Dalkey Archive Press: 193 books

Beauty Looks Down On Me is a collection of by turns sad and funny stories about the thwarted expectations of the young as they grow older. HeeKyung’s characters are misfits who by virtue of their bodies or their lack of social status are left to dream of momentous changes that will never come. Unsatisfied...

A classic of contemporary Catalan literature, and a haunting and satirical portrait of a vanishing age, Llorenç Villalonga's The Dolls' Room concerns the decline of Don Toni and Dona Maria Antonia Bearn: aristocrats, cousins, husband and wife, and members of the decadent, age-old ruling class of the...

Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page is an unconventional study of Robert Coover's work from his early masterpiece The Origin of the Brunists (1966) to the recent Noir (2010). Written in the second person, it offers a self-reflexive investigation into the ways in which Coover's stories often...

Stories and Essays of Mina Loy is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy's narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy's narratives address issues...

Communication—or the lack thereof—is the subject of this sly update of the picaresque. No One Writes Back is the story of a young man who leaves home with only his blind dog, an MP3 player, and a book, traveling aimlessly for three years, from motel to motel, meeting people on the road. Rather...

In this comic novel of political intrigue, Adam Gorozpe, a respected businessman in Mexico, has a life so perfect that he might as well be his namesake in the Garden of Eden—but there are snakes in this Eden too. For one thing, Adam's wife Priscila has fallen in love with the brash director of national...

Suicide cannot be read as simply another novel—it is, in a sense, the author's own oblique, public suicide note, a unique meditation on this most extreme of refusals. Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend—perhaps real, perhaps fictional—more than twenty years...

Masochism is out and feminism is in, Jews are out and Germans are in, race is out and gender is in, and everyone's fighting (and rewriting) for a piece of the pie. Jewish director Jim Minsk disappears during a trip to the South. Black playwright Ian Ball writes the all-female play Reckless Eyeballing...

Warrenpoint is a memoir, and more than a memoir: with moments of novelistic narrative and lyricism wedded to musings on the aesthetic and theological themes of the author's coming of age—filial piety, original sin, a child's perceptions, and then the nature of terrorism, and of reading itself—it...

A Community Writing Itself features internationally respected writers Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratcliffe, Robert Glück, and Barbara Guest, and important younger writers Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr, and Elizabeth Robinson....

Ishmael Reed's career as one of our great playwrights has long been eclipsed by his other work. Here published for the first time, Reed's plays follow the ancient tradition of using the theater as a forum in which the official versions of our history can be critiqued. Dealing with subjects that mainstream...

Tor Ulven is one of the most renowned Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, beginning his career writing poetry and ending it with unclassifiable explorations of the possibilities of prose, reminiscent of writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke. Replacement, his only novel, published...

At once an ironic portrayal of contemporary Korea and an intimate exploration of heartache, alienation, and nostalgia, this collection of seven short stories has earned the author widespread critical acclaim. With empathy and an overarching melancholy that is at times tinged with sarcasm but always...

Having abandoned his wife, life, family, and homeland, the narrator of My Year of Love flees to Paris to begin his life over again, and finds himself having to rescue himself from the freedom he believed he desired: "I would never have believed that freedom could be a form of captivity, freedom can be...