Dalkey Announces Fall 2008 Titles

Posted on: August 22, 2008

August, 2008 — We are pleased to announce Dalkey Archive's Fall 2008 catalog. This season has one of the biggest lists of titles in Dalkey's history, and title-for-title is among the best collections of books we've ever published.

THE MIRROR IN THE WELL, by Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Available September 2008

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 explicit in its language, extreme in some of the acts it catalogues, it makes no pretense of submission to middle-class decency, let alone to expectations of happy endings . . . [more]

PRAIRIE STYLE, by C.S. Giscombe
Available September 2008

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 housing project, etc.) and crosses and recrosses the line between poetry and prose. The book is an acknowledgment of the “terrible frankness” of color, pleasure’s distance, and the similarity of equivocation and argument . . . [more]

LOG OF THE S.S. THE MRS UNGUENTINE, by Stanley Crawford
Available September 2008

“Forty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas . . .” So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as “Mrs. Unguentine,” the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas together, alone on a giant land-covered barge of their own devising. They tend their gardens, raise a child, invent an artificial forest—all the while steering clear of civilization . . . [more]

THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE, by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Burton Pike
Available October 2008

First published in Paris 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 as death approaches. This new translation by Burton Pike is a reaction to overly stylized previous translations, and aims to capture not only the beauty but also the strangeness, the spirit, of Rilke’s German . . . [more]

HOMAGE TO CZERNY: STUDIES IN VIRTUOSO TECHNIQUE, by Gert Jonke
Translated by Jean M. Snook
Available October 2008

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 dimensions of space and sound, always anchoring his flights of fancy in accessible imagery. More than any other author, Jonke, a pianist turned writer, avails himself of compositional techniques from classical music . . . [more]

THE ONE MARVELOUS THING, by Rikki Ducornet
Available November 2008

This year Rikki Ducornet is being presented with a lifetime achievement award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her beloved work as a novelist and essayist, but perhaps most of all for her work as a writer of short stories. In the tradition of Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Angela Carter, Ducornet creates modern-day fables filled with characters as complex and surprising as any in American short fiction . . . [more]

CAMERA, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Translated by Matthew B. Smith
Available November 2008

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 happens? He takes driving lessons, goes grocery shopping, spends endless hours with an adorable employee of the driving school he attends . . . [more]

THE BATHROOM, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Translated by Barbara Bray
Available November 2008

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 inside his bathroom. As he sits in his tub meditating on existence, the people around him—his girlfriend, Edmondsson, the Polish painters in his kitchen—each in their own way further enables his peculiar lifestyle, supporting his eccentric quest for immobility . . . [more]

TALKING OUT OF SCHOOL, by Kass Fleisher
Available December 2008

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 way. We follow our protagonist, Kassie, as the academic world reshapes her life, her worst secrets and most humiliating mistakes revealing deep problems of race, class, gender, and sexuality . . . [more]

A NEST OF NINNIES, by John Ashbery & James Schuyler
Available December 2008

"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 his father as a passenger in the front seat . . . Jimmy said, ‘Why don’t we write a novel?’ And how do we do that, I asked. ‘It’s easy—you write the first line,’ was his reply.” The result is one of the strangest and most exuberant experiments in American literary history . . . [more]

PIGEON POST, by Dumitru Tsepeneag
Translated by Jane Kuntz
Available December 2008

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 going with it. Soon enough he realizes that looking out of the window, sitting in front of his typewriter, describing anything and everything, is not enough to write a novel . . . [more]

DUST, by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
Translated by Thomas Epstein, Evgeny Pavlov, Shushan Avagyan, and Ana Lucic
Available January 2009

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 he writes about—whether memory, Gertrude Stein, immortality, or a walk on Nevsky Prospect—but how he writes it. Formally, Dragomoshchenko never tires of digression, creating playful games of patience and anticipation for his reader. . . . [more]

DO NOT TOUCH, by Eric Laurrent
Translated by Jeanine Herman
Available January 2009

When French mafioso Oscar Lux saved Clovis Baccara from killing himself, he became Clovis's boss and mentor. Oscar entrusts Clovis with the job of guarding his new bride when he is taken into police custody for embezzlement and racketeering on the day after his wedding. Alone on his boss’s honeymoon in Los Angeles with Oscar’s incredibly attractive new wife, Clovis tries his hardest to adhere to the one rule he has given himself: do not touch . . . [more]

PHANTASMS OF MATTER, by Michal Oklot
Available January 2009

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, but rather an effort to enumerate the images of matter in Gogol’s texts and to specify the rules of their construction . . . [more]

BEST OF CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN FICTION, edited by Álvaro Uribe
Translated by Olivia Sears
Available February 2009

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. Many of these writers, and most of these stories, have never before appeared in English. The writers in this volume are deeply engaged in the literary life of Mexico and include prominent editors, translators, columnists, professors, and even the young founder of a new publishing collective . . . [more]

THE WINNER OF SORROW, by Brian Lynch
Available February 2009

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. Intense and exhilarating, this is literary fiction at its finest—the reader will be hard-pressed not to rush ahead to see what happens next. Yet you’ll want to savor every word as Lynch traces Cowper’s tragic descent into madness . . . [more]

CARTESIAN SONATA AND OTHER NOVELLAS, by William H. Gass
Available February 2009

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 in the kitschy clutter of a small town in Illinois, a young woman in rural Iowa who loses touch with the outside world and turns to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop as anchor, and the coming-of-age story of a devilish young man named Luther (who might as well be called Lucifer) . . . [more]


