3quarksdaily (Free subscription) | 07/12/2008
Gérard Gavarry’s work is one of contemporary French literature’s best-kept secrets. That this should be so here in the United States is no surprise, granted that his books have not yet found their way into English translation—though Dalkey Archive Press...
New Statesman (Free subscription) | 06/26/2008
The Temple of the Wild Geese and Bamboo Dolls of Echizen Tsutomu Mizukami, translated by Dennis Washburn Dalkey Archive Press, 208pp, £14.99 Fukui Prefecture, on the northern backside of the island of Honshu in Japan, has a coastal plain facing the permacold Sea of Japan (which might as well be called the Sea of Manchuria, because that's what's chilled on its other side). Inland, mountains rise, their...
New Statesman (Free subscription) | 05/15/2008
Omega Minor Paul Verhaeghen Dalkey Archive Press, 640pp, £9.99
ReadySteadyBlog (Free subscription) | 05/12/2008
Last Thursday, I attended the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize awards at the Serpentine gallery in London (currently showing an exhibition of Maria Lassnig 's dreadful paintings). As you'll all know by now, Paul Verhaeghen 's massive Omega Minor ( Dalkey Archive Press ) -- vexing for me -- won the day. Why my problem? Well, The Liberal magazine ("devoted to a renaissance in liberal politics and the...
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 05/12/2008
The Dalkey Archive Press's CONTEXT magazine "was started to create a context for reading modern and contemporary literature and addressing cultural issues," according to an interview with the founder: It is founded upon the rather perverse idea—perverse in terms of how books are treated in our culture—that books do not grow old. That is, they are forever being read by someone for the first time, or...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 05/09/2008
Paul Verhaeghen has won this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel Omega Minor, published by Dalkey Archive Press. His victory with this exuberant, pyrotechnic, toweringly ambitious epic is a suitably mould-breaking event. To begin with, the Belgian-born cognitive psychologist translated his own work into English from the Dutch. (He has taught in the US since 1997, and is associate...
the Literary Saloon (Free subscription) | 05/06/2008
A new issue of the Dalkey Archive Press-affiliated Context is up -- and they've made a lot more of the always-worthwhile Review of Contemporary Fiction book reviews accessible online.
Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | 02/22/2008
Were I stranded for a couple months with nothing but Dalkey's spring '08 lineup, I don't think I'd mind. There's really a lot of very-intriguing sounding stuff here. These are my favorites from this strong season. First-off, Dalkey is happily giving me more of two of my favorite non-American authors. First is Jean-Philippe Toussaint, whose short comic novel Television, which reads kind of like a book...
NewPages Blog (Free subscription) | 02/21/2008
In 1992, Dalkey Archive Press at Illinois State University began its Scholarly Series with the publication of Viktor Shklovsky's Theory of Prose. Since that time, the Press has published such distinguished critics, theorists, and scholars as Gerald L. Bruns, Leslie Fiedler, Hugh Kenner, and Warren Motte. In 2004, the Press expanded this series in response to the crisis in scholarly
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 10/20/2007
My boss asked me to recommend a title by Henry Green, a novelist I’ve praised zealously and often, stopping just short of proselytizing, I hope. Enlightened common readers know his work, of course, and Dalkey Archive Press has returned four of his books to print, but I’ve often fancied that Green resides in a private literary preserve, open only to members, and the key is in my pocket. That's a measure...
Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | 09/21/2007
It's hard for me to believe that we're almost at the end of 2007. There's so much I planned on getting to this year (see this column for an idea), so much that I won't end up reading. There are, of course, the nice surprises that help compensate for the books I've missed, but, somehow, I still feel let down. Not only that, but soon 2008 will be rolling around and there will be a whole new slate of...
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 06/17/2007
My father maintained that Father’s Day, like its maternal counterpart, was a conspiracy organized by a cabal of greeting card and chocolate magnates, and like rubes on the midway we predictably fell each June for their sentimental pitch (guilt masquerading as filial piety). Of course, my father also thought the move to adopt the metric system in the United States was a Bolshevik subterfuge. As a son,...
