentric Juan Filloy's novels to be
translated into English, Faction tells the story of seven erudite, homeless, and semi-incompetent radicals traveling
from city to city in an attempt to foment a revolution . . .
Fado
In this delightful collection of essays—by turns wry and reflective, wistful and witty—contemporary Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk turns his attention to the villages and small towns of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania, and his native Poland...
The Family of Pascual Duarte
The Family of Pascual Duarte is the story of Pascual Duarte—a Spanish peasant born into a brutal world of poverty, hatred, and depravity—as told from his prison cell, where he awaits execution for the murders he's committed throughout his...
A Farewell to Prague
Following a crippling depression and institutionalization, the writer Desmond wanders from his native Dublin around an increasingly unrecognizable Europe, and as far as the southern United States, assembling a patchwork of small stories . . .
Farewell: A Mansion in Occupied Istanbul
A sweeping story of the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the First World War, Farewell is a novel of great warmth, suffused with tragedy . . .
The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am
Mathea Martinsen has never been good at dealing with other people. After a lifetime, her only real accomplishment is her longevity: everyone she reads about in the obituaries has died younger than she is now.
The Fear of Losing Eurydice
This lyrical novel by one of Mexico's leading women writers explores both desire and the desire to tell a love story. In an idle moment between grading assignments, a French teacher sitting in a cafe in a Caribbean seaport town sketches an island on...
Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell
From his birth in rural Kentucky during the Great Depression to his suicide in Manhattan in 1985, Coleman Dowell played many roles. He was a songwriter and lyricist for television. He was a model. He was a Broadway playwright. He served in the U.S...
Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century
Fiction Now reports on the current states of the novel in France, taking a series of soundings within the compass of innovative French writing since 2001. Chapters focus closely upon Jean Echenoz, Marie Redonnet, Christian Gailly, Lydie Salvayre...
Finding a Form
Scathing, lyrical, and hilarious by turns, this collection of essays by William H. Gass—perhaps our greatest critic and author—sounds a rallying cry against the steady encroachment of the banal and the lazy into the fields of fiction.
Fire the Bastards!
Fire the Bastards! is a scorching attack on the book-review media using the critical reception of William Gaddis's 1955 novel The Recognitions as a case study. Although this monumental novel is now generally regarded as one of the few indisputable...
The First Book of Grabinoulor
Like its author, Grabinoulor has been rediscovered only in the last few decades. Originally published in SIC in 1919 and praised by such writers as Apollinaire, Celine, Max Jacob, and Raymond Queneau, it did not appear in English until 1986.
Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians
An enlightening study of three writers, Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians begins with an explanation of the effect of the printing press on books. The "book as book" has been removed from the oral tradition by such features...
Flotsam and Jetsam
Aidan Higgins is one of the most highly respected Irish writers of the past fifty years, heir to such master stylists as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. The short prose and fiction collected here spans Higgins's entire career, and provides American...
Flowers of Grass
Outside Tokyo, a tuberculosis sanatorium in the village of K has a six-bed ward that the narrator, an aspiring poet, shares with a student of linguistics and budding writer named Shiomi . . .
A Fool's Paradise
"Marriage kills love. That's why people get married." The unmarried and unemployed narrator of A Fool's Paradise is seeing a married man and must, because of her social security, apply and interview for jobs she does not want.
Foreign Parts
When it was first published in Great Britain, Foreign Parts was described as "a road movie for feminists . . . a funny, sharp and gutsy portrayal of female friendship," and "a painstakingly crafted, multilayered investigation of contemporary female...
The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart
Composed of 150 poems, with a title taken from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, and partly a response to the poetry of Raymond Queneau, this collection explores Jacques Roubaud's many poetic modes. He skips from the strict form of the...
Forms and Substances in the Arts
An engaging companion piece to The Arts of the Beautiful, this volume advances Etienne Gilson's theories about art as a process of "making" by focusing on the substances available to an artist.
The Fountains of Neptune
"My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind."
Thus begins...
The Franchiser
Ben Flesh is one of the men "who made America look like America, who made America famous." He collects franchises, traveling from state to state, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the American landscape. But both the nation and Ben...
The Free-Lance Pallbearers
Ishmael Reed's electrifying first novel zooms readers off to the crazy, ominous kingdom of HARRY SAM—a miserable and dangerous place ruled for thirty years by Harry Sam, a former used car salesman who wields his power from his bathroom throne...
French Fiction Revisited
The most interesting French fiction since World War II is also the most revolutionary, exploring new narrative techniques and incorporating challenging new ideas in aesthetics, politics, psychoanalysis, gender, linguistics, and philosophy. This...
Friction
In the tradition of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, Eloy Urroz, the acclaimed author of The Obstacles, here presents his latest literary card game, and you, the reader, have been invited to sit at the table and play . . .
Further Cuttings from Cruiskeen Lawn
When The Best of Myles was published in 1968, it was hailed (by S. J. Perelman among others) as one of the supreme comic achievements of the English language. Now, in response to the clamorous demands of men of science and the arts, men of steam, of...
The Galley Slave
The Galley Slave is a tour de force of historical fiction centered on the misadventures of an Everyman of indeterminate origins named Johan Ot, who is part picaresque anti-hero, part Josef K. . . . [continued]
A Garden of Trees
"When you have put your trust in shadows there is nothing that is real. Have you found this?"
Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability . . .
Garden, Ashes
Garden, Ashes is the remarkable account of Andi Scham's childhood during World War II, as his Jewish family traverses Eastern Europe to escape persecution. As the family moves from house to house, the novel focuses on Andi's relationship with...
Generation of Vipers
Perhaps the most vitriolic attack ever launched on the American way of living—from politicians to professors to businessmen to Mom to sexual mores to religion—Generation of Vipers ranks with the works of De Tocqueville and Emerson in...
Genii Over Salzburg
In this, his second collection of poetry, Carl R. Martin seeks out essences of things, of thoughts, of broad sweeps of culture and language. In a work which resists classification, Martin's use of the permutations and gradations of meaning, the nuance...
Geometric Regional Novel
Geometric Regional Novel is an innovative satire on the process by which bureaucracy and official regimentation insidiously pervade society...
George Anderson
Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time
Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time
Theo Fales is a one-time historian turned book editor who specializes in ghostwriting the memoirs of leading American policy-makers.
George Mills
An ambitious, digressive, and endlessly entertaining account of the thousand-year history of the George Millses, George Mills is the antithesis to the typical Horatio Alger story. Since the First Crusade, there has always been a George Mills...
Gilbert Sorrentino: A Descriptive Bibliography
The trajectory of Gilbert Sorrentino's literary life can be tracked in this bibliography, from his first short story in a 1956 issue of his college literary magazine, through his involvement with the New York publishing scene in the 1960s and 1970s...
The Girl in the Photograph
Complex and hauntingly beautiful, Lygia Fagundes Telles's most acclaimed novel is a journey into the inner lives of three young women, each revealing her secrets and loves, each awaiting a destiny tied to the colorful and violent world of modern Brazil.
Giscome Road
Winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry upon first publication, Giscome Road continues the meditation on place begun in Here, C. S. Giscombe's earlier volume of poetry. Concerned with specific locales in northern Canada named for the...
The Glass Slipper and Other Stories
In addition to “The Glass Slipper,” this collection contains nine other stories held together by a common thread of self-perception: Yasuoka writes from the belief that the self has such depths that at times it can appear to be illusory. Set against...
God Head
In God Head, Scott Zwiren boldly and courageously records the terrifying, destructive experience of manic depression. From a promising young college student to mental hospitals to a confined, out-of-control, roller-coaster life on New York City's...
God's Hazard
God is said to have given humans freedom. Yet in the story of Genesis God is a punishing father-figure. Why have humans portrayed him like this? Here, a contemporary writer called Adam imagines God behaving as a good father should, seeing it is time...
Going to Patchogue
Patchogue is a village on Long Island sixty miles from New York City. A man now married and living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan decides to return to the village where he grew up. He carries the dead heaped on his shoulders and the memory of the...
The Golden Age
Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec, Michal Ajvaz's The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes about about an exotic civilization he encountered on an island in the...
The Good-Bye Angel
In The Good-Bye Angel, Brandão returns to his great subject: the tyranny of the community versus the individual, the city versus its inhabitants.
The Great Fire of London: A Story With Interpolations and Bifurcations
"I've devoted myself to the enterprise of destroying my memory . . . I set fire to it, and with its debris I charcoal-scrawl the paper." Part novel and part autobiography, The Great Fire of London is one of the great literary undertakings of the...
The Hard Life
Subtitled "An Exegesis of Squalor," The Hard Life is a sober farce from a master of Irish comic fiction. Set in Dublin at the turn of the century, the novel does involve squalor—illness, alcoholism, unemployment, bodily functions, crime, illicit...
He Who Searches
A professor of semiotics who doubles as a psychologist in Barcelona visits (always in disguise) a prostitute in the early hours of the morning on Mondays and Thursdays in order to analyze her without her knowing it. The story moves from Barcelona to...
Heartbreak Hotel
One is Daisy,
Two is Pearl,
Three is Rita,
Four is Meg,
Five is Gretchen,
Six is Maggie,
Seven's Quasi.
These are the residents of the Heartbreak Hotel, a way station for tour guides on mandatory rest leave from the Museum of the Revolution...
Heartbreak Tango
Awash in small-town gossip, petty jealousy, and intrigues, Manuel Puig's Heartbreak Tango is a comedic assault on the fault lines between the disappointments of the everyday world, and the impossible promises of commercials, pop songs, and movies..
Heartsnatcher
Vian's final and most serious novel begins with an elegant psychiatrist arriving in a remote town, where he helps deliver the triplets of a woman whose husband is locked up in a bedroom because she abhors him for causing the pain and discomfort of her...
Heatwave and Crazy Birds
When her archeologist father died, Loya Kaplan left Israel seemingly for good, severing all ties to her past. She returns now to a country that has become alien to her, and the house where she was raised, filled with relics of her past and her family.
Hedyphagetica
Hedyphagetica is a powerful political satire, a ribald comedy, and a desperate love letter to a woman named Aimeé. "Oh my, yes, I am afraid that in the beginning was the word . . ." So begins the narrator's account of his homeland, Gron, a country.
Here
C. S. Giscombe's Here is a long, single poem that takes place in a progression of three settings, three unlikely locations: the edges of the urban south, the edges—just beyond and just within the city—of rural Ohio, and the places where...
The Hesperides Tree
Reminiscent in theme and style to his Whitbread Award-winning Hopeful Monsters, Nicholas Mosley's The Hesperides Tree tells of a young man frustrated by the inability of his two chosen courses of study—biology and literature—to adequately...
Hidden Camera
From one of Serbia's greatest contemporary writers, Hidden Camera opens with the narrator finding a mysterious, blank envelope stuck in his apartment door inviting him to a private showing of a movie. Or so he initially thinks. Upon arrival at...
Hobson's Island
Hobson's Island (so called because Mr. Hobson bought it, or did Mr. Hobson buy it because it was so called?) enjoyed decades of isolation in the Atlantic Ocean. For years, the caretakers lived there peacefully, with only a cow for company and an...
The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction
Collecting twenty essays written by distinguished scholars from the United States and Germany, The Holodeck in the Garden offers an informative tour of the complex interrelations between science, technology, and contemporary American...
Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique
Gert Jonke’s prose ripples along like a piano étude, transcending its meticulously constructed sequences to transport the reader into an imaginary world. With a delightful combination of the ridiculous and the sublime, Jonke explores surreal...
Homesick
Moving from character to character, perspective to perspective, Homesick is a complex and moving portrait of parallel lives and failing love in a time of permanent war... A bestseller in Israel, this is the first U.S. edition.
Hopeful Monsters
Hopeful Monsters, winner of the Whitbread Award, is a tour de force of intellect and eros—one in which Albert Einstein taunts a lecture hall full of Nazis and Ludwig Wittgenstein is an awkward guest at an English garden party. It is a love story...
Hoppla! 1 2 3
The tale is simple, if grim: a disenfranchised teenage boy from the housing projects on the outskirts of Paris rapes and murders the manager of the supermarket where his mother works. But Gérard Gavarry is a writer who knows how literary inventiveness...
Hortense in Exile
Set to marry Gormanskoï, the Premier Prince Presumptive, our beautiful heroine Hortense has been exiled to Queneau'stown, where she finds herself in a real-life production of Hamlet—or is it Hatmel, the original Poldevian tale scandalously...
Hortense is Abducted
The second installment in Roubaud's popular and widely acclaimed "Hortense" series opens with a murder of a dog at the Church of Sainte-Gudule. Chief Inspector Blognard and his sidekick Arapède are on the scene, as is our narrator, Jacques...
Hotel Crystal
At some Parisian lost-and-found, a mysterious manuscript scribbled onto stray bits of hotel stationary and postcards and stuffed into an abandoned briefcase comes into the hands of an "editor," who claims to faithfully transcribe and assemble the...
Hotel Europa
The author-narrator, a Romanian émigré with a French wife, tells with great insight and humor the story of a young student's life and education as he passes from post-Ceausescu Romania through an unwelcoming Western Europe . . .
The House of Mourning and Other Stories
Focusing as always on the downtrodden and the eccentric, the misplaced and the dispossessed, Hogan's stories merge past with present, landscape with mindscape . . .
House of the Fortunate Buddhas
House of the Fortunate Buddhas is perhaps most startling for its fiery, uninhibited, and highly compelling narrator. By force of her intelligence, courage, and strength of will, she achieves an unlikely liberation of both mind and body.
The House of Ulysses
Julián Ríos's latest comic extravaganza is at once a serious literary excavation and a lecture as delivered by Groucho Marx on the subject of that great (and often imposing) cornerstone of world literature: James Joyce's Ulysses . . .
The Houses of Children
A ghost story unfolds simultaneously across three centuries and two continents; a young cannibal details the daily life and appetites of his clan; a man slowly, and without pain or blood, loses his limbs, his tongue, and his sight. Drawing on...
Huddleston Road
In circumstances all too familiar for many of us, Vic meets and falls in love with Lali, only to discover that what attracts him to her is also what will make the relationship impossible . . .
The Human Country
The Human Country collects all of Mathews's shorter fiction, including the early stories from Country Cooking, the mid-career stories from The American Experience, and ten recent, previously uncollected pieces that are every bit...
A Hunt for Optimism
A Hunt for Optimism (1931) circles obsessively around a single scene of interrogation in which a writer is subjected to a show trial for his unorthodoxy.
Hypothermia
Shocking, erudite, and affecting, these twenty-odd short stories, "micro-novels," and vignettes span a vast territory and introduce an array of bewildering characters . . .
I the Supreme
Latin America has seen, time and again, the rise of dictators, Supreme Leaders possessed of the dream of absolute power, who sought to impose their mad visions of Perfect Order on their own peoples. Latin American writers, in turn, have responded with...
Iceland
Iceland begins with Paul arriving at a mysterious Institute to pick out—on doctor's orders—a new internal organ. There he meets Emily, a young, bikini-clad woman hired to stimulate the organs preserved in a nutrient-enhanced swimming pool...
I'd Like
The thirteen short stories that make up Amanda Michalopoulou's I’d Like read like versions of an unwritten novel: each riveting tale resonates with the others, and yet a sense of their connectedness remains tantalizingly out of grasp.
The Idea of Home
In Curtis White's first novel, The Idea of Home, he attempts to "imagine a place in which humans can live." This utopia is definitely not San Lorenzo—a postwar, prefabricated suburb in California—where White grew up and which is the basis...
I'm Not Stiller
Arrested and imprisoned in a small Swiss town, a prisoner begins this book with an exclamation: "I'm not Stiller!" He claims that his name is Jim White, that he has been jailed under false charges and under the wrong identity. To prove he is who he...
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
Gilbert Sorrentino's third novel is about the New York artistic and literary world of the 1950s and '60s, specifically the artists, writers, hangers-on, and the phonies who populated that world. In a prose that is ruthless as well as possessed of an...
Imago Bird
"Ever since I can remember I have thought the grown-up world to be mad; its way of talking to itself and being outraged at the answers; the bright look in its eye as it goes off to feed on disaster. Aristotle said it was self-evident that human beings...
Impossible Object
"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...
Impressions of Africa
Newly translated and with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti, this edition of Impressions of Africa vividly restores the humor, linguistic legerdemain, and conceptual wonder of Raymond Roussel's magnum opus.
In Night's City
On the night of a father's death, two women remember. Esther, the wife denied, and Sara, her corrupted daughter, look back at the father's overwhelming cruelty and ahead to their freedom from him. Finally liberated from his terrible physical and...
In Partial Disgrace
The long-awaited final work and magnum opus of one of the United States's greatest authors, critics, and tastemakers, In Partial Disgrace is a sprawling self-contained trilogy chronicling the troubled history of a small Central European
nation . . .
In the Penny Arcade
After the success of his first novels (Edwin Mullhouse and Portrait of a Romantic), Steven Millhauser went on to enchant critics and readers with two short story collections that captured the magic and beauty of his longer works in vivid...
In Transit
Set in an airport ("one of the rare places where twentieth-century design is happy with its own style"), In Transit is a textual labyrinth centering on a contemporary traveler. Waiting for a flight, Evelyn Hillary O'Rooley suffers from...
Infante's Inferno
Hidden behind a cloak of exotic mystery, Cuba is virtually unknown to American citizens. G. Cabrera Infante—in Infante's Inferno and several of his other novels—allows readers to peek behind the curtain surrounding this island and see the...
Inish
The setting is a country called Inish (the Irish word for "island" and also for "tell"), which bears a striking resemblance to modern Eire. More pertinently, Inish resembles a state of mind—and since the mind has a tendency to wander, it's not...
Inland
Is it possible to fall in love with a correspondent based entirely on a fascination with his or her handwriting, with a map of the country they live in, with the syllables of their name? What about, then, a fictional character . . .
Innovations: An Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Fiction
The critic F. R. Leavis once called what we think of realism as the "great tradition," meaning the tradition which most distinguishes and characterizes the fiction of the Western world from the Romans to the present. But the fiction of the Western...
The Inquisitory
A stylistic masterpiece, The Inquisitory consists entirely of questions and answers directed at solving an unspecified crime. The man being questioned throughout is an old servant at a château in Agapa (Pinget's version of Yoknapatawpha County...
Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers
Since his first novel was published in 1985, Richard Powers has assembled a body of work whose intellectual breadth and imaginative energy bears comparison with that of any writer working today. Intersections pays tribute to that achievement...
Inventing God
Set amid the current tension and violence of the Middle East, Whitbread Award-winning Nicholas Mosley's new novel features over a half-dozen characters searching for a way to quell the self-destructive impulses of society. As the novel develops, the...
The Invitation
This 1987 novel by Nobel Prize-winner Claude Simon is a sardonic look at glasnost Russia, where recent reforms and improvements carry all the conviction of rouge on a corpse. The narrator is one of fifteen international guests who have been invited on...
Invitation to a Voyage
In this collection of thematically related stories, celebrated Belgian author François Emmanuel shows his indebtedness to the great poetic iconoclasts of the French language—not least Charles Baudelaire, after whose famous poem this book was named.
Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews
Marguerite Young is best known as the author of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, a 1200-page novel published to great critical acclaim in 1965 and since then considered a landmark of contemporary American literature. But she is also an enchanting essayist...
Iranian Writers Uncensored
Freedom, Democracy, and the Word in Contemporary Iran
Freedom, Democracy, and the Word in Contemporary Iran
The 1979 Revolution in Iran was meant to bring freedom, hope, and prosperity to an oppressed people, but the reality is well known—the poets and writers interviewed by Shiva Rahbaran speak instead of humiliation, despotism, war, and poverty.
Is This What Other Women Feel Too?
June Akers Seese's second novel is about books and the people who read them: it's about a rare-book dealer and his mistress, set in that era when words like "mistress" were still used, and recalling the years when Lenny Bruce, Edith Piaf, and Freud...
Ishmael Reed: The Plays
Ishmael Reed’s career as one of our great playwrights has long been eclipsed by his other work. Here published for the first time, Reed’s plays follow the ancient tradition of using the theater as a forum in which the official versions of our history...
Island People
In this complex novel, a gay man who has fled the violence of the city for an island retreat spends his time keeping a journal and writing stories. He invents a female alter-ego who haunts him, as does the ghost of the murderer who occupied his house...
Isle of Dreams
Though it has a lovely name, the real "Isle of Dreams" is a hunk of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay where the city dumps its garbage . . . and yet, Shozo Saka, a middle-aged widower, does indeed find the place beautiful . . .
Isle of the Dead
Baur and Bindschädler, two old men, friends from their days in the army, share a habitual walk to the edge of town, Baur speaking incessantly—circling between past and present, inconsequential observations and profound insights—while Bindschädler listens.
Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale
Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale tells the stories of three generations of a Jewish family, from the 1920s to the 1980s.
Italian Stories
Italian Stories pays homage to the Italian-American experience, celebrating an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx during the 1930s and '40s, and mourning the loss of this ethnic identity with the migration of subsequent generations to the suburbs.
J R
Winner of the 1976 National Book Award, J R is a biting satire about the many ways in which capitalism twists the American spirit into something more dangerous, yet pervasive and unassailable . . . [continued]
Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant
"It takes so long to see you are a slave," muses one character in these lyrical, sometimes bitingly funny chronicles of women breaking out of imposed roles. Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant chronicles the dreams of misplaced waitresses, prostitutes and other...
The Jade Cabinet
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...
James Mason and the Walk-in Closet
In this collection of short fiction—two novellas and eleven short stories—June Akers Seese writes of the Sylvia Plath generation: older women who, although alienated from conventional roles, remain unliberated by the feminist movement, and...
Jane's Bad Hare Day
"One day short of the fourth official annual observance of a divorce (the husband insisted, the wife resisted, the husband filed first, the wife filed under duress), what woman wouldn't be unusually out of sorts?" But the last thing Jane Samuels...
Jerusalem
One morning late in May, between three and six a.m., a group of lonely men and women wait to be brought together, like the elements in an equation. Ernst Spengler is about to throw himself out his window. Mylia, terminally ill and in enormous pain...
Joseph Walser's Machine
Continuing Tavares's award-winning "Kingdom" series (begun in Jerusalem, winner of the Saramago Prize), Joseph Walser's Machine recounts a life of bizarre routines and patterns.
