Books published by Dalkey Archive Press

A hidden classic of Brazilian literature, "P's Three Women" is a bonbon laced with slow-acting poison--but delicious nonetheless.

With a name like Jacques Boucher de Cr?vecoeur de Perthes, it ought to be easy to become a hero. Yet, how to go about it? A reallife nineteenth-century paleontologist and explorer, excavated here by Christine Montalbetti to serve as her protagonist, Jacques has tried everything: fighting off pirates, writing poetry, becoming a dandy, a man of culture... all without ever quite feeling he fits the bill. At last, when Jacques decides he'll make his name by discovering evidence of early man, it seems we, his, will be treated to a novel about mankind itself--unless, of course, our putative hero gets shanghaied into a love story along the way. "The Origin of Man" is the story of one man--and all humanity--waging a war against oblivion without ever quite winning the day. It's also a comedy about being immersed in heroic and fantastical events without one's ever noticing.

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 revolutionary, his cry for freedom echoes like a broken record as they lower him into the ground. Like a hopelessly lost coal miner, he digs on, deflating the gloom with slapstick, pensive as a clown, gathering strength for the next round.

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 intricacies involved in keeping them on, the physical (as well as psychological) laws related to the interaction of body and clothing. All such speculations come to an absurd, crashing halt as the contemporary mind, filled with an overload of information, attempts but fails to make sense of some of the simplest, though of course complex, mundane facts of daily life.From Dublin to Central Illinois to Outer Space, MacLochlainn¿s stories embody the imaginative spirit of Samuel Beckett and Flann O¿Brien.

"Yasuoka s venal, youthful first-person narrators grasp at beauty and romance amid a changing Japan in these nine stories, all published in Japan in the early 1950s . . . Tyler s translation captures Yasuoka s effortless style, registering dark but delightful impressions of youth." Publishers Weekly

The denizens of Kelton, New York - a bedroom community some fifty miles from Manhattan - are a well-heeled bunch who spend an awful lot of time playing rummy. There is Alice, an unfulfilled cellist, and her complacent brother Marshall, who doesn't like his friends to confide in him. There are the bumbling and overindulged Fabia and Victor, another sibling duo, and their friend Irving, a meek mama's boy. Into their cloistered lives come Claire and Nadia Tosti, two sisters from Paris, whose take-charge tactics stir the winds of enterprise, romance, and change. Through them, Alice is led to a swarthy Italian who helps her orchestrate a successful restaurant business. Irving pairs up with Claire, finally winning freedom from his eccentric, cat-loving mother. Victor embraces Nadia and the antiques trade, while Fabia discovers a potential romance with Victor's French pen pal. Only Marshall finds himself eluded by love, a predicament that will lead him from the snug environs of Kelton to the crude energies of the Midwest. In bistros, galleries, bars, and theaters, the protagonists eat, drink, criticize each other, and debate the worlds of art, music, literature, life, and love.

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 is a young girl, who we meet at age seven. Along the way, she loses her home, her family, her name, her hair, and finally, her fear. Two things help her on her journeys during these difficult years: some lessons from her parents and a large share of luck, which never deserts her.

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 to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle, as well as the older, more political Marius. Reality soon encroaches upon the foursome, however, in the form of Marius's ailing wife, forcing the narrator to confront the dark emptiness and fear at the heart of his friends' joie de vivre. In this, his second novel-written in the '50s and never before published-Nicholas Mosley weighs questions of responsibility and sacrifice against those of love and earthly desire, the spirit versus the flesh.

In this collection of thematically related stories, celebrated Belgian author Francois 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.

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 Switzerland's victory over Nazi Germany in the 1938 Swiss National Cup. This play of coincidences sets the stage for Orelli's encyclopedic portrait of European culture under Nazism, where a motley crew of philosopher-peasants as well as historical luminaries like Arthur Schopenhauer, Vincent van Gogh, Viktor Shklovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Klee himself, and the titular footballer Eugene Walaschek all meet at the local tavern and debate the significance of Klee's work.

Spanning fifty years, but with a particular emphasis on post-independence fiction, this collection features a diverse range of styles and voices, offering a window onto a vibrant literary scene that has been largely inaccessible to the English-language reader until now. With stories addressing subjects as diverse as blood feuds, betrayal, sex, drugs, and Sergio Leone, it promises to challenge any existing preconceptions the reader might hold, and make available a rich and varied literary tradition unjustly overshadowed by the other ex-Soviet republics, until now.

A cornerstone of Swiss modernism, at last available in English translation from one of the great German translators of our time.