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Dalkey Announces Fall 2008 Titles Posted on: August 22, 2008 August, 2008 — We are pleased to announce Dalkey Archive's Fall 2008 catalog. This season has one of the biggest lists of titles in Dalkey's history, and title-for-title is among the best collections of books we've ever published. THE MIRROR IN THE WELL, by Micheline Aharonian Marcom Available September 2008 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 explicit in its language, extreme in some of the acts it catalogues, it makes no pretense of submission to middle-class decency, let alone to expectations of happy endings . . . [more] PRAIRIE STYLE, by C.S. Giscombe Available September 2008 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 housing project, etc.) and crosses and recrosses the line between poetry and prose. The book is an acknowledgment of the “terrible frankness” of color, pleasure’s distance, and the similarity of equivocation and argument . . . [more] LOG OF THE S.S. THE MRS UNGUENTINE, by Stanley Crawford Available September 2008 “Forty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas . . .” So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as “Mrs. Unguentine,” the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas together, alone on a giant land-covered barge of their own devising. They tend their gardens, raise a child, invent an artificial forest—all the while steering clear of civilization . . . [more] THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE, by Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Burton Pike Available October 2008 First published in Paris 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 as death approaches. This new translation by Burton Pike is a reaction to overly stylized previous translations, and aims to capture not only the beauty but also the strangeness, the spirit, of Rilke’s German . . . [more] HOMAGE TO CZERNY: STUDIES IN VIRTUOSO TECHNIQUE, by Gert Jonke Translated by Jean M. Snook Available October 2008 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 dimensions of space and sound, always anchoring his flights of fancy in accessible imagery. More than any other author, Jonke, a pianist turned writer, avails himself of compositional techniques from classical music . . . [more] THE ONE MARVELOUS THING, by Rikki Ducornet Available November 2008 This year Rikki Ducornet is being presented with a lifetime achievement award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her beloved work as a novelist and essayist, but perhaps most of all for her work as a writer of short stories. In the tradition of Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Angela Carter, Ducornet creates modern-day fables filled with characters as complex and surprising as any in American short fiction . . . [more] CAMERA, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint Translated by Matthew B. Smith Available November 2008 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 happens? He takes driving lessons, goes grocery shopping, spends endless hours with an adorable employee of the driving school he attends . . . [more] THE BATHROOM, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint Translated by Barbara Bray Available November 2008 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 inside his bathroom. As he sits in his tub meditating on existence, the people around him—his girlfriend, Edmondsson, the Polish painters in his kitchen—each in their own way further enables his peculiar lifestyle, supporting his eccentric quest for immobility . . . [more] TALKING OUT OF SCHOOL, by Kass Fleisher Available December 2008 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 way. We follow our protagonist, Kassie, as the academic world reshapes her life, her worst secrets and most humiliating mistakes revealing deep problems of race, class, gender, and sexuality . . . [more] A NEST OF NINNIES, by John Ashbery & James Schuyler Available December 2008 "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 his father as a passenger in the front seat . . . Jimmy said, ‘Why don’t we write a novel?’ And how do we do that, I asked. ‘It’s easy—you write the first line,’ was his reply.” The result is one of the strangest and most exuberant experiments in American literary history . . . [more] PIGEON POST, by Dumitru Tsepeneag Translated by Jane Kuntz Available December 2008 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 going with it. Soon enough he realizes that looking out of the window, sitting in front of his typewriter, describing anything and everything, is not enough to write a novel . . . [more] DUST, by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko Translated by Thomas Epstein, Evgeny Pavlov, Shushan Avagyan, and Ana Lucic Available January 2009 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 he writes about—whether memory, Gertrude Stein, immortality, or a walk on Nevsky Prospect—but how he writes it. Formally, Dragomoshchenko never tires of digression, creating playful games of patience and anticipation for his reader. . . . [more] DO NOT TOUCH, by Eric Laurrent Translated by Jeanine Herman Available January 2009 When French mafioso Oscar Lux saved Clovis Baccara from killing himself, he became Clovis's boss and mentor. Oscar entrusts Clovis with the job of guarding his new bride when he is taken into police custody for embezzlement and racketeering on the day after his wedding. Alone on his boss’s honeymoon in Los Angeles with Oscar’s incredibly attractive new wife, Clovis tries his hardest to adhere to the one rule he has given himself: do not touch . . . [more] PHANTASMS OF MATTER, by Michal Oklot Available January 2009 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, but rather an effort to enumerate the images of matter in Gogol’s texts and to specify the rules of their construction . . . [more] BEST OF CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN FICTION, edited by Álvaro Uribe Translated by Olivia Sears Available February 2009 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. Many of these writers, and most of these stories, have never before appeared in English. The writers in this volume are deeply engaged in the literary life of Mexico and include prominent editors, translators, columnists, professors, and even the young founder of a new publishing collective . . . [more] THE WINNER OF SORROW, by Brian Lynch Available February 2009 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. Intense and exhilarating, this is literary fiction at its finest—the reader will be hard-pressed not to rush ahead to see what happens next. Yet you’ll want to savor every word as Lynch traces Cowper’s tragic descent into madness . . . [more] CARTESIAN SONATA AND OTHER NOVELLAS, by William H. Gass Available February 2009 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 in the kitschy clutter of a small town in Illinois, a young woman in rural Iowa who loses touch with the outside world and turns to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop as anchor, and the coming-of-age story of a devilish young man named Luther (who might as well be called Lucifer) . . . [more]

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