Dalkey Archive Press

Based on Wikipedia: Dalkey Archive Press

The Publishing House That Refuses to Let Books Die

There's a small publishing company operating out of Funks Grove, Illinois—a hamlet so tiny it barely registers on most maps—that has made a rather audacious promise: every book they publish will stay in print forever. Not for as long as it sells. Not until the warehouse gets too full. Forever.

This is Dalkey Archive Press, and their commitment to literary permanence stands in stark rebellion against an industry that routinely lets books vanish from existence the moment they stop turning a profit.

A Name Borrowed from a Madman's Novel

The press takes its name from The Dalkey Archive, a 1964 novel by the Irish writer Flann O'Brien. If you haven't encountered O'Brien's work, imagine what might happen if James Joyce had a nervous breakdown, developed an obsession with bicycles, and decided that the most profound truths could only be expressed through absurdist comedy. O'Brien was the pen name of Brian O'Nolan, a civil servant who wrote some of the strangest, funniest, most intellectually dizzying novels in the English language while maintaining a perfectly respectable day job with the Irish government.

The novel The Dalkey Archive itself features, among other things, a mad scientist who has discovered that time and matter are not what we think they are, and Saint Augustine living in an underwater cave. It's exactly the kind of book that would have disappeared forever without publishers willing to keep obscure masterpieces alive.

So the name is not just an homage. It's a mission statement.

Born in a Chicago Suburb

John O'Brien founded the press in 1984 in Elmwood Park, Illinois, a working-class suburb about ten miles northwest of downtown Chicago. The press began as an extension of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, a literary magazine O'Brien had started with John Byrne and Lowell Dunlap. The magazine's purpose was to shine a light on writers the mainstream literary establishment had overlooked or forgotten, and the press would serve the same mission in book form.

For its first four years, Dalkey Archive was essentially a two-person operation: O'Brien and his office manager and typesetter, Shirley Geever. Think about that for a moment. Two people, running a publishing house out of suburban Chicago, deciding to take on the work of preserving avant-garde literature for future generations.

In 1988, O'Brien hired Steven Moore as managing editor. Moore would go on to write a monumental two-volume history of the novel that traces experimental fiction from ancient times to the present, and his scholarly sensibility helped shape the press's identity as a home for serious literary experimentation.

What Makes a Book Dalkey-Worthy

The press describes its mission by invoking a literary lineage that stretches back centuries. They publish fiction "that belongs to the experimental tradition of Sterne, Joyce, Rabelais, Flann O'Brien, Beckett, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes."

This is a specific genealogy worth unpacking.

Laurence Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy in the 1760s, a novel so formally inventive—with its blank pages, marbled pages, and chapters that interrupt themselves mid-sentence—that it still feels avant-garde today. François Rabelais, writing two centuries earlier, created Gargantua and Pantagruel, a sprawling satirical epic so vulgar and so learned that scholars still argue about whether it's high art or elaborate bathroom humor. The answer, of course, is both.

James Joyce pushed the novel toward stream-of-consciousness and linguistic experimentation. Samuel Beckett stripped it down to its bare bones, revealing the absurdity lurking beneath human existence. Gertrude Stein fragmented syntax until language itself became strange and new. Djuna Barnes wrote Nightwood, a novel so dense with metaphor and so committed to its own poetic logic that T.S. Eliot wrote the introduction, declaring it one of the great novels of the century.

These are not easy writers. They demand active participation from their readers. They refuse the conventional pleasures of plot and character in favor of something harder to define: a confrontation with language itself, with the strangeness of consciousness, with the limits of what fiction can do.

And this is precisely what Dalkey Archive Press believes deserves to be kept alive.

The University Years

In 1992, the press accepted an invitation to relocate from suburban Chicago to Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. Yes, the town is really called Normal. It was named after the "normal school"—a nineteenth-century term for a teacher training college—that eventually became the university.

