Books published by Dalkey Archive Press

"Terra Nostra is the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say." Milan Kundera

Proving himself yet again a master of every form, Barth conquers in his latest the ruminative short essay—“​​jeux d’esprits,” as Barth describes them. These mostly one-page tidbits pay homage to Barth’s literary influences while retaining his trademark self-consciousness and willingness to play.

Originally published in 1968, The Secret Crypt is a cult classic of Mexican literature, waiting to be rediscovered.

From Museum of Modern Art editor Emily Hall, a debut novel in the first person about the place of art and the artist in the world.

The time is the twilight of the decrepit Brezhnev regime, the place, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia: the "Latin periphery of empire." A pensioner seeks justice for his dead wife, crushed by a falling crane--the very symbol of the "construction of socialism"--but comes up against hostility from a cynical system at best indifferent, at worst contemptuous of human life. With a keen, Gogolian eye for the grotesque, often squalid, details of everyday life in the USSR, Iulian Ciocan paints darkly humorous but compassionate portraits of Homo sovieticus, from crusty war veterans and lowly collective farm workers to venal Party bigwigs, as each comes to the disturbing realization that the lofty ideals of Soviet society were lies all along. And for idealistic young pioneer Iulian, the biggest disillusionment of all will be the abrupt revelation of Brezhnev's mortality.

collection of previously published and unpublished storiesDumitru Tsepeneag exiled because of this controversial writing style

The End of the World Would Not Have Taken Place is Czech author Patrik Ourednik's second work originally written in French. Like the author, the narrator is a writer and translator writing a book about the end of the world, in which he reflects on life, death, war, and divine action to form a biting social critique.

With each chapter embodying a separate Commandment, Living Tissue, 10x10 is both a Decalogue and a ribald, exuberant, deliriously inventive postmodern Decameron, which covers four decades in the life of the protagonist, unfolding against the backdrop of Soviet and post-communist Moldova, from the untimely death of Yuri Gagarin in 1968 to the so-called "twitter revolution" of 2009. Tens of tragical, comical, fantastical, historical tales intertwine, punctuated by the endless upheavals suffered by twentieth-century Moldova. But the narrative also takes euphoric flight, in episodes that travel as far afield as Paris, Moscow, and Tibet. In Living Tissue. 10x10, Emilian Galaicu-Päun engages in literary origami, bending and blending together real and fictional worlds, abolishing up and down, here and there, past and present, as if in an Escher engraving, alternating narrative techniques, braiding myth, history and literary allusion, transgressing the boundaries of languages and cultures to create a rapturously intricate novel in ten dimensions.

In Pisa, Italy, an Armenian immigrant named Marco Iprannossian sits in jail awaiting judgment on the attempted murder of a local official.The novel opens on the first day of his hearing-three years after his arrest-and follows the lives of Marco, his friends on the outside, the judge presiding over this case, her husband, and their teenage daughter, Lea. Through deceptively structured as a crime novel, Quarry's real concerns are both far smaller and far larger than those of a typical whodunit.Houdart's modern tale, presented in a series of brief, elliptical snapshots, is a precision-cut gem of literary minimalism.

* Nabokov, Joyce, and John Barth can be counted among Boylan's forebears

*A novel about the toxic relationships between mothers and their children by a writer famous for her vigorous sentence-making and her vitriol.

In this collection of eighteen stories, Hugh Fulham-McQuillan writes with the playfulness and intelligence of such masters of the short form as Borges, Poe, and Barthelme. He examines the aesthetics of murder, the reigning fascination of the macabre in popular culture, and the tenuous line that separates art from life. One narrator traces the Möbius strip that encloses the assassination of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare¿s play Julius Caesar, and the murder of Lincoln by a famous actor in a theater. Another undergoes plastic surgery to accelerate the process of his being possessed by the ghost of the Italian composer Gesualdo. A detective ponders the interest he takes in investigating murders. Fulham-McQuillan wears his learning lightly and writes with the tact of a born storyteller.