The Journalist
As an aid to recovering from a nervous breakdown, the narrator of The Journalist begins to keep daily records of almost everything that goes on in his life, from how much he has spent on books and movies to what he eats. As the diary progresses, the...
Joyce's Voices
When a correspondent from Missouri wrote to Hugh Kenner and asked that he elaborate on his assertion that "Joyce began Ulysses in naturalism and ended it in parody," Kenner answered with this book. Joyce's Voices is both a helpful guide...
Juan the Landless
Juan Goytisolo's radical revision of his masterpiece Juan the Landless is the starting-point for this new translation by renowned translator Peter Bush. The new text focuses on Goytisolo's surreal exploration and rejection of his own roots...
Judith
Judith is an aspiring young actress and the mistress of a writer on a popular satirical magazine. We learn of her involvement with drugs and increasing self-delusion. After a crack-up, she seeks healing in an Indian ashram run by an...
Juice!
Ishmael Reed's Juice! is a novelistic commentary on the post-Simpson American media frenzy from one of the most controversial figures in American literature today.
Kangaroo
One morning in 1949, Fan Fanych, alias Etcetera, is summoned from his Moscow apartment to KGB headquarters, where he is informed that he will be charged with a crime more heinous than any mere man could ever devise. Comrade Etcetera will be tried for...
Killoyle
Proving that the spirits of James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett still flow in the veins of at least one Irish writer, Roger Boylan has composed a novel filled with hilarity and doom about the inhabitants of the Irish town of Killoyle: Milo...
Kin
Emil, the unwanted child of two young parents, is adopted by Yoel and Leah, a childless couple. Yet, as the years pass, it becomes clear that Emil doesn't bear much resemblance to the parents who've loved and raised him . . .
A Kind of Testament
A Kind of Testament is part autobiography and part justification of the life's work of one of Poland’s most important novelists and playwrights.
The King
In The King, a retelling of Le Morte D'Arthur, Donald Barthelme moves the chivalrous Knights of the Round Table to the cruelty of the Second World War. Dunkirk has fallen, Europe is at the breaking point, Ezra Pound and Lord Haw-Haw are...
Knight's Move
First published in 1923, Knight's Move is a collection of articles and short critical pieces that Viktor Shklovsky, no doubt the most original literary critic and theoretician of the twentieth century, wrote for the newspaper The Life of Art
Knowledge of Hell
Like his creator, the narrator of this novel is a psychiatrist who loathes psychiatry, a veteran of the despised 1970s colonial war waged by Portugal against Angola, a survivor of a failed marriage, and a man seeking meaning in an uncaring and venal...
Konfidenz
Told almost exclusively through dialogue, Konfidenz opens with a woman entering a hotel room and receiving a call from a mysterious stranger who seems to know everything about her and the reasons why she has fled her homeland. Over the next nine...
Koula
At its heart, Koula is the story of an improbable love affair. It is the story of Koula, a middle-aged married woman who falls in love with a young man that she meets routinely on the subway ride home to her husband and kids. Attracted to older...
L.C.
Blending historical fiction with feminist and revolutionary politics, Susan Daitch's first novel is a complex and unique look at the controversial nature of historical representations. This story within a story within a story opens in 1968, with a...
Ladies Almanack
"Now this be a Tale of as fine a Wench as ever wet Bed . . . Thus begins this Almanack, which all Ladies should carry about with them, as the Priest his Breviary, as the Cook his Recipes, as the Doctor his Physic, as the Bride her Fears, and as the...
Langrishe, Go Down
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...
Larva: Midsummer Night's Babel
First published in Spain in 1983 and proclaimed "an instant postmodern classic, without a doubt the most disturbingly original Spanish prose of the century" (Encyclopedia Britannica 1985 Book of the Year), Larva is a rollicking account of a masquerade...
The Last Days
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...
The Last Days of Louisiana Red
When Papa LaBas (private eye, noonday HooDoo, and hero of Reed's Mumbo Jumbo) comes to Berkeley, California, to investigate the mysterious death of Ed Yellings, owner of the Solid Gumbo Works, he finds himself fighting the rising tide of...
The Laurels of Lake Constance
It is 1936, and Albert B. is one of the first French citizens to join the Fascist party. During the war, he becomes a collaborator. It's only a matter of time before he dons a German uniform himself . . .
Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique
In a city not quite of any particular era, a distant and calculating man named Lenz Buchmann works as a surgeon, treating his patients as little more than equations to be solved: life and death no more than results to be worked through without compassion.
The Lecture
At the City Hall in a small town in the South of France, one man starts his campaign to correct the ills that have overtaken his proud nation by lecturing the town's inhabitants on the art of conversation. In the narrator's opinion, "conversation is a...
Lend Me Your Character
From the story of Steffie Cvek to "The Kharms Case," the pieces in Dubravka Ugresic's collection, Lend Me Your Character, are always smart and endlessly entertaining. The former story paints a picture of a harassed and vulnerable typist whose...
LETTERS
A landmark of postmodern American fiction, LETTERS is (as the subtitle genially informs us) "an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself factual." Seven characters (including the Author himself)...
Letters of William Gaddis
Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis (1922–98) shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation . . .
Life Itself: Louis Paul Boon as Innovator of the Novel
Life Itself is the first book-length study in English of the great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon. A.M.A. van den Oever begins by questioning the paradox between Boon's international reputation as a significant innovator of the novel, and the...
Life On Sandpaper
In terse prose, inspired by the associative and breathless drive of bebop, Kaniuk's memories race between the ecstatic devotion of his beloved Harlem jazz clubs, to the volcanic gush of passion, pain, art, and drugs that was Greenwich Village.
Light While There Is Light
An American History
An American History
One of the unheralded masterpieces of twentieth-century American fiction, Light While There Is Light is acclaimed poet Keith Waldrop's autobiographical novel about the myriad ghosts left behind by his family . . .
Literature and Cinematography
In this short, brilliant book, Viktor Shklovsky enunciates the function of the arts: what they are and, just as importantly, what they are not. In the course of defining what art is, by implication he also quietly lays to waste the theories and people...
The Living End
A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Ellerbee is a good husband, a good employer, a good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings—until he is killed during a senseless liquor-store hold-up. Suddenly smote by a deity as indifferent as...
Locos: A Comedy of Gestures
The interconnected stories that form this novel take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 Arabian Nights and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young author. "For them," he complains, "reality is what fiction is...
Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine
"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...
The Lollipop Trollops and Other Poems
The Lollipop Trollops gathers the poems—written over several decades—of Alexander Theroux, one of the most brilliant novelists of our age. It is an uncompromising and explosive volume, a work of astonishing force and variety.
London Bridge
In this widely acclaimed translation, Dominic DiBernardi expertly captures Céline's trademark style of prose which has served as inspiration to such American writers as Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Charles...
Look at the Dark
A retired academic and writer is becoming a media celebrity of sorts, appearing on various talk shows to voice his controversial views on human nature and war. While in New York to make such an appearance, he becomes the victim of a...
The Loop
Seventeen years after the publication of the first volume of Jacques Roubaud's epic and moving The Great Fire of London, Dalkey Archive Press is proud to publish the first English translation of The Loop, the second novel in Roubaud's...
Love and Death in the American Novel
A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as "one of the great, essential books on the American imagination . . . an accepted major work."
Lucy Church Amiably
In spite of all the recent interest in the writings of Gertrude Stein, the novel Lucy Church Amiably has remained one of the least known of her major works. The first edition, published in Paris in 1930, was never widely distributed in the...
The Lute and the Scars
Written between 1980 and 1986, the six stories that constitute The Lute and the Scars (as well as an untitled piece by the author, included here as "A and B") were transcribed from the manuscripts left by Danilo Kiš following his death in 1989 . . .
Lyric of the Circle Heart: The Bowman Family Trilogy
These novels face head-on the reality of the American Indian, perhaps the last great taboo in American culture. After all of the flag-waving, the wars to protect the Land of the Free, and interventions around the world in the name of democracy, how do...
The MacGuffin
As he's chauffeured about in his official limousine, aging City Commissioner of Streets Bobbo Druff comes to a frightening realization: he has lost force, the world has started to condescend to him. His once fear-inspiring figure has become everyone's...
Macho Camacho's Beat
"Life is a phenomenal thing,
frontwards or backwards, however you swing."
Infinitely multiplied by the blare of radios, TVs and record players in San Juan, Macho Camacho's guaracha weaves its way across the city and through the lives of one family...
The Magic Kingdom
Abandoned by his wife and devastated by the death of his twelve-year old son, Eddy Bale becomes obsessed with the plight of terminally ill children and develops a plan to provide a last hurrah dream vacation for seven children who will never grow-up...
Magnetic Field(s)
Organized around the idea that "you can't know what a magnetic field is like unless you're inside of it," Ron Loewinsohn's first novel opens from the disturbing perspective of a burglar in the midst of a robbery and travels through the thoughts and...
Mahu or the Material
In the tradition of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, and Raymond Queneau's The Flight of Icarus, Robert Pinget's Mahu or The Material tells the story of Mahu, a lazy man who may be a...
Makbara
In Makbara, Juan Goytisolo—widely considered Spain's greatest living writer—again dazzles the reader with his energetic, stylistic prose, which he himself compares to a snake: cunning, sly, sinuous. But the themes in Makbara are perhaps...
Making a Novel
Moving between explanations and anecdotes, Gérard Gavarry's Making a Novel is partly a memoir of a writer's life and partly a memoir of his work, showing us how every story, no matter how well-planned, could always have been written countless other ways.
The Making of Americans
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...
Man + Dog
Painter and art historian Nick Wadley—who has curated exhibitions on Kurt Schwitters, Franciszka Themerson, Gaberbocchus Press, and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi—here turns his attentive and whimsical eye to one of life’s most essential relationships. With...
Man + Doctor
"Most of these images were drawn in the bed of a London hospital, either the Royal Free or the Princess Grace, between 2004 and 2010. The rest of the drawings are memories and afterthoughts from the same times." The wordless story of encounters . . .
Man in the Holocene
A stunning tour de force, Man in the Holocene constructs a powerful vision of our place in the world by combining the banality of an aging man's lonely inner life and the objective facts he finds in the books of his isolated home.
The March of Literature: From Confucius' Day to Our Own
This 900-page survey of world literature, From Confucius' Day to Our Own (as the subtitle reads), was the last book written by Ford Madox Ford, one of the seminal figures of the modernist period. Written for general readers rather than scholars and...
Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays
With Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965) Marguerite Young established herself as one of the greatest writers of our time, and yet she has been slow to attract critical attention. Miriam Fuchs remedies that defect with the first book-length study of her...
Marks of Identity
An exile returns to Spain from France to find that he is repelled by the fascism of Franco's Spain and drawn to the world of Muslim culture. In this novel, Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, speaks for a generation of Spaniards...
Martereau
Martereau is narrated by a tubercular young man driven by a compulsion to discover what lies behind facades, especially in relation to the adults around him. He's particularly interested in Martereau, his uncle's devoted friend and business...
The Master of Insomnia
A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, The Master of Insomnia is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's verse from the last fifteen years . . .
Mathematics:
Longtime Oulipo member Jacques Roubaud's homage to one of the great passions of his life: mathematics . . . [continued]
Melancholy
In real life, Lars Hertervig would become, along with Edvard Munch, one of Norway's most renowned painters—but in Melancholy he is a promising young artist tortured by doubt and unhinged by unrequited love. After agonizing over his work...
