Books published by Dalkey Archive Press

Comic and tragic, po-faced and hysterical, Contemporary Macedonian Fiction allows us to discover some of the most exciting young writers at work today.

*This is a book that's whimsical and funny and also very much engaged with the political ramifications of language, how we use language to wound in the same way we use it to play

*a novel that incorporates not only a fictionalized history of Delbanco's own extraordinary family history but also re-imagines the turbulent history of emigrant German Jews in the twentieth century

In this debut novel by the Polish writer Piotr Pazinski, a young man takes a train to a small town outside of Warsaw to visit a boarding house populated by the last generation of Polish Holocaust survivors.

Alistair Ian Blyth's Card Catalogue is a book about books. Set in Bucharest in the decade after the Revolution, it presents a series of dreamlike narratives loosely linked by the subject of libraries: book hoarding, book hunting, book burning, and, above all, the dreams of infinite other books--past and future--that every individual codex volume inspires. Whether he is describing his encounters with Gribski (whose strange hidden library in Bucharest he is to see but once) or itemizing the various books whose existence he has dreamed (including "a collection of children's paeans to Ceausescu bound in the same volume as a slim commentary on Pound's Canto XIV"), Blyth shows himself to be a card catalogue unto himself. In the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Alberto Manguel, this book is bound to please.

In the hospital, being treated for cervical cancer, Mia meditates on her life, her ex-girlfriend, and the state of her sanity. This heartbreaking autobiographical novel dramatizes the brutality of disease and its effects on both mind and body.

In Cut Up on Copacabana, three interlocking sets of texts by professional boxer and professor of French literature David Scott ("Travel Notes," "Boxing Rings," and "Schoolboy Rites of Passage") explore such singular moments.

In these subtly linked novellas, Muharem Bazdulj takes the reader across several centuries of Yugoslav history, finding in three very different sets of circumstances a common longing to escape the desperation and depression of life in the east.

Caring for Japanese Art at the Chester Beatty Library is a memoir of Yoshiko Ushioda , looking back at more than five decades of life in Dublin. Both inspiring and heartfelt, Mrs. Ushioda's memoir will be of interest to both lovers of Japanese Art and those interested in Irish-Japanese relations.

The Formality of the Page is a collection of powerfull and meditative poems tracking the emotional histories of ageing, love, family, and the artist's life. Alongside these personal reflections, Roberts looks back on the many writers and artists with a role in shaping his sensibility, including Catullus, Dickinson, Melville, and Wallace Stevens.

Mosley's Rainbow People is a masterful,powerful book about borders, politics, andhope.

The twenty-first century doesn¿t much care for subtlety. Now is the era of the gist, the elevator pitch, the big idea boiled down. This is precisely why Christopher Woodall¿s fiction gives such pleasure. His meticulous stories about love, death, fidelity, friendship, and human solitude do not wave their narrative arms wildly, demanding unwarranted attention. They speak in a calm voice, inviting the reader closer¿inviting him not merely to react but to feel and think. Sweets and Toxins is the first collection of short fiction to be published by this talented novelist (November) and it marks him as a writer whose sharp eye for detail and feeling for people is a rare commodity indeed. He is one of the major English authors writing today.

An unprecedented gathering of the correspondence of one of the great writers of the twentieth century spanning the years 1934 to 1966, these compulsively readable letters show us O'Brien at his most cantankerous and intimate.

"Atavisms" is an original and unsettling portrait of Quebec, from the hinterland to the metropolis, from colonial times to the present, and beyond. These thirteen stories, though not linked in the traditional sense, abound in common threads. Like family traits passed down through the generations, the attitudes and actions of a rich cast of characters reverberate, quietly but deeply, over generations. Here is a group portrait of the individual lives that together shape a collective history. "Atavisms" has been shortlisted for the 2014 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature.

"Addendum to a Photo Album" is the saga of the births, deaths, and disappearances within the eccentric Mandrykin family. Following patriarch Malach, a Cossack captain, his wife Annushka, and his many sons all born with sideburns, the novel details their fraught relationships, particularly when sitting for family photographs. Vladislav Otroshenko's flowing sentences and rich metaphorical language describe characters whose concerns embrace the heroic, the metaphysical, and the mundane, as they fulfill their duties as Cossack warriors and family members. Otroshenko draws on his upbringing in Novocherkassk, a city on the Don River, creating a world and a book inhabited with absurdity, filial love, and unusual facial hair.

"Gombrowicz is one of the most original and gifted writers of the twentieth century: he belongs at the very summit, at the side of his kindred spirits, Kafka and Celine." The Washington Post

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, she inadvertently becomes involved with a drug kingpin trying to use her as a front for his operations. Combining a comic plot with a deep concern for character, Elkin ends his career with a vivid portrait of a woman overcoming loss, a woman who is both recognizable and as unique as Elkin's other famous characters.

Oliver Rohe's first novel is a word-crazed monologue in the mind of a man named Selber flying back to his wartorn native country for the first time in years. Grappling with his fear of flying and increasingly possessed by reminiscences of his long-dead childhood friend Roman, the narrator begins to wonder if any of his thoughts, or the decisions he has made in his life, are truly his own. From meditations upon loss, violence, repetition, and individuality, to explicit homages to the works of Thomas Benhard, Without Origin is a remarkable and incisive debut.