Publishing Toussaint at Dakley

Dalkey Archive editor and Quarterly Conversation contributor Martin Riker has a piece at the Semininary Co-Op Blog about how Dalkey came to publish three Jean-Philippe Toussaint works in the same year.

There’s something very exciting about publishing several of an author’s books together. Instead of putting a single work out into the world, you’re putting into the world a whole way of seeing. You’re saying: This is not just about a book. Here’s a writer who is doing something beyond mere temporary curiosity. This is the real thing, an actual innovation, literature finding a new way to relate to life.

This is why, in the jacket copy for Camera, I refer to Toussaint as a “comic Camus for the twenty-first century.” It isn’t because Toussaint’s writing reminds me of Camus’s stylistically, but because Toussaint offers something that Camus once offered: a new way to think about the experience of being. Though both comic and compelling, Toussaint’s “being” is also quite strange, and at times disorienting. Something often seems to be missing, and indeed something often is.

Also see our review of Toussaint's Monsieur and our interview with Toussaint.