Memories of My Father Watching TV
Only in America, and only since the 1950s, has the watching of television become the communal ground, often the battleground, of fathers and sons, as well as the place through which the rest of family experience is played out, fought out, remembered...
The Mind of the Novel: Reflexive Fiction and the Ineffable
From Moby-Dick to The Unnamable, from A Tale of a Tub to The Book of Questions, Bruce Kawin explores the nature of self-conscious fiction and compares its structure to that of human consciousness.
Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film
In the opening chapter of this groundbreaking work, Bruce Kawin asks: can a film—which is already the dream of its maker and its audience, and which can present itself as the dream of one of its characters—appear, finally, to dream itself...
A Minor Apocalypse
As in his novel The Polish Complex, Konwicki's A Minor Apocalypse stars a narrator and character named Konwicki, who has been asked to set himself on fire that evening in front of the Communist Parry headquarters in Warsaw in an act of...
Minuet for Guitar
Ranking with the best novels about World War II, Minuet for Guitar is also a masterpiece of Slovenian fiction. Taking cues from the wartime epics of Ford Madox Ford and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Zupan tells the harrowing story of a partisan soldier "Berk."
The Mirror in the Well
A woman’s sexual awakening is a tragedy when the woman is married to someone other than the man who awakens her. But until then, her marriage, now doomed, was a sleepwalker’s tragedy. This novel will shock and offend some readers. Unapologetically...
The Mise-en-Scène
First published in France in 1958 and winner of the prestigious Prix Medecis, The Mise-en-Scène takes place in the mountains of Morocco when the French still controlled North Africa. An engineer named Lassalle has been sent from France to plan...
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Volume 1
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...
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Volume 2
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...
Misterioso
Misterioso is the final work of Gilbert Sorrentino's trilogy, the first two volumes of which, Odd Number and Rose Theatre, attempted to discover the shifting, evasive truth concerning a myriad of characters, all vaguely connected...
Mobile
Considered by many to be his greatest book, Michel Butor's Mobile is the result of the six months the author spent traveling across America. The text is composed from a wide range of materials, including city names, road signs, advertising...
Modern and Contemporary Swiss Poetry
An Anthology
An Anthology
Featuring the work of some of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, this anthology is unique in bringing together a broad selection of Switzerland's greatest authors in all of the country's major languages . . .
Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language
Here Gerald L. Bruns does something remarkable: he makes accessible the theoretical issues involved in the discussion of language as discourse versus that used in art. On one side, we have the language of Orpheus that seeks to unite poetry and man's...
Modern Poetry of Pakistan
The first anthology of its kind to appear in English, Modern Poetry of Pakistan brings together not one but many poetic traditions indigenous to Pakistan, with 142 poems translated from seven major languages . . .
Monsieur
Meet Monsieur, your hero, a successful young executive in Paris whose daily life you will follow in precise detail. He is nothing if not unremarkable. Meet his secretary, his nieces, his fiancée and her parents, his neighbor whose scientific reports...
Monstrous Possibility: An Invitation to Literary Politics
In Monstrous Possibility Curtis White creates a lucid perspective on what it means to be a writer and a human being in the so-called postmodern...
Mordechai Schamz
In a series of comic vignettes and letters, Mordechai Schamz sets out to investigate himself, his world, and the language which makes them both intelligible. Dumbfounded at every turn and undiscouraged by—perhaps even unaware of—his...
Motti
An unassuming, unambitious man named Motti, who owns a dog named Laika, has a good friend named Menachem. Motti is the very picture of inertia, until, one night, a drunk Menachem, driving home from a bar with Motti, runs over a woman and kills her.
Mountain R
In an unnamed country, the President of the Republican Council, wanting to "do something big," strikes upon the idea of building a 1,500-meter high mountain as an inspirational monument to national greatness. Construction of the mountain will reduce...
Mr. Dynamite
Jarleth Prendergast is an ex-pat Irishman, an aging punk rocker, a film snob, a copy-shop employee, a dime-store intellectual, and a truly desperate man. His marriage is in tatters and his career as an avantgarde claymation artist is heading nowhere...
Mrs. Ted Bliss
Published posthumously in 1995, Mrs. Ted Bliss tells the story of an eighty-two-year-old widow starting life anew after the death of her husband. As Dorothy Bliss learns to cope with the mundane rituals of life in a Florida retirement community...
Mulligan Stew
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...
Music by My Bedside
On the eve of a coup d'etat, the wife of a diplomat newly returned to Turkey from the United States finds that the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fuat, is in fact a childhood friend.
Muzzle Thyself
Nothing is pure or sacred in Muzzle Thyself. If it hasn't rubbed up against something or isn't sweating, it's of little concern to Lauren Fairbanks. Literary fragments, "found materials," are organized in such a way as to appear unliterary. The...
My Beautiful Bus
Poetic, comic, obsessed with minutiae, MY BEAUTIFUL BUS is a welcome dose of serious frivolity at the expense of the contemporary novel . . .
My Life in CIA
Through a series of improbable coincidences, in the early 1970s Harry Mathews, then living in France, was commonly reputed to be a CIA agent. Even his closest friends had their suspicions, which were only reinforced each time he tried to deny such a...
My Little War
The great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon began his life's work with this extraordinary novel, a story of World War II as seen through the unglamorous, uncourageous, unhistorical eyes of the man on the street.
My Paris
In My Paris, a Canadian woman keeps an extraordinary journal of her time in a Parisian studio. Not a typical tourist, she prefers indoor spaces, seeing Paris go by on TV or watching from her window the ever-changing displays of men's designer...
My Year of Love
Having abandoned his wife, life, family, and homeland, the narrator of My Year of Love flees to Paris to begin his life over again, and finds himself having to rescue himself from the freedom he believed he desired . . .
The Mystery of the Sardine
When an unknown black poodle inexplicably explodes in philosophy professor Timothy Chesterton-Brown's back yard—paralyzing the professor and killing his guest—the "mystery of the sardine" begins. Its solution will involve such unwitting...
Natalie Natalia
Natalie Natalia is Nicholas Mosley's brilliant examination of political life. It revolves around Anthony Greville, a conservative Member of Parliament who is tormented by his ambivalence toward his career, by his religious doubts, and by his...
Natural Novel
Resembling the complex and fragmented way a fly's eye works, Natural Novel contains a myriad of storylines, reflections, and digressions, including a history of toilets and the graffiti found there, a meditation on the relationship between bees...
The Necessary Marriage
A man lies sleepless in a foul-smelling room while raucous noises come from next door, and women—past and present, real or imagined—pass through his mind. From these few elements, Romanian author Dumitru Tsepeneag builds a dreamlike world...
Necropolis
Boris Pahor's stirring account of his attempts to provide medical aid to the prisoners in the face of the utter brutality of the camps – and of his coming to terms with the ineradicable guilt he feels, having survived when millions did not . . .
Nelly's Version
Nelly's Version could be described as Eva Figes's inventive reshaping of the pop psychological thriller. The story opens as Nelly Dean, a middle-aged woman suffering from amnesia, checks into a small-town hotel with a suitcase full of cash and...
A Nest of Ninnies
"James Schuyler and I began writing A Nest of Ninnies purely by chance," writes John Ashbery in his new introduction to this classic of American comic fiction. "We were in a car being driven by the young cameraman, Harrison Starr, with...
News from the Empire
One of the acknowledged masterpieces of Mexican literature, Fernando del Paso's News from the Empire is a powerful and encyclopedic novel of the tragic lives of Maximilian and his wife, Carlota, the short-lived Emperor and Empress of Mexico...
Nicholas Mosley’s Life and Art: A Biography in Six Interviews
The son of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of Britain’s Fascists in the 1930s, and himself the inheritor of a noble title, Nicholas Mosley nonetheless fought bravely for Britain during World War II, and became a tireless anti-Apartheid campaigner...
Night
Not since Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Ferdinand Bardamu has a character appeared in fiction with such a bitter, ironic, hysterically ranting voice. Tonka—a fifty-something woman spending the night watching TV before leaving her husband for a...
A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This
From Hollywood B-movies to Hollywood classics, A Night at the Movies invents what "might have happened" in these Saturday afternoon matinees. Mad scientists, vampires, cowboys, dance-men, Chaplin, and Bogart, all flit across Robert Coover's...
Night Soul and Other Stories
Best known for his complex and beautiful novels—regularly compared to those of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo—Joseph McElroy is equally at home in the short story . . .
Nightwood
The version of Nightwood published in 1936 and revered ever since both as a classic modernist work and a ground-breaking lesbian novel differs in many respects from the book Djuna Barnes actually wrote. Unable to find a publisher for her earlier, more...
Nightwork
In this, her first collection of stories, Christine Schutt gives exquisite and provocative form to feelings and memories. Nightwork is a masterful dreamwork, revealing with startling clarity the dark and unsettling sexuality that lies just...
The No Variations
Diary of an Unfinished Novel
Diary of an Unfinished Novel
A cryptic, self-negating series of notes for an unfinished work of fiction, this astonishing book is made up of ideas for characters and plot points, anecdotes and tales, literary references both real and invented, and populated by an array of . . .
The No World Concerto
The many layers of The No World Concerto center around an old screenwriter, holed up in a shabby hotel in order to write a screenplay about his lover, a young piano prodigy who wants in turn to give up music and become a writer.
Normance
A landmark event: The last of Céline's novels to be translated into English, this account of an air attack on Paris during World War II shows a hallucinatory, altered space in which human aggressions, appetites, and suspicion come boiling to the...
North
In this novel, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan) offers us a vivid chronicle of a desperate man's frantic flight from France in the final months of World War II.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
First published in 1910, Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is one the first great modernist novels, the account of poet-aspirant Brigge in his exploration of poetic individuality and his reflections on the experience of time...
Nothing
Years after having an affair that almost ruined their respective marriages, Jane Weatherby and John Pomfret are reunited when their children decide to get married despite questions regarding their possible kinship and the fact that they have almost no...
A Novel of Thank You
This is the first paperback edition of one of Stein's most revealing novels. Written in 1925-26 (but not published until 1958), it is Stein's midcareer assessment of herself, her writing, and her relationships, composed in the unique style for which...
The Obstacles
One of the most remarkable books of contemporary Mexican literature, The Obstacles is the story of young writers coming of age in a world dominated entirely by their own fictions. It tells, in alternating chapters, the stories of two teenagers...
Odile
"Even though I can't remember my childhood, my memory being as if ravaged by some disaster, there nevertheless remains a series of images from the time before my birth . . . of my first twenty years, only ruins are left in a memory devastated by...
Omega Minor
Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century—Berlin united and divided, Boston, Los Alamos, Auschwitz—Omega Minor is a novel of big ideas, a tale of survival of the soul cast in a whirlwind plot...
On Elegance While Sleeping
The first English translation of the self-proclaimed "Viscount" Emilio Lascano Tegui—a friend of Picasso and Apollinaire—On Elegance While Sleeping is the deliciously macabre novel, part Maldoror and part Dorian Gray . . .
The One Marvelous Thing
Winner of a 2007 American Academy of Arts and Letters, Rikki Ducornet is beloved as a novelist and essayist, but is known perhaps most of all for her work as a writer of short stories. In the tradition of Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Angela...
Op Oloop
Mr. Optimus Oloop is a Finnish statistician living in Buenos Aires. His life runs according to a methodical and rigid schedule, with everything—from his meals down to his regular visits to the city brothels—timed to the minute. But when an...
