Martin Riker – författare

“A comic-philosophical novel, the other side of the same coin as Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” —The Wall Street Journal As a boy in an isolated religious community in Pennsylvania, Samuel Johnson sneaks off to watch TV with a neighbor girl—whom he eventually grows up and marries, only to lose her at a young age. When he too dies just a few years later, he inexplicably finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to body as each one expires, Samuel’s soul journeys on a comic quest through an American half-century, inhabiting lives that are as stymied, in their ways, as his own. A ghost story of the most unexpected sort, Martin Riker’s extraordinary debut is “a darkly funny contemporary story” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) about the ways experience is mediated, the unstoppable drive for human connection, and the struggle to be more fully alive in the world. “Like a television rerun, Samuel’s situation repeats, but the story of his eternal return does end, as all books must, in a manner that is absolutely dazzling.”—Los Angeles Times “Unforgettable.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This issue publishes short stories by Catalan's most exciting contemporary writers, providing readers a unique opportunity to view both the life and art of Catalonian culture.

To celebrate the publication of a revised translation of Georges Perec's masterpiece, "Life: A User's Manual," as well as other debut Perec translations due in 2009, Dalkey Archive is reissuing one of the most popular issues of the "Review of Contemporary Fiction" in a newly expanded edition.

This issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction presents new Slovak fiction in translation, congregating such significant writers as Dusan Dusek, Brano Hochel, Michal Hvorecky, Jan Johanides, Daniela Kapitanova, Monika Kompanikova, and Dusan Simko, among others most of whom have never before been translated into English to form a literary portrait of contemporary Slovak identity, framed by traditionalism and yet striving to engage the modern world with a voice all its own.

Editions P.O.L is perhaps the most innovative and important French publisher today, welcoming richly challenging and experimental literature into its fold to appear side by side with books belonging squarely in the mainstream. This issue of TheReview of Contemporary Fiction pays tribute to this remarkable publisher with essays, images, and excerpts from previously untranslated works, and an interview with founder and director Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens.

"The Review of Contemporary Fiction" was founded in 1981 to promote a vision of literary culture that is not limited to the immediately popular, and to ensure that important world writers outside popular attention continue to be written about and discussed.