The move brought institutional support and stability, but the press didn't stay put. In December 2006, Dalkey Archive relocated again, this time to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The university had committed to global projects that complemented the press's dedication to literary translation, and this alignment of missions made the move logical.

Translation has always been central to Dalkey's work. The press has published writers from France, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Russia, the Czech Republic, Cuba, Mexico, and dozens of other countries. In many cases, these translations introduced English-speaking readers to major literary figures who had been virtually unknown outside their home countries.

The Resurrected and the Discovered

One of the most satisfying things a publisher can do is bring a forgotten writer back from obscurity. Dalkey Archive has done this repeatedly.

Take Felipe Alfau. Born in Barcelona in 1902, Alfau moved to the United States as a teenager and wrote in English, but his work was so strange—novels composed of interlocking stories about characters who seem aware they're fictional—that he found almost no readers during his lifetime. He published Locos: A Comedy of Gestures in 1936 and Chromos in 1948, then essentially gave up on the literary world. When Dalkey Archive reissued Locos in 1988 and Chromos in 1990, Alfau was rediscovered. Chromos was nominated for the National Book Award. Alfau, who had been forgotten for four decades, suddenly found himself the subject of essays and critical attention. He died in 1999, having lived long enough to see his work matter to readers.

Flann O'Brien himself received similar treatment. Though celebrated in Ireland, O'Brien remained relatively obscure in the United States until Dalkey Archive began championing his work. At Swim-Two-Birds, his hallucinatory 1939 novel about a writer whose characters rebel against him, and The Third Policeman, a metaphysical mystery about a murderer who finds himself in a purgatorial Irish countryside populated by bicycle-obsessed policemen, found new generations of readers through the press's editions.

The Catalog: A Tour Through Literary Strangeness

Looking at the Dalkey Archive catalog is like touring a museum of experimental fiction. Some highlights reveal the breadth of what they've preserved.

William Gaddis's The Recognitions, published in 1955, is a 956-page novel about art forgery, religious mania, and the counterfeiting of authenticity in modern life. It's composed almost entirely of dialogue, with minimal attribution, so readers must constantly work to figure out who's speaking. When it was first published, critics either ignored it or attacked it. Dalkey kept it in print, and it's now recognized as one of the great American novels of the twentieth century.

Gaddis's J R, which won the National Book Award in 1976, goes even further. It's a 726-page novel written almost entirely in unattributed dialogue, following an eleven-year-old boy who builds a paper empire of corporate acquisitions using nothing but pay phones and mail order. The novel captures the absurdity of American capitalism with a precision that feels even more relevant today than when it was written.

William Gass's The Tunnel—the very book that prompted this exploration of Dalkey Archive—took thirty years to write. It's the memoir of a historian of Nazi Germany who, instead of writing the introduction to his scholarly masterwork, begins tunneling out of his basement while reflecting on his own capacity for evil. The prose is dense, difficult, brilliant, and profoundly unsettling.

David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress consists entirely of the typed thoughts of a woman who believes she's the last person on Earth. It's a novel made of fragments—references to artists, philosophers, historical figures—that accumulates into something devastatingly lonely and beautiful.

Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew is a comic novel about a writer struggling to complete a mystery novel, interspersed with the notebooks of his characters, who are aware they're trapped in a bad book and desperate to escape into better fiction.

International Voices

The translation program has brought equally remarkable work into English.

Viktor Shklovsky was a Russian literary theorist and novelist who helped found the Formalist movement in early twentieth-century Russia. His Theory of Prose, translated and published by Dalkey, introduced English readers to the concept of "defamiliarization"—the idea that art works by making the familiar strange, by slowing down perception so we actually see the world instead of recognizing it automatically. Shklovsky wrote with the energy of a revolutionary, and his ideas have influenced writers and critics for a century.