The Opportune Moment, 1855
Simultaneously satiric and philosophical, The Opportune Moment, 1855, opens with an Italian anarchist's missive to his noble former mistress, an impassioned rejection of all of Europe's latest and greatest advancements.
The Origin of Man
With a name like Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, it ought to be easy to become a hero. Yet, how to go about it? A real life nineteenth-century paleontologist and explorer, excavated here by Christine Montalbetti to serve as her protagonist . . .
The Other City
In this strange and lovely hymn to Prague, Michal Ajvaz repopulates the city of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statues, all lurking on the peripheries of a town so familiar to tourists...
Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature
This is an amazing anthology of writings by members of the group known as Oulipo, including, among others, Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, and Raymond Queneau. Put simply, this group, which was founded in Paris in 1960...
Our Circus Presents
Every day, the Birdman performs the same ritual: he climbs out onto his window ledge to see if he can manage to kill himself—and never does. The Birdman is a member of a loose-knit group of failed suicides, each pursuing absurd ways to end their...
Our Share of Time
"When it happens you don't expect it. You don't expect anything anymore. You lose your head for just a second and someone walks into your life, turns it upside down, tenderly, brutally, making a place for himself. Even before anything has happened...
Out of Focus
The anonymous narrator in Alf MacLochlainn's Out of Focus has more than blurred vision when he looks at the world around him as he recuperates from his many minor accidents. His visual perception or skewed perspective is a working out of the author's...
Pack of Lies: A Trilogy
Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the most accomplished innovators in twentieth-century fiction, a position that is everywhere confirmed in this trilogy of novels, Odd Number, Rose Theatre, and Misterioso. Beginning with a series of...
Palinuro of Mexico
Winner of Mexico's Premio Novela Mexico, Spain's Romulo Gallegos Prize for best Spanish-language novel, and France's Priz de Meilleur Livre Etranger for best foreign book, Palinuro of Mexico is a masterpiece which ranks with the finest achievements of...
Paradise
Simon, a middle-aged architect separated from his wife, is given the chance to live out a stereotypical male fantasy: freed from the travails of married life, he ends up living with three nubile lingerie models who use him as a sexual object.
Set...
Paradiso
A classic of modern literature, Paradiso was first published in Cuba in 1966 and quickly hailed as a masterpiece by such eminent writers as Julio Cortazar and Mario Vargas Llosa. Written by Cuba's most important poet, it tells the story of Jose...
The Paradox of Freedom
As the first book-length study of Nicholas Mosley, The Paradox of Freedom combines a discussion of the author's incredible biography with an investigation of his writing, nearly all of which is published by Dalkey Archive Press.
Paradoxes of Peace, or The Presence of Infinity
Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this.
The Parson's Widow
After the publication of The Parson's Widow, Vartio's fifth novel, Finnish critics hailed it as a masterpiece, her finest literary achievement. This is the first opportunity for English readers to become acquainted with her unforgettable...
Passages
A poetic book of voices, landscapes and the passing of time, Ann Quin's finely wrought novel reflects the multiple meanings of the very word "passages." Two characters move through the book—a woman in search of her brother, and her lover (a...
The Passion Artist
A classic of dark eroticism from one of the great American writers of the twentieth century...
Perfect Lives
Raoul de Noget, an over-the-hill singer, and his younger pal Buddy ("The World's Greatest Piano Player"), find themselves in a small town in the Midwest.
Permission
Composed of anonymous e-mail messages sent by the author to an acclaimed visual artist over the course of a year, Permission is the record of an experiment: an attempt to forge a connection with a stranger through the writing of a book.
Peru
Arguably Gordon Lish's masterpiece, Peru begins with its narrator announcing, "There is nothing which I will not tell you if I can think of it." Gradually, the story of a dark childhood secret — real or imagined — unfolds . . .
Phantasms of Matter
In Gogol (and Gombrowicz)
In Gogol (and Gombrowicz)
An investigation into the problem of writing about matter in Nikolai Gogol's work and, indirectly, into the entire Neoplatonic tradition in Russian literature, this book is not intended to be an exhaustive historical survey of the concept of matter...
A Philosophy of Evil
Despite the overuse of the word in movies, political speeches, and news reports, "evil" is generally seen as either flagrant rhetoric or else an outdated concept: a medieval holdover with no bearing on our complex everyday reality. Svendsen, however...
Phosphor in Dreamland
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...
Pierrot Mon Ami
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...
Pigeon Post
Here is a book about a man, supposedly a writer, who tries to write a novel, because he promised his readers he would. But he doesn’t have anything to say. He keeps erasing what he writes, and rewriting it, without having the slightest idea where he’s...
Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places
From the author of Billy and Girl, this collection of stories explores the emptiness at the center of the characters' lives and their attempts to fill this lack. In "Cave Girl" Cass goes through a sex change, not to become a man, but rather to...
Place Names
Which came first, words or things? Are your words yours, or someone else’s? And what do the Crusades have to do with it? And what do ants have to do with it?
Jean Ricardou has been given something of a bad rap: he’s widely seen as a difficult...
Plainsong
A nameless, ambitionless office worker finds his small apartment gradually invaded by three other people: all younger than himself, but seemingly no less adrift. The year is 1986, and this strange communal life is the plot, such as it is, of Plainsong.
The Planetarium
The many narratives of The Planetarium, told from various points of view, revolve around a seemingly simple conceit: a young man has his heart and ambition set on his aunt's large apartment. But, as in Sarraute's other books, this plot forms...
The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis
This collection of prose and poetry elaborates on themes explored in Roubaud's Some Thing Black, which the Times Literary Supplement called "a harrowing book . . . an elegy for our time." As in the earlier collection, Roubaud grapples...
Point Counter Point
Point Counter Point was included in the Modern Library's list of the "100 Best Works of the Century." Along with Brave New World (written a few years later), Point Counter Point is Huxley's most concentrated attack on the...
The Polish Complex
The Polish Complex takes place on Christmas Eve, from early morning until late in the evening, as a line of people (including the narrator, whose name is Konwicki) stand and wait in front of a jewelry store in Warsaw. Through the narrator we are...
Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms, and Praise for Lois
A gift for his wife, Jay Wright's Polynomials and Pollen explores the complementary exigencies of abstraction and physicality. In five sections, each arranged under the aegis of a tutelary concept—from the Yoruba, Akan, Bamana, and...
The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story About the Hard Life
The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O'Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents. Potatoes constitute the basis of his...
Poor Things
One of Alasdair Gray's most brilliant creations, Poor Things is a postmodern revision of Frankenstein that replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter—a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant.
Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard
Pop artists (painters and poets) often get praised or criticized for their use of low-brow commercial iconography. Yet either appraisal obscures the rigors of Pop serial design . . .
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape
Like James Joyce's and Dylan Thomas's similar titles, Butor's novel is autobiographical in nature and explores the way a writer develops. Shortly after World War II a young man travels to a castle in Franconia housing the second largest private...
Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal
A trenchant satire of greed and self-interest—in idealists and tycoons both—Lydie Salvayre's latest novel proves her once again to be France's funniest and most insightful critic of modern life. Portrait was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt.
Poundemonium
Just as Ezra Pound wrote a "Homage to Sextus Propertius" to pay tribute to an important influence, Julián Ríos offers in his novel a "Homage to Ezra Pound" (as the original Spanish edition is subtitled). On November 1, 1972, news of...
The Power of Flies
The Power of Flies begins in a courtroom, where a man is undergoing an interrogation. He has committed a crime, and he must now explain himself. But instead of letting the judge, lawyer, and psychiatrist question him, he asks himself all the...
Prairie Style
Prairie Style is about the breakdown of location and voice. It lays out a landscape of habitations (Frank Lloyd Wright's designs for "servantless families," fox dens in an embankment, the two-mile long face of Chicago’s Robert Taylor public...
The Presentable Art of Reading Absence
The Presentable Art of Reading Absence takes as impulse the act of meditation, in which the energetic relationship between a meditative body and its universe is not only the envisioning of absence by presence but also vision itself...
Princess Hoppy or, The Tale of Labrador
A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud's delightful book The Princess Hoppy or, The Tale of Labrador. How else to describe a novel that reads like an Arthurian romance as rewritten by Lewis Carroll, with enough math puzzles...
The Princess of 72nd Street
This remarkable novel by Elaine Kraf received almost no attention when it was first published in 1979. For whatever reasons, America was not ready for this dream-like look at life inside the head of a young woman, a struggling artist, living in New...
Procession of Shadows
Procession of Shadows is filled with stories of love, war, and vengeance, focusing on the tiny, remote village of Tamoga—a place where vendettas are passed down from generation to generation, and where violence has left its traces in every corner.
Project for a Revolution in New York
Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself—or a foreigner's nightmare of New York—as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city . . .
P's Three Women
In a picaresque journey from youth to old age, P., a wealthy
businessman who abhors his real name, tells the stories of his
three greatest passions, his three greatest affairs, his three most erotic encounters: a married woman, a demanding . . .
Psalm 44
Psalm 44 is the last major work of fiction by Danilo Kiš to be translated into English, and his only novel dealing explicitly with Auschwitz (where his own father died). Written when he was only twenty-five, before embarking on the masterpieces . . .
Pushkin House
No other contemporary novel provides such clear insight into the Russian mind and way of life as Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House. First published in the United States in 1987 and highly praised for its inventiveness, Pushkin House survives...
Putting My Foot in It
Imagine, if you can, Freud and Proust sitting down for a chat with Zippy the Pinhead and the Marquis de Sade. Then, just when things are starting to get a bit silly, in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe. After he...
Quarantine
Quarantine, a novel by one of Spain's most provocative writers, recounts the forty days in which, according to Islamic tradition, the soul wanders between death and eternity, still in possession of a tenuous, dreamlike body. After the unexpected death...
The Queen of the Prisons of Greece
This is the final novel of one of the most innovative, comic Brazilian writers of this century. It takes the form of an anonymous high school science teacher's journal about an unpublished novel written by his deceased lover, a young woman named Julia...
The Questionnaire
Originally circulated in Czechoslovakia in an underground edition of nineteen typewritten copies (which landed the author in jail for "initiating disorder"), The Questionnaire is Jirí Grusa's internationally acclaimed masterpiece.
The Rabbi of Lud
Surrounded by cemeteries in the flatlands of New Jersey, the small town of Lud is sustained by the business of death. In fact, with no synagogue and no congregation, Rabbi Jerry Goldkorn has only one true responsibility: to preside over burial...
Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study
This book examines the first five novels of Rayner Heppenstall (1911-1981). During his lifetime, many critics cited Heppenstall as the founder of the nouveau roman, believing his debut novel, The Blaze of Noon (1939), anticipated the post-war...
Reader's Block
In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind—literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations...
Reading Games: An Aesthetics of Play in Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, and Georges Perec
In Reading Games, Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja guides us through an entertaining and instructive exploration of a neglected genre of post-modernism, the Play-Text. Pioneered by authors such as Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, and Georges Perec...
Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views
This collection of the definitive essays by and about the Russian Formalists is crucial to understanding the major theoretical movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Investigating the conceptualization of structure and form within literature, the Formalists...
Realm of the Dead
Realm of the Dead describes the lands of both the living and the dead. In this collection of short stories, they are equally dark and mysterious worlds where logic and reality are subject to constant change and where ideas about identity and...
