HOME





Review Of Contemporary Fiction
The ''Review of Contemporary Fiction'' is a tri-quarterly journal published by Dalkey Archive Press. It features a variety of fiction, reviews and critical essays, with emph on literature that has an experimental, avant-garde or subversive bent. Founded in 1980 by the publisher John O'Brien, the ''Review of Contemporary Fiction'' originally focused upon American and British writers who had been overlooked by the critical establishment, and in this manner the Review succeeded in bringing new critical attention to writers such as William Gaddis, Gilbert Sorrentino, Paul Metcalf, Nicholas Mosley, Donald Barthelme, and many others. In 1984, in order to begin reprinting some of these authors, John O'Brien founded Dalkey Archive Press. Over the past few decades, both the ''Review'' and Dalkey Archive have widened their focus to include works in translation, especially from countries without a strong presence in global literature. Examples of significant international issues of the ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


John O'Brien (publisher)
John O'Brien (November 10, 1945 – November 21, 2020) was an Irish American publisher, editor, author, and academic. He founded the journal '' Review of Contemporary Fiction'' in 1980, and the independent press Dalkey Archive Press in 1984. In the course of his career, O’Brien published almost 1,000 books from 50 countries.Ed NawotkaObituary: John O'Brien, Founder of Dalkey Archive Press ''Publishers Weekly'', November 25, 2020. Accessed December 19, 2020. Life O'Brien taught at Illinois Benedictine College, DePaul University, Illinois State University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and then University of Houston-Victoria. O’Brien was awarded the Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2011, and in 2015 O'Brien was made Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.Sinéad CrowleyDeath announced of Dalkey Archive Press founder John O'Brien ''RTÉ'', November 25, 2020. Accessed December 19, 2020. He was the father of Kathleen ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Robert Coover
Robert Lowell Coover (February 4, 1932 – October 5, 2024) was an American novelist, Short story, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization. Background Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa. He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale, received his B.A. in Slavic Studies from Indiana University Bloomington in 1953, then served in the United States Navy from 1953 to 1957, where he became a lieutenant. He received an M.A. in General Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago in 1965. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Coover served as a teacher or writer in residence at many universities. He taught at Brown University from 1981 to 2012. ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

China Miéville
China Tom Miéville ( , born 6 September 1972) is a British speculative fiction writer and Literary criticism, literary critic. He often describes his work as "weird fiction", and is allied to the loosely associated movement of writers called New weird, New Weird. Miéville has won multiple awards for his fiction, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, British Fantasy Award, BSFA Award, Hugo Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Awards. He holds the record for the most Arthur C. Clarke Award wins (three). His novel ''Perdido Street Station'' was ranked by ''Locus (magazine), Locus'' as the 6th best fantasy novel published in the 20th century. During 2012–13, he was Artist-in-residence, writer-in-residence at Roosevelt University in Chicago. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2015. Miéville is active in left politics in the UK and has previously been a member of the International Socialist Organization (US) and the short-lived International Socialist Net ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


