Dalkey Archive Announces Spring 2008 Titles
Posted on: April 01, 2008
March, 2008 — Dalkey Archive is releasing 15 new books for the Spring 2008 season, including several titles from authors Dalkey has previously published.
KNOWLEDGE OF HELL
by António Lobo Antunes; translated by Clifford E. Landers
Publication Date: March 2008
The narrator is a psychiatrist who loathes psychiatry, a war veteran, a survivor of a failed marriage, and a man seeking meaning in an uncaring and venal society. The reader joins Antunes on a journey both real and phantasmagorical as he travels by car from a vacation in the Algarve back to his hated work as a psychiatrist at a Lisbon mental institution. [more]
THE TEMPLE OF WILD GEESE AND BAMBOO DOLLS OF ECHIZEN
by Tsutomu Mizukami; translated by Dennis Washburn
Publication Date: March 2008
The Temple of the Wild Geese tells the tale of Jinen, a Buddhist monk raised by villagers after his mother abandoned him. His resentment smolders for years until it explodes in a shocking climax. In Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, no woman is willing to marry the diminutive Kisuke, a bamboo artisan, until Tamae, a prostitute, comes to pay her respects at the grave of Kisuke’s father . . . [more]
POLYNOMIALS AND POLLEN: PARABLES, PROVERBS, PARADIGMS, AND PRAISE FOR LOIS
by Jay Wright
Publication Date: April 2008
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, the book is a constellation of protophilosophical inquiry into notions of order, disarray, evidence, flowering, and return. [more]
THE PRESENTABLE ART OF READING ABSENCE
by Jay Wright
Publication Date: April 2008
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. With occult emotionality and analytic brilliance, Jay Wright has written the user's guide to evanescence. [more]
I'D LIKE
by Amanda Michalopoulou; translated by Karen Emmerich
Publication Date: April 2008
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. Instead, we are presented with a kaleidoscope of characters and events, signs and emotions, linked by the uncanny repetition of certain details. [more]
THE COUNT OF CONCORD
by Nicholas Delbanco
Publication Date: May 2008
On par with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Count Rumford was, among many other things, a politician, a spy, a philanthropist, and above all, a scientist. Based on countless historical documents, including letters and essays by Thompson himself, The Count of Concord brings to life the remarkable career of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. [more]
DIARY OF A BLOOD DONOR
by Mati Unt; translated by Ants Eert
Publication Date: May 2008
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), widely regarded as the first Estonian woman to express an Estonian longing for independence—with portraits of life in contemporary Estonia, all set against a backdrop of vampirism and the Gothic novel. [more]
HOTEL CRYSTAL
by Olivier Rolin; translated by Jane Kuntz
Publication Date: May 2008
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 random texts. Olivier Rolin has dipped into his extensive travel notebooks to create this highly inventive novel that spoofs the decaying international espionage scene, the literary author publicity tour, and official French culture. [more]
THE GLASS SLIPPER AND OTHER STORIES
by Shotaro Yasuoka; translated by Royall Tyler
Publication Date: June 2008
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 the chaotic backdrop of the era running from before World War II to just after its end, these stories are infused with a timeless sense of novelty and humor that does not suffer from age. [more]
MONSIEUR
by Jean-Philippe Toussaint; translated by John Lambert
Publication Date: June 2008
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. What will happen? This and that. Monsieur will attend a party. He will babysit. But most of all, Monsieur will muse, and so will you muse, on everything from the night sky to a Rotring pen. [more]
MAKBARA
by Juan Goytisolo; translated by Helen Lane
Publication Date: July 2008
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 more universal than in his earlier works, and the book is full of its own kind of warmth, humor, and love. [more]
LITERATURE AND CINEMATOGRAPHY
by Viktor Shklovsky; translated by Irina Masinovsky
Publication Date: July 2008
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 who view art as a means of representing “the real world” and a method of communication. [more]
FICTION NOW: THE FRENCH NOVEL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
by Warren Motte
Publication Date: August 2008
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. Each of the authors invoked exemplified in his or her work a different set of strategies, concerns, and approaches. Despite their diversity of theme and technique, these writers share a will to make French fiction new, and demonstrate that today's French novel is an extremely vigorous, deeply enthralling, and richly plural cultural form. [more]
LIFE ITSELF: PAUL BOON AS INNOVATOR OF THE NOVEL
by A.M.A van den Oever; translated by Annette Visser
Publication Date: March 2008
Life Itself is the first book-length study in English of the great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon. A.M.A. van den Oever questions the paradox between Boon’s international reputation as a significant innovator of the novel, and the peculiarly reductive biographical interpretations regularly uttered by some of his fellow countrymen and contemporaries. [more]
INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON RICHARD POWERS
Edited by Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey
Publication Date: July 2008
Richard Powers has assembled a body of work whose intellectual breadth and imaginative energy bears comparison with that of any writer working today. Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers pays tribute to that achievement by collecting seventeen essays—written by leading literary critics, philosophers, and a novelist—each of which offers important insights into the intellectual grids that underlie Powers's work. [more]
KNOWLEDGE OF HELL
by António Lobo Antunes; translated by Clifford E. Landers
Publication Date: March 2008
The narrator is a psychiatrist who loathes psychiatry, a war veteran, a survivor of a failed marriage, and a man seeking meaning in an uncaring and venal society. The reader joins Antunes on a journey both real and phantasmagorical as he travels by car from a vacation in the Algarve back to his hated work as a psychiatrist at a Lisbon mental institution. [more]
THE TEMPLE OF WILD GEESE AND BAMBOO DOLLS OF ECHIZEN
by Tsutomu Mizukami; translated by Dennis Washburn
Publication Date: March 2008
The Temple of the Wild Geese tells the tale of Jinen, a Buddhist monk raised by villagers after his mother abandoned him. His resentment smolders for years until it explodes in a shocking climax. In Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, no woman is willing to marry the diminutive Kisuke, a bamboo artisan, until Tamae, a prostitute, comes to pay her respects at the grave of Kisuke’s father . . . [more]
POLYNOMIALS AND POLLEN: PARABLES, PROVERBS, PARADIGMS, AND PRAISE FOR LOIS
by Jay Wright
Publication Date: April 2008
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, the book is a constellation of protophilosophical inquiry into notions of order, disarray, evidence, flowering, and return. [more]
THE PRESENTABLE ART OF READING ABSENCE
by Jay Wright
Publication Date: April 2008
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. With occult emotionality and analytic brilliance, Jay Wright has written the user's guide to evanescence. [more]
I'D LIKE
by Amanda Michalopoulou; translated by Karen Emmerich
Publication Date: April 2008
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. Instead, we are presented with a kaleidoscope of characters and events, signs and emotions, linked by the uncanny repetition of certain details. [more]
THE COUNT OF CONCORD
by Nicholas Delbanco
Publication Date: May 2008
On par with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Count Rumford was, among many other things, a politician, a spy, a philanthropist, and above all, a scientist. Based on countless historical documents, including letters and essays by Thompson himself, The Count of Concord brings to life the remarkable career of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. [more]
DIARY OF A BLOOD DONOR
by Mati Unt; translated by Ants Eert
Publication Date: May 2008
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), widely regarded as the first Estonian woman to express an Estonian longing for independence—with portraits of life in contemporary Estonia, all set against a backdrop of vampirism and the Gothic novel. [more]
HOTEL CRYSTAL
by Olivier Rolin; translated by Jane Kuntz
Publication Date: May 2008
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 random texts. Olivier Rolin has dipped into his extensive travel notebooks to create this highly inventive novel that spoofs the decaying international espionage scene, the literary author publicity tour, and official French culture. [more]
THE GLASS SLIPPER AND OTHER STORIES
by Shotaro Yasuoka; translated by Royall Tyler
Publication Date: June 2008
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 the chaotic backdrop of the era running from before World War II to just after its end, these stories are infused with a timeless sense of novelty and humor that does not suffer from age. [more]
MONSIEUR
by Jean-Philippe Toussaint; translated by John Lambert
Publication Date: June 2008
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. What will happen? This and that. Monsieur will attend a party. He will babysit. But most of all, Monsieur will muse, and so will you muse, on everything from the night sky to a Rotring pen. [more]
MAKBARA
by Juan Goytisolo; translated by Helen Lane
Publication Date: July 2008
LITERATURE AND CINEMATOGRAPHY
by Viktor Shklovsky; translated by Irina Masinovsky
Publication Date: July 2008
FICTION NOW: THE FRENCH NOVEL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
by Warren Motte
Publication Date: August 2008
LIFE ITSELF: PAUL BOON AS INNOVATOR OF THE NOVEL
by A.M.A van den Oever; translated by Annette Visser
Publication Date: March 2008
Life Itself is the first book-length study in English of the great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon. A.M.A. van den Oever questions the paradox between Boon’s international reputation as a significant innovator of the novel, and the peculiarly reductive biographical interpretations regularly uttered by some of his fellow countrymen and contemporaries. [more]
INTERSECTIONS: ESSAYS ON RICHARD POWERS
Edited by Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey
Publication Date: July 2008