Reckless Eyeballing
It's the 1980s and the politics of the New York theater scene have taken yet another turn. Masochism is out and feminism is in, Jews are out and Germans are in, race is out and gender is in, and everyone's fighting (and rewriting) for a piece of the...
The Recognitions
The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the "ur-text of postwar fiction" and the "first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both." . . . [continued]
The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales
Best known for her Gothic language handbooks (reissued recently as The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire), Karen Elizabeth Gordon here turns her extraordinary talents to fiction, and the result is as unconventional as her...
Red the Fiend
A recasting of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight, this is the story of how a child becomes a monster: of how Red the boy becomes Red the Fiend. With an absent father who turns up only to drunkenly berate his son, and a grandmother whose...
Redemption
In Redemption French feminist writer Chantal Chawaf explores the dark paths of madness and sadism, where sexuality evokes cannibalism and vampirism. The language of the body and the body of language are stripped naked in Chawaf's violently beautiful...
Replacement
Tor Ulven is one of the most renowned Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, beginning his career writing poetry and ending it with unclassifiable explorations of the possibilities of prose...
Requiem
Requiem is a darkly comic novel about what it means to be human in a culture obsessed with sex and death. With a structure loosely based on the Mass for the Dead, this ambitious novel includes letters-to-the-editor, an e-mail correspondence with...
Reticence
In Jean-Philippe Toussaint's take on the detective novel, we find a man on vacation in a tiny village, where a writer named Biaggi appears to be keeping him under surveillance. To what end? Ah, but it's far more pleasant to enjoy the . . . [continued]
Rhode Island Notebook
Not since On the Road has a book been more thoroughly of the road. Unlike Kerouac's novel, however, this book was literally written on the road in Gudding's own car, on pad and paper while driving. Rhode Island Notebook is the handwritten...
Rigadoon
Completed right before his death in 1961, Rigadoon, the most compassionate of Céline's novels, explores the ravages of war and its aftermath. Often comic and always angry, the first-person autobiographical narrator, with his wife and their cat...
The Ring
When Quentin's lover announces that she's leaving him for his brother and moving to America, he replies spontaneously that he too is leaving the country—but going where?
Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page
Written in the second person, it offers a self-reflexive investigation into the ways in which Coover's stories often challenge the reader to resist the conventions of sense-making and even literary criticism.
Roberte Ce Soir & The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's erotic fiction explores the connections between the mind and body. This pair of short novels merges the sexual misadventures of Octave, his striking young...
Romancer Erector
In Romancer Erector Diane Williams again astonishes us with her distinctive voice, detached yet fiercely intimate. As one critic writes: "the effect is original, as if a strange little memory has insinuated itself into the reader's own memory...
Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials, 1905-1995
Following the much-deserved rediscovery of early modernist Ronald Firbank's works in the 1980s, this annotated bibliography collects reviews of the satirist's books, synopses of books and essays about Firbank, references to creative works inspired by...
Rose Theatre
Rose Theatre is the second book of the Sorrentino trilogy, the first book of which, Odd Number, was published in 1985. Odd Number investigated the ways in which facts assert themselves through the various encodings of experience contained in the...
Running Away
A European man arrives in Shanghai, ostensibly on vacation, yet a small task given him by his Parisian girlfriend Marie starts a series of complications. There is a mysterious Chinese man and a manila envelope full of cash. Later, he meets a woman at...
Ryder
When it was first published in 1928, Djuna Barnes's Ryder, a bawdy mock-Elizabethan chronicle of a family very much like her own, was described in the Saturday Review as "the most amazing book ever written by a woman."
Sabbatical: A Romance
Subtitled "a romance," Sabbatical is the story of Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, a sharp young associate professor of early American literature—part Jewish, part Gypsy, and possibly descended from Edgar Allan Poe—and her husband Fenwick Scott...
Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!
The Nic Sacco and Bart Vanzetti of Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! are not exactly the infamous anarchists controversially sentenced to death by the United States government. Instead, in this hilarious first novel, they are silent film stars...
Saint Glinglin
Saint Glinglin is a tragicomic masterpiece, a novel that critic Vivian Mercier said "can be mentioned without incongruity in the company" of Mann's Magic Mountain and Joyce's Ulysses. "By turns strange, beautiful, ludicrous, and intellectually...
Savage
Based on the life of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, Jacques Jouet's Savage compels the reader to ask whether it is the primitive or the civilized man who is savage. At the height of the Belle Époque, an eccentric young clothing...
Scenes from a Receding Past
Opening with a quote from Richard Brautigan—"I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning"—Scenes from a Receding Past constructs the adolescence and early adulthood of Dan...
The Sea
A profoundly touching contribution to the tradition of the metaphysical novel as exemplified by Dostoyevsky and Bernanos . . .
Self-Control
The second volume in Stig Sæterbakken's loosely connected "S Trilogy," Self-Control moves from the dark portrait of codependent marriage featured in the acclaimed Siamese to a world of solitary loneliness and repression . . .
Self-Portrait Abroad
In Self-Portrait Abroad, our narrator—a Belgian author much like Toussaint himself—travels the globe, finding the mundane blended everywhere with the exotic.
A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922
Viktor Shklovsky's A Sentimental Journey, which borrows its title from Laurence Sterne, describes the travels of a bewildered intellectual through Russia, Persia, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus during the period of the Russian Revolution. Valuable as a...
Sentimental Songs (La poesia cursi)
Almost lost to literary history, Felipe Alfau was rediscovered in 1988 with the republication of his proto-postmodernist novel Locos; in 1990 his only other novel, Chromos (written in 1948), was published for the first time...
Serpent
Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada—the fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans in A. D. 73. He doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made...
The Sextine Chapel
The delightful and daring entertainment by French author Hervé Le Tellier is a series of short, intimately interconnected stories making up a lively user's manual to pleasure, relating the various liaisons of couples from Anna and Ben to Yolande and Zach.
The Shadow of a Blue Cat
A rare work of fiction focused simply on a man of integrity, The Shadow of a Blue Cat meticulously renders his life and opinions as Yuki tries to find a middle path between his uncle's past radicalism and the quiet bourgeois home he's worked to build.
The Shadow of Memory
In this eerie, compelling, and playful novel, a young man tormented by his feeble memory meets an elderly man, Robert, endowed with the recall of an elephant. Soon, in exchange for becoming his live-in servant, Robert agrees to allow his young protégé . .
Sherbrookes
Now finally collected into a single volume, the Sherbrookes trilogy—Possession, Sherbrookes, and Stillness—is Nicholas Delbanco's most celebrated achievement. Delbanco is revealed as a Henry James for our time: a passionate cataloger of human strength.
Shklovsky: Witness to an Era
Shklovsky: Witness to an Era is a blend of riotous anecdote, personal history, and literary reflection . . .
A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family
Fathers, many fathers, wish that they could explain themselves to their children, perhaps most of all to their sons, provide a written record so that the gossamer connection between themselves and their progeny might be sustained beyond their lives...
Shorter Poems
Gerald Burns is a leading practitioner of the long-lined, thickly textured verse. "These / long lines are long life to us, go back to Kenneth Irby's 'A Set' I saw first in / a flyer from Lawrence, KS where Burroughs chats with Cage whose spitbubbles /...
The Shutter of Snow
In a prose form as startling as its content, The Shutter of Snow portrays the post-partum psychosis 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...
Siamese
Edwin Mortens is almost blind, but has good hearing; his wife Erna is hard of hearing, but has excellent eyes. Paralyzed from the waist down, Edwin sits locked in his bathroom all day, every day, trying to liberate his mind from his body...
The Siege in the Room
Three Novellas
Three Novellas
This volume brings together three short novels by Catalan literature's great maverick and recluse, each depicting a brutal, abstract world where words are the only reality—shifting between the erudite, the archaic, and the vulgar. . .
Silences, or a Woman's Life
When a woman falls into a coma, her daughter accompanies her through six weeks of agony, bearing witness to the prolonged death imposed upon her by the monstrous machine of modern medicine. During this final voyage through the fog, the narrator...
Singular Pleasures
The subject of this unique book of short fiction is masturbation, a practice both universal and virtually taboo. In sixty-one vignettes, Mathews records the imaginative varieties of this solitary activity in prose that is playful, intimate, urgent...
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium
Composed of a series of letters between a husband and wife, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium is a brilliant comedy about love and longing, dashed hopes and frustrations, and trying to make connections. Newly wedded Zachary McCaltex...
Sister Carrie
Sister Carrie is a first novel by a writer possessing such an original voice and slashing, surrealistic wit that she is sure to take her place at the forefront of cutting-edge fiction writers. Carrie Meeber leaves her stifling Florida home for...
Sisters
Mathilde Lewly—a female painter at the dawn of the twentieth century—has achieved notoriety among the Parisian avant-garde. She and her husband, also a talented young artist, pursue their separate visions side by side in a Clichy atelier . . .
The Sky Changes
Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's relentlessly disturbing first novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as the husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that the marriage can be rescued...
Sleepwalker
A deadpan comedy about the rather unfunny void in the center of many modern lives, Sleepwalker explores how our trying to fill that void can be just as destructive as ignoring it...
Some Instructions to My Wife
From "Putting Things Away" to "The Marriage Almanac" (not to mention the pedantic "Index," in itself a comic wonder), Stanley Crawford gives the married, the unmarried, and the formerly married a classic satire on all the sanctimonious marriage...
Some Thing Black
In 1983 Jacques Roubaud's wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem ("Nothing"), then fell silent for thirty months.
In subsequent years, Roubaud—poet, novelist...
Something Said
For over four decades, Gilbert Sorrentino has produced brilliant, penetrating essays and reviews, each one an uncompromising statement of what is good—and what is not—in literature and culture. Something Said collects in a single volume...
Sound on Sound
This inventive first novel deflates the same myths of rock and roll that it glorifies in a vivid exploration of pop culture and the shattered society that emerged from the 1980s.
Hi-Fi, a third-rate New York bar band, plays another in a desultory...
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Spleen
Dalkey Archive Press first introduced readers to this "best-kept secret" of British literature with the hardback Collected Writings of Olive Moore in 1992. Spleen, the best of the author's three novels, tells the disturbing story of a woman who goes...
Splendide-Hôtel
From A to Z, from Alpha to Omega, Splendide-Hôtel encompasses the natural movement and necessity of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet to grow into words which become phrases and sentences and paragraphs. Each of the twenty-six chapters becomes an...
The Splendor of Portugal
The Splendor of Portugal's four narrators are members of a once well-to-do family whose plantation was lost in the Angolan War of Independence.
Springer's Progress
Here comes Lucien Springer. Age: forty-seven. Still handsome though muchly vodka'd novelist, currently abashed by acute creative dysfunction. Sole preoccupation amid these artistic doldrums: pursuit of fair women. Springer is a randy incorrigible who...
The Stain
In The Stain Rikki Ducornet tells the story of a young girl named Charlotte, branded with a furry birthmark in the shape of a dancing hare, regarded as the mark of Satan. "Sadistic nuns, scatology, butchered animals, monkish rapists, and Satan"...
A Star-Bright Lie
A Star-Bright Lie recounts the age-old story of the young provincial who comes to New York and is dazzled and betrayed by the bright lights of Broadway, but with a few kinks to the story: the provincial in this case was gay and would later develop...