David Markson
David Merrill Markson (December 20, 1927 – June 4, 2010)'The Egyptian Book of the Dead'' (p. 147) * "A kind of verbal fugue" (p. 170) * "A classic tragedy [in many ways]" (p. 171) * "A volume entitled 'Writer's Block'" (p. 173) * "A comedy of a sort" (p. 184) * "His synthetic personal ''Finnegans Wake''" (p. 185) * "Nothing more than a fundamentally recognizable genre all the while" (p. 189) * "Nothing more or less than a read" * "An unconventional, generally melancholy though sometimes even playful now-ending read." In ''This Is Not a Novel'', the Writer character states, "A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive" (p. 2). ''Reader's Block,'' likewise, calls itself "a novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel" (p. 61). Rather than consisting of a specific plot, they can be said to be composed of "an intellectual ragpicker's collection of cultural detritus ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera ( ; ; 1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019. Kundera's best-known work is ''The Unbearable Lightness of Being''. Before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the country's ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia banned his books. He led a low-profile life and rarely spoke to the media. He was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was also a nominee for other awards. Kundera was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, and the Herder Prize in 2000. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor. Early life and education Milan Kundera was born on 1 April 1929 at Purkyňova 6 (6 Jan Evangelista Purkyně, Purkyně Street) in Královo Pole, a district of Brno, C ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch ( ; February 27, 1925 – July 6, 2002) was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77.) He was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry. This was a loose group of poets including Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery that eschewed contemporary introspective poetry in favor of an exuberant, cosmopolitan style that drew major inspiration from travel, painting, and music. Comical, narrative, punning and exuberant are adjectives that have been associated with his work. Life Koch (pronounced ''coke'' was born Jay Kenneth Koch in Cincinnati, Ohio. He began writing poetry at an early age, discovering the work of Shelley and Keats in his teenage years. At the age of 18, he served in WWII as a U.S. Army infantryman in the Philippines. After his service, he attended Harvard University, where he met future New York School poet John Ashbery. After graduating from Harvard in 1948 and moving to New York City, Koch studied ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Travis Jeppesen
Travis Jeppesen is an American novelist, playwright, poet, artist, and art critic. He is known, among other works, for his novels ''Settlers Landing'' and '' The Suiciders''; a non-fiction novel about North Korea, ''See You Again in Pyongyang''; and for his object-oriented writing work, '' 16 Sculptures''. He also wrote the 2014 feature film ''The Coat'', directed by Christophe Chemin. Life and career Travis Jeppesen was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. As a teenager, he studied writing under the playwright Naomi Iizuka. He later attended college at The New School, where he studied literature and philosophy. Upon graduation, he moved to Europe in 2001. Jeppesen's first novel, ''Victims'', was selected by Dennis Cooper to debut his Little House on the Bowery series for Akashic Books in 2003; a Russian translation of the novel was published in 2005 by Eksmo. Written in a Southern Gothic vein, the novel is inspired in part by the UFO re ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Aidan Higgins
Aidan Higgins (3 March 1927 – 27 December 2015) was an Irish writer. He wrote short stories, travel pieces, radio dramas and novels. Among his published works are '' Langrishe, Go Down'' (1966), '' Balcony of Europe'' (1972) and the biographical ''Dog Days'' (1998). His writing is characterised by non-conventional foreign settings and a stream of consciousness narrative mode. Most of his early fiction is autobiographical – "like slug trails, all the fiction happened." Life Aidan Higgins was born in Celbridge, County Kildare, Ireland. He attended local schools and Clongowes Wood College, a private boarding school. In the early 1950s he worked in Dublin as a copywriter for the Domas Advertising Agency. He then moved to London and worked in the light industry for about two years. He married Jill Damaris Anders in London on 25 November 1955. From 1960, Higgins sojourned in Southern Spain, South Africa, Berlin and Rhodesia. In 1960 and 1961 he worked as a scriptwriter for Filmle ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Dermot Healy
Dermot Healy (9 November 1947 – 29 June 2014) was an Irish novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer. A member of Aosdána, Healy was also part of its governing body, the Toscaireacht. Born in Finea, County Westmeath, he lived in County Sligo, and was described variously as a "master", a "Celtic Hemingway" and as "Ireland's finest living novelist". Often overlooked due to his relatively low public profile, Healy's work is admired by his Irish literary predecessors, peers and successors alike, many of whom idolise him—among the writers to have spoken highly of him are Seamus Heaney, Eugene McCabe, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe and Anne Enright. He won several literary awards, and was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Life Healy was born in Finea, County Westmeath, the son of a Guard. When Healy was a child, the family moved to Cavan, where he attended the local secondary school. In his late teens, he moved to ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

William Gass
William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, ''A Temple of Texts'' (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel '' The Tunnel'' received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel ''Middle C'' won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal. Early life and education William Howard Gass was born on July 30, 1924, in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, a steel town, where he attended local schools. He described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities. His father had been trained as an architect but, ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Stanley Elkin
Stanley Lawrence Elkin (May 11, 1930 – May 31, 1995) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships. Biography Elkin was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn and grew up in Chicago from age three onwards. He did both his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, receiving a bachelor's degree in English in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1961 for his dissertation on William Faulkner. During this period he was drafted and served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957. In 1953 Elkin married Joan Marion Jacobson. He was a member of the English faculty at Washington University in St. Louis from 1960 until his death, and battled multiple sclerosis for most of his adult life. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. During his career, Elk ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Rikki Ducornet
Rikki Ducornet (; born Erica DeGre; April 19, 1943) is an American writer, poet, and artist. Her work has been described as "linguistically explosive and socially relevant," and praised for "deploy ngtactics familiar to the historical avant-garde, including an emphasis on gnosticism, cosmology, diablerie, bestiary, eroticism, and revolution, to produce an astounding body of work, cogent and ethical in its beauty and spirit." Biography Rikki Ducornet was born in Canton, New York. Gerard DeGré, Ducornet's father, was a professor of social philosophy, and her mother Muriel hosted community-interest programs on radio and television. Ducornet was raised in a multicultural household as her father was Cuban and her mother was Russian-Jewish. Ducornet's father encouraged her to read books by authors such as Albert Camus and Lao Tzu, and to pursue an exploration of knowledge. ''Alice in Wonderland'' was an especially formative book, and inspired her 1993 novel ''The Jade Cabinet'', in wh ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]