logo

More “Montao’s Malady” (Excerpt)

Following up on yesterday's post, this excerpt from Montano's Malady is just too perfect not to share. Enjoy and preorder the forthcoming Dalkey Archive edition of Vila-Matas's brilliant, twisty book here.   April 21 “I’m absolutely convinced that publishing being in the hands of businessmen is just a ...

TMR 20.3: “Drunken Condition of Both Teams” [MULLIGAN STEW]

This section of Mulligan Stew is particularly wild, featuring a western populated by Irishmen speaking in bad accents (and worse accents in The Club Zap), a long rambling set of hypotheticals about why the police haven't arrived to find Ned's body (spoiler: Halpin hasn't called them), a drunken baseball game featuring ...

Three Percent #191: Raymond Queneau

To celebrate the first-ever English-language publication of Raymond Queneau's Sally Mara's Intimate Journal, and the reissue of Pierrot Mon Ami as a Dalkey Essential, Chris Clarke (whose retranslation of Queneau's The Skin of Dreams is forthcoming from NYRB) and Daniel Levin Becker (infamous member of Mujeres Encinta, ...

TMR 20.2: “THE ULTIMATE IN BIZARRE BEAUTY!!” [MULLIGAN STEW]

Loveletters galore! Lists without context! Repurposing life for fiction! More puzzles! Terrible book reviews! An insufferable, pretentious elementary school essay! This episode has it all—and more! (As Lamont would say.) This week's music is "All Your Fails" by Kevin Drew. You can find all previous seasons of TMR on ...

Fragile Travelers

In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Flaubert attempted to highlight the ordinary, tired, and often crass nature of common expressions by italicising them within the text. When Charles, Emma Bovary’s mediocre husband, expresses himself in a manner akin to that of a million other colourless men before him, Flaubert uses ...

Latest Review: "Vano and Niko" by Erlom Akhvlediani

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Vano and Niko by Erlom Akhvlediani, translated by Mikheil Kakabadze and published by Dalkey Archive earlier this year. I know everyone is still reeling from not being able to correctly guess all the finalists for the 2015 BTBA fiction and poetry shortlists ...

Vano and Niko

What to make of Vano and Niko, the English translation of Erlom Akhvlediani’s work of the same name, as well as the two other short books that comprise a sort of trilogy? Quick searches will inform the curious reader that these short pieces (what contemporary writers would call flash fiction) resemble fables and that ...