Steelwork
Like a series of snapshots, this novel presents a picture of a particular Brooklyn neighborhood between the years 1935 and 1951, covering the Depression, World War II, the beginnings of the Cold War and the Korean War. In short, colorful, dramatic...
Stories and Essays of Mina Loy
Stories and Essays of Mina Loy is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy's narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works.
Storytown
The distinctions between art and life are blurred in this unsettling and tantalizing first collection of short fiction by novelist Susan Daitch (The Colorist, L.C.). In fifteen stories, all concerning "strange displacements of the ordinary," Daitch...
Stranded
Spanish feminist writer Esther Tusquets has won a discriminating following in this country with two earlier novels published in translation, Love Is a Solitary Game and The Same Sea as Every Summer.
Stranded is a novel about love and betrayal among...
The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction
To most of us, "subversion" means political subversion, but The Subversive Scribe is about collaboration not with an enemy, but with texts and between writers. Though Suzanne Jill Levine is the translator of some of the most inventive...
The Succubus
In an unnamed city shrouded in mist, Valent Kosima is a retiree living quietly yet discontentedly with his TV-addicted wife. To escape the claustrophobia of home, he masquerades as a man of means and takes to spending his nights strolling . . .
Suicide
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.
Summer in Termuren
This, the author writes, is "the novel of the indiviual in a world of barbarians." It is the story of Ondine and Oscarke, a young married couple adrift in a Belgian landscape that is darkening under the spread of industry and World War I. Ondine, who...
The Summer of the Elder Tree
With uncompromising sincerity, and in the same beautiful prose for which she is renowned, Marie Chaix here takes stock of her life as a woman and writer, as well as the crises that caused her to give up her work.
Sweet Tooth
In a New York as gritty and brutal as Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles—a city of muggings, cockroach-infested apartments, dank hospitals, and casual murders—three characters cross paths and collide. Sweet Tooth is a book of anonymous sexual...
The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square
An astonishing and fantastical autobiographical novel—reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Laurence Sterne—The System of Vienna details Jonke's travels through Vienna by streetcar, reporting the bizarre and frustrating encounters he experiences as he..
Take Five
Welcome to the world of Simon Lynxx and to one of the great overlooked novels of the 1980s. Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing "Jesus 2001", what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather, best known for his movie...
Talismano
Talismano is a novelistic exploration of writing seen as a hallucinatory journey through half-remembered, half-imagined cities—in particular, the city of Tunis, both as it is now, and as it once was.
Talking
"If someone came up and started talking
a poem at you how would you know it
was a poem?" So begins David Antin's Talking, a collection of writings that defy classification. Combining a passion for storytelling and improvisation with a unique...
Talking out of School
This bitterly funny memoir reads like an exposé of the power structures in America’s higher education system: who’s got it, how they’re abusing it, what everyone else is willing to do to get it, and the social cost of doing educational business this...
Tar and Feathers
Dorothy Nelson's first book to be published in the United States focuses on a demented, dysfunctional Irish family. The Crawford family is dominated by Da (Joe), a manic-depressive thief and liar who has spent two years in prison for exposing himself...
The Tar Baby
Cast in the form of a hilariously ribald parody of a literary quarterly, The Tar Baby is a brilliant, audacious, story-filled novel populated by an array of brawling academics and earthy townies. A commemorative issue honoring the late Anatole...
Teeth Under the Sun
A modern-day Don Quixote and an exile in his own hometown, the protagonist of Teeth Under the Sun is kept from writing by a conspiracy (real? imagined?) designed to prevent him from revealing the truth about the town's strange status quo...
Teitlebaum's Window
Welcome to Brighton Beach of the 1930s and early '40s as filtered through Simon Sloan, from youth to would-be artist-as-a-young-man at Brooklyn College to the eve of his induction into the army. Wallace Markfield perfectly captures this Jewish...
Television
The amusingly odd protagonist and narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel is an academic on sabbatical in Berlin to work on his book about Titian. With his research completed, all he has left to do is sit down and write. Unfortunately, he can't...
A Temple of Texts
Winner of the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, A Temple of Texts is the latest critical collection from one of America's greatest essayists and novelists. Here, William H. Gass pays homage to the readerly side of the literary...
The Temple of the Wild Geese and Bamboo Dolls of Echizen
The Temple of the Wild Geese, a semi-autobiographical account of Mizukami's childhood, tells the tale of Jinen, a Buddhist monk raised by villagers after his mother, a beggar, abandoned him. Sent to live at a temple at the age of ten...
Terra Nostra
One of the great masterpieces of modern Latin American fiction, Terra Nostra is concerned with nothing less than the history of Spain and of South America, with the Indian Gods and with Christianity, with the birth, the passion, and the death of...
The Terrible Threes
With offbeat humor and on-target social criticism, Ishmael Reed presents in The Terrible Threes a vision of America in the not-too-distant future, a portrait of a fairy tale gone awry. Opening on Thanksgiving Day in the late 1990s—three years...
The Terrible Twos
The Terrible Twos is a wickedly funny, sharp-edged fictional assault on all those sulky, spoiled naysayers needing instant gratification—Americans. Ishmael Reed's sixth novel depicts a zany, bizarre, and all-too believable future where mankind's...
Thank You for Not Reading
In this collection of acerbic essays, Ugresic dissects the nature of the contemporary book industry, which she argues is so infected with the need to create and promote literature that will appeal to the masses—literally to everyone—that...
Theatre of Incest
In normal, everyday tones, a story is told by the perpetrator of triple incest: first with his mother as a child and a young man, then with his daughter as he grows into mature manhood, and finally with his sister in middle age. This primeval...
Theory of Prose
Viktor Shklovsky's 1925 book Theory of Prose might have become the most important work of literary criticism in the twentieth century had not two obstacles barred its way: the crackdown by Soviet dictatorship on Shklovsky and other Russian...
Things in the Night
Things in the Night explores a world on the edge of disaster—plagued by mysterious power-outages and threatened by ominous conspiracies—juxtaposed against images and stories of unsurpassed beauty and tenderness.
Beginning with the simple but...
Third Factory
Like many of Shklovsky's works, Third Factory cannot be neatly classified. In part it is a memoir of the three "Factories" that influenced his development as a human being and as a writer, yet the events depicted within the book are fictionalized and...
The Third Policeman
The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a...
This Is Not a Tragedy
The Works of David Markson
The Works of David Markson
The very first book-length study to focus on this seminal American author, This Is Not a Tragedy reviews David Markson's entire body of work . . .
Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials
Thomas Pynchon has received an unparalleled amount of criticism in the twenty-five years since the publication of his first novel: two dozen books, dozens of chapters in other books, hundreds of articles, even his own journal. No other novelist has...
Those Barren Leaves
Aldous Huxley spares no one in his ironic, piercing portrayal of a group gathered in an Italian palace by the socially ambitious and self-professed lover of art, Mrs. Aldwinkle. Here, Mrs. Aldwinkle yearns to recapture the glories of the Italian...
Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again
In the place of plot, which the author claims to have had "shot and buried with the proper honors," the reader finds a dense, subtly interwoven structure of memory and reality, banalities and fantasy, all served up with a good dollop of absurdity . . .
A Thousand Pearls (for a Thousand Pennies)
This delightful "novel" offers a thousand answers to the question, "What are you thinking?" (Or, as translator Ian Monk puts it: "Penny for them?") This is a book about the basics: love, sexuality, death, and all the other things that lurk in our everyday
Three
Three opens with the death of a young woman, identified only as S, possibly a suicide. Following her death, Ruth and Leonard—a middle-aged British couple whose marriage has devolved into pithy and bitter conversations—review the time S...
Three Trapped Tigers
Cabrera Infante's masterpiece, Three Trapped Tigers is one of the most playful books to reach the U.S. from Cuba. Filled with puns, wordplay, lists upon lists, and Sternean typography—such as the section entitled "Some Revelations," which...
Through the Night
Dentist Karl Meyer's worst nightmare comes true when his son, Ole-Jakob, takes his own life. This tragedy is the springboard for a complex novel posing essential questions about human experience.
The Tide is Right
This remarkable novel, suppressed in 1957 and published by Dalkey Archive for the first time, is concerned with a day in the life of a stagnant, aristocratic Scottish family in the 1950s. As the family prepares for its annual Christmas dance, old...
Time at War
Aged twenty, and with no war experience, Nicholas Mosley found himself in charge of a platoon of men positioned along the Italian front during the Second World War. With his father in prison on charges of treason, he had enlisted primarily in an...
Time Must Have a Stop
Sebastian Barnack, a handsome English schoolboy, goes to Italy for the summer, and there his real education begins. His teachers are two quite different men: Bruno Rontini, the saintly bookseller, who teaches him about things spiritual; and Uncle...
Tlooth
Set in a Russian prison camp, this novel begins at a baseball game featuring the Defective Baptists versus the Fideists. As in other Mathews novels, there is a plot (of sorts), and here it is one of revenge. Our narrator/hero is a dental assistant in...
To An Early Grave
When Leslie Braverman passes away at the early age of 41, four of his closest friends are reunited on an odyssey through the streets of Brooklyn in a beat-up Volkswagen searching for the funeral parlor. In a series of fits, starts and wrong-turns, the...
Tom Harris
At times in his life, Tom Harris is a dull schoolboy, an apprentice barber, a delinquent husband, an old man with a monkey who drinks at the Green Man Pub, "il professore Harris" at the University of Genoa, and possibly a murderer. But the question of...
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
Composed of seven dark tales, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich presents variations on the theme of political and social self-destruction throughout Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The characters in these stories are caught...
Too Much Flesh and Jabez
Coleman Dowell's "Southern Gothic" is a novel about sexual repression. Miss Ethel, a spinster school teacher, decides to write what she calls a "perverse tale" about one of her former students, a Kentucky farmer named Jim Cummins. Endowing him with...
Tower of Glass
The five interlocking stories in The Tower of Glass create a singular, powerful account of a nation in turmoil—and a prophetic warning about an oppressive government's need to control not just the society but the mind.
Through symbolism, wry...
transcript
A disturbing document and a powerful, poetic masterpiece, transcript shows us that the Holocaust was not "unspeakable," but was an eminently describable and described act...
Transit
Two men meet in an airport men's room ("Excuse me. But you're pissing on my foot.") sometime in the early 1990s in the Arabian Gulf. From this meeting, they proceed to get a bit drunk on bad liquor, discover a magical hidden room, get transported back...
Translation in Practice: A Symposium
Though translation is a vital part of any vibrant literary culture, no practical guide to the process of translating foreign works into English and preparing them for publication has yet been made available to prospective translators, editors, or...
Transparency
Drawing on his resources as a novelist, cultural critic, and scholar, Marek Bieńczyk peels away the layers of our contemporary obsession with "transparency," skipping across centuries and continents to piece together the genesis of our fears of deception.
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing
This inventive first novel explores the widespread problem of female depression. A 27-year-old drama teacher named Joy Stone has come undone. The problems of everyday living accumulate and begin to torture Joy, who blames her problems not on her work...
Trio
Trio marks the first time these three shorter Pinget works are collected in a single volume. From the sublime surrealism of Between Fantoine and Agapa, through the Faulknerian take on rural life in That Voice, to the musical rhythm...
