Martin Riker on "The Endless Week" by Laura Vazquez

Last Minute Addition: As I went to send this out, I saw that a Dorothy book, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lim, is longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction!! Congrats to all, and perfect timing for this piece . . .

Below please find a piece that Martin Riker—author of Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return and The Guest Lecture, co-founder and co-publisher of Dorothy, a publishing project, and former Dalkey Archive employee, all around great literary citizen—wrote about Dorothy’s latest publication, The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez, translated from the French by Alex Niemi.

This is a book that I’ve been anticipating ever since it appeared on Dorothy’s website, and this piece only stokes those fires!

If you aren’t already familiar with Dorothy, you may want to spend some time (and money) with their catalog.1 They are truly one of the most elegant publishers out there, doing high-quality books in such a thoughtful, considered way. From the editing to the cover design to the modest way in which they drop these total bangers year in and year out—Dorothy is a testament to what small press publishing can be.

On The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez

by Martin Riker

I’d written to Chad to say how impressed I’ve been with this “Mining the Dalkey Archive” project. It’s one thing to relaunch a book—certainly Dalkey Archive has a long tradition of it—but trying to build a new audience for an entire backlist is a heavy lift, and this particular effort seems a model for how that sort of thing can be done.

So, I’d written to say I thought this series was great, but also to tell him about The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez, translated (very brilliantly) by Alex Niemi, a debut novel coming out from Dorothy, the press my wife Danielle and I run. I thought Chad would be interested because the novel makes me think, for different reasons, of a number of Dalkey books: Ourednik’s Europeana, Levé’s Autoportrait (a little). Also Gerald Murnane, in the sense that both writers seem to reinvent literature from the ground up. So when Chad turned around and asked if I wanted to write something about The Endless Week for “Mining the Dalkey Archive,” even though it is not a book published by Dalkey Archive, that made its own kind of sense.

There is