Arno Schmidt's Bottom's Dream is one of the most ambitious translation projects any English-language publisher has ever undertaken. The original German novel runs to 1,496 pages, printed in a massive folio format with three columns per page—a main narrative column flanked by marginal commentaries. It took Schmidt over a decade to write and translator John E. Woods three decades to render into English. The Dalkey edition, published in 2016, weighs over thirteen pounds.

Jon Fosse, the Norwegian novelist and playwright who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, saw early English translations of his work through Dalkey Archive. His spare, repetitive prose style—sentences that circle back on themselves, conversations that seem to dissolve into silence—found its first American home with the press.

Recognition and Loss

In 2011, the National Book Critics Circle awarded John O'Brien its Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, honoring his decades of work preserving and promoting literary fiction. The French government went further. In 2015, the Minister of Culture and Communication appointed O'Brien a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres—Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters—in recognition of his significant contribution to French arts and literature. The press had published so many French writers in translation that France itself wanted to say thank you.

John O'Brien died on November 21, 2020. He left behind four children—his daughter Kathleen and sons Emmett, William, and Kevin—along with his brothers Chip and Eddie, many other family and friends, and, somewhat memorably, seven dogs.

He also left behind a catalog of over a thousand books and a mission that continues.

Deep Vellum and the Future

Shortly after O'Brien's death, Dalkey Archive Press was acquired by Deep Vellum, a nonprofit publisher based in Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum had been founded in 2013 by Will Evans, and like Dalkey, it focused on literary translation and experimental fiction. The acquisition made sense: two small presses with aligned missions, joining forces to stay alive in an industry dominated by corporate conglomerates.

Today, Dalkey Archive maintains offices in McLean, Illinois (near the original Funks Grove location), at Dutch House in London, and at the Trinity College Centre for Literary Translation in Dublin. The Irish connection remains strong—appropriate for a press named after a Flann O'Brien novel set in the Dublin suburb of Dalkey.

Why Any of This Matters

Publishing is a brutal business. Most books lose money. Even successful publishers must constantly calculate which titles to keep in print and which to let die. The backlist—the collection of older titles that continue selling year after year—is supposed to subsidize the frontlist of new books, but when a backlist title stops selling, the rational economic decision is to let it go out of print, free up warehouse space, and move on.

Dalkey Archive refuses this logic. They have committed to keeping every book they publish in print, regardless of sales. This means they operate on the thinnest possible margins, dependent on grants, university support, and the patronage of readers who believe that difficult literature deserves to survive.

The bet they're making is that literature is a long game. A book that sells fifty copies a year for fifty years has reached 2,500 readers—and those readers, the kind who seek out experimental fiction from small presses, are precisely the readers who go on to write, to teach, to influence culture in subtle but lasting ways. A single copy of At Swim-Two-Birds in the hands of the right reader might catalyze something that echoes for generations.

This is not a profitable business model. It's closer to an act of faith.

The Models and the Mission

Dalkey Archive explicitly modeled itself on two earlier American publishers: Grove Press and New Directions.

Grove Press, founded in 1947, became famous for publishing writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and William S. Burroughs, and for fighting censorship battles over books like Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer. Grove was willing to go to court to defend literature's right to exist.

New Directions, founded in 1936 by James Laughlin, published Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and a roster of international modernists who had trouble finding American publishers. Laughlin used his family's steel fortune to subsidize the press, operating it as a cultural mission rather than a business.

Both presses understood something crucial: certain kinds of literature will never be commercially viable, but commercial viability is not the only measure of value. Culture needs patrons willing to lose money on important things.

Dalkey Archive has carried that tradition forward for four decades. In an era when algorithms determine what gets published and what gets promoted, when bestseller lists have become self-fulfilling prophecies, when social media metrics shape editorial decisions, there remains a small press in central Illinois that answers to a different set of criteria.

Is this book strange enough? Is it brave enough? Does it do something language hasn't done before?

If yes, Dalkey Archive will publish it. And they'll keep it in print forever.