Tripticks
As innovative and abrasive as the very best of William Burroughs, Ann Quin's Tripticks offers a scattered account of the narrator's flight across a surreal American landscape, pursued by his "No. 1 X-wife" and her new lover. This masterpiece of...
Troia: Mexican Memoirs
In this newly rediscovered memoir, Bonnie Bremser, ex-wife of Beat-poet Ray Bremser, chronicles her life on the run from the law in the early Sixties. When Ray fled to Mexico in 1961 to avoid imprisonment for armed robbery, a crime he claimed he did...
The Truth about Marie
Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, The Truth about Marie revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie.
The Tunnel
Thirty years in the making, William Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. The story of a middle aged professor who, upon completion of his massive...
The Tunnel read by William H. Gass
Thirty years in the making, William H. Gass's second novel first appeared on the literary scene in 1995, at which time it was promptly hailed as an indisputable masterpiece. It is the story of a middle-aged professor who, upon completion of his...
Unbabbling
In the tour de force called America, one of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses struggles upward to the penthouse of God, discovering too late he's taken the elevator marked down. Resurrected from the rubble of dreams as a messiah and accidental...
Under the Shadow
Under the Shadow takes the form of fifty-nine brief sketches with simple nouns as titles. These exquisite vignettes take place on a plane at once surreal, abstract, and ominous, describing a set of people and incidents derived largely from fragments...
An Unending Landscape
An Unending Landscape is a subtle, humorous, mind-bending novel about the origins and fates of three different manuscripts. The first is an autobiographical sketch concerning an Estonian writer's old schoolmate, now a government official, who is . . .
Upstaged
Two minutes into the second act, Nicolas Boehlmer finds himself bound, gagged, and stripped by a man who appears to be his mirror image: costumed in the same wig, makeup, and clothes. Nicolas is powerless to prevent his usurper from playing his role . . .
The Uses of Slime Mould: Essays of Four Decades
Including pieces on Gregory Bateson, William Faulkner, Philip Pullman, Sir Oswald Mosley's politics, religion, and stammering, this deverse collection gathers essays written by Nicolas Mosley over the past forty years. Resembling the behavior of slime...
Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose
The British novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose (born 1923) is increasingly being regarded as one of the most significant writers of the contemporary period;
Vain Art of the Fugue
Clutching a bouquet of flowers, hurrying to catch his bus, and arguing with the driver once he's on, a man rushes to a train station platform to meet a woman. This sequence of events occurs and recurs in remarkably different variations in Vain...
Van Gogh's Room at Arles
The three novellas collected in Van Gogh's Room at Arles demonstrate once again Stanley Elkin's mastery of the English language, with exuberant rants on almost every page, unexpected plot twists, and jokes that leave readers torn between...
Villa Bunker
The narrator of Villa Bunker receives letters, dozens of them, written by his mother in an isolated seaside villa, which tell of his parents' troubles in this uninhabitable house, soon to become a kind of labyrinth roamed by memories . . .
The Vineland Papers
The publication of Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland in 1990, 17 years after his epochal Gravity's Rainbow, received unprecedented attention from the media and tens of thousands of readers, all wondering why the novel was so long in the making and...
Vlad
Where, Carlos Fuentes asks, is a modern-day vampire to roost? Why not Mexico City, populated by ten million blood sausages (that is, people), and a police force who won't mind a few disappearances? "Vlad" is Vlad the Impaler, of course, whose mythic . . .
Voices from Chernobyl
On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl. Until now, all of the books published in English focused on the facts, names, and data. Voices from Chernobyl presents first-hand accounts of what happened...
Vol. XXXI, #1 The Failure Issue
An issue devoted to failure should be no issue at all. Instead, guest editor Joshua Cohen has failed at failure and assembled an unparalleled group of contributors for this specially themed issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction.
Vol. XXXI, #2 Gilbert Sorrentino and Mulligan Stew
Featuring essays and tributes by Jonathan Lethem, Marjorie Perloff, and Gerald Howard among others, this issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction focuses on the life and work of Gilbert Sorrentino...
Vol. XXXI, #3 Flann O'Brien: Centenary Essays
Celebrating one hundred years of Flann O'Brien, this issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction gathers literary appreciations and critical investigations by Aidan Higgins, Thierry Robin, Carlos Villar Flor, Joseph Brooker, and others.
Vol. XXXII, #1 Robert Coover Festschrift
In honor of the 80th birthday of one of the grandmasters of American experimental fiction, editor Stéphane Vanderhaeghe has gathered critical essays and appreciations by William Gass, John Barth, Bradford Morrow, Shelley Jackson, and many more.
Vol. XXXII, #2 Gert Jonke's "Individual and Metamorphosis"
The Review of Contemporary Fiction proudly presents the English-language debut of Austrian master Gert Jonke's absurd, revealing, and groundbreaking autobiographical essay/novella "Individual and Metamorphosis."
Vol. XXXII, #3 The Future of British Fiction
This issue of the RCF is, for the first time, devoted to—but not devotional toward—contemporary British fiction. Stewart Home, China Miéville, Maureen Freely, and Patricia Waugh pose difficult questions about the status of contemporary British literature.
Volume 1: Collected Novellas
This is the first in a four volume edition of the early fiction of one of the most daring and influential writers of postwar Germany, a man often called the German James Joyce due to the linguistic inventiveness of his fiction. The novella was...
Volume 2: Nobodaddy's Children
This is the second in a four volume edition of the early fiction of one of the most daring and influential writers of postwar Germany, a man often called the German James Joyce due to the linguistic inventiveness of his fiction.
This trilogy of...
Volume 3: Collected Stories
This is the third in a four volume edition of the early fiction of one of the most daring and influential writers of postwar Germany. Gathered here are all of the short stories that Arno Schmidt wished to preserve. They are grouped under three...
Volume 4: Two Novels, The Stony Heart and B/Moondocks
This is the last in a four volume edition of the early fiction of one of the most daring and influential writers of postwar Germany, a man often called the German James Joyce due to the linguistic inventiveness of his fiction.
Among Schmidt...
Walaschek's Dream
Giovanni Orelli's docufictional phantasmagoria revisits a lesser-known painting by Paul Klee titled Alphabet I, which features black letters and symbols scrawled over the sports page of a newspaper reporting the results of the 1938 Swiss National Cup . .
The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image
The Walk, a meditation on walking and on the literature of walking, ruminates on this pervasive, even commonplace, modern image. It is not so much an argument as a journey along the path of literature, noting the occasions and settings...
Wall to Wall
Like so many of Woolf's odysseys into the heart of America's subcultures, Wall to Wall traces a modern Ulysses in reverse: from a West Coast asylum where he works as an attendant to a Boston asylum where he visits his mother, Claude Squires views...
Waltz
Waltz is an occasionally absurd comedy of indecision and indolence structured in imitation of the dance from which it takes its title.
Warrenpoint
Warrenpoint is a memoir, and more than a memoir: with moments of novelistic narrative and lyricism wedded to musings on the aesthetic and theological themes of the author's coming of age . . .
Wasabi for Breakfast
This book debuts two novellas by the noted Japanese author: Family Business and 1,001 Fires Raging.
Wert and the Life Without End
Combining the worlds of the avant-garde and the ancient epic, and revealing the interconnectedness of psychology, lived experience, and the written word, Wert and the Life Without End is a masterpiece of self-reflective storytelling.
Western
Setting out to tell the story of a mysterious cowboy—a stranger in town with a terrible secret—Christine Montalbetti is continually sidetracked by the details that occur to her along the way, her CinemaScope camera focusing not on the gunslinger’s...
What Does Mrs. Freeman Want?
While lying on a beach in Greece with an accommodating female companion, the narrator of this novel, Petros Abatzoglou (also the name of the author), describes the peculiar life story and marriage of Mrs. Freeman. By turns digressive, tender...
What Waiting Really Means
What Waiting Really Means is about emergencies that never reach the emergency room. It's about a woman named Mary with no last name who rides buses and smokes cigars and watches the wind blow her bedroom curtains into a frenzy. It's about cities...
What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going
In his debut collection, Damion Searls gives us five extraordinary tales of the life of the mind in America today. "56 Water Street" and "Goldenchain" follow writers whose projects only lead them deeper into the labyrinth of modern relationships and...
When Blackness Rhymes With Blackness
In When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, Rowan Ricardo Phillips pushes African American poetry to its limits by unraveling "our desire to think of African American poetry as African American poetry."
Where the Air Is Clear
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...
Whistlejacket
While investigating his mentor's life and death, Michael, a voyeuristic fashion photographer, travels through a Dionysian landscape where sex is daydream, women and horses share the same erotic power, and perversity is the rule. In his search, Michael...
Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta
Largely autobiographical, Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta incorporates Aglaja Veteranyi's own experiences as a circus child, refugee, and wanderer . . . [continued]
Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife
In this paean to the pleasures of language, Gass equates his text with the body of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title, to advance the conceit that a parallel should exist between a woman and her lover and a book and its reader. Disappointed...
Windy Arbours
In addition to his novels and stories, Aidan Higgins—one of Ireland's most respected contemporary writers—has written a large body of criticism. Windy Arbours includes pieces written between 1970-1990 and is the first collection of his...
The Winner of Sorrow
A fictional imagining of the gentle but troubled zealot William Cowper—best known as a precursor to Romantics such as Wordsworth and Burns—Brian Lynch's The Winner of Sorrow brings to life the mind and times of an eighteenth-century poet.
With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows
Kalniete's book is a moving and eloquent testimony to her family and to the Latvian nation—to their shared fate during more than fifty years of occupation. It is an indictment of the inhuman repression of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Above...
With the Animals
Considered the standard-bearer for the great Franco-Swiss literary tradition, exemplified by authors such as Jacques Chessex and C. F. Ramuz, Noëlle Revaz may also remind English-language readers of Louis-Ferdinand Céline . . .
Without Origin
Oliver Rohe's first novel is a word-crazed monologue in the mind of a man named Selber flying back to his war-torn native country for the first time in years.
Wittgenstein's Mistress
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...
Witz
On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government.
The Word "Desire"
The twelve startlingly original stories about erotic situations collected in The Word Desire are the best opportunity yet for adventurous readers to discover the fiction of Rikki Ducornet. Always at ease with the sensuous, perverse and eccentric...
The Word Book
Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction—the solid certainties of the self, the world around...
Words for a Deaf Daughter and Gala: A Fictional Sequel
This volume brings together two of Paul West's best books: his critically acclaimed Words for a Deaf Daughter (1970), a nonfiction account of West's deaf and brain-damaged daughter Mandy at age eight, and Gala (1976), a novel about a writer named...
Ya! And John-Juan
Well-respected throughout his career, Douglas Woolf created some of the most startlingly original works of the twentieth century. The two novels collected here create a dreamlike vision of America where helplessness prevails and the actions of the...
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
"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...
You Do Understand
This collection of sharp, spare, occasionally absurd, cruel, touching miniatures addresses the fundamental difficulty we have in making the people we love understand what we want and need . . .
Zero
Against a backdrop of political corruption José lives an ordinary life, working a dead-end job catching mice in a dingy movie theater. Everything changes when he meets his wife Rosa thanks to the help of the Happy Heart Marriage Agency. They...
Zoo, or Letters Not about Love
While living in exile in Berlin, Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet (the "Alya" of this novel). Shklovsky was in the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write...