I first discovered the magazine, CONTEXT, in my graduate literary publishing seminar. Dalkey Archive Press, a nonprofit publisher located on the Illinois State University campus, distributed it free to universities.  CONTEXT's aim was to save the great works of experimental literature by educating young readers about them.  There were essays about Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Carole Maso, Jean Rhys, Manuel Puig, and others.  There were excerpts from Henry James, William Carlos Williams, Sterne, Rabelais, Flaubert, and Cervantes.  The essays were interesting and edgy, and the excerpts inspired me.  By the time I reached the last page of the first edition -- a full page call-to-action to READ DIFFERENT -- I was already composing my resume for the publishing fellowship.

If you ask John O'Brien, the founder of Dalkey Archive Press, about his enterprise, he will tell you necessity demands it.  Critics and the public often ignore great writers or forget about them altogether, and sales departments, not editors, dictate what gets printed. O'Brien, frustrated by this, founded the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1981 as a venue to discuss these ignored or forgotten writers. Because the Review of Contemporary Fiction soon created a demand for the books, and because many were out of print, O'Brien founded Dalkey Archive Press a few years later.  In 1999, CONTEXT was created in order to help younger readers understand the books in their literary, cultural, and historical contexts.  Despite the growth and changes over the years, the same two simple philosophies have always motivated this crusade: books are objects of art, and books change your life.  And the press's commitment is to keep these books in print forever -- all 240 and counting -- because the books (i.e. the objects of art) are worth it.

Once you begin reading the books, you understand.  First paragraph I read, I was hooked. In Nicholas Mosley's Serpent, Jason, a scriptwriter en route to the site of an AD 73 Jewish mass suicide (the only way to evade Roman capture), steps aboard a plane, senses its theater-like quality (a "hollow" with people staring blankly forward), and understands he has entered the problem he must solve between his life and his art, the problem of Plato's cave.  My favorite book, Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, a book rejected 54 times before Dalkey published it, pulls readers into a world of relativity and heartbreaking loneliness.  Kate believes that she is the last person left in the world.  In a series of meditations typed on an old typewriter in a house on a beach somewhere, she authors the tragicomedy that is the loss of the Western tradition.  In Gabrielle Burton's Heartbreak Hotel, I can still feel the elation of the women inmates of the hotel when they take their feminist Museum of the Revolution to the streets after the town fathers close it down.  And I can still feel the terrible lost-ness of Felipe Alfau's Spanish immigrants in Chromos, as they live their lives fractured between the mythologies they make of Spain and the harsh realities they live in 1920s New York.  And there are so many other great authors -- Djuna Barnes, Aldous Huxley, Ford Madox Ford, Raymond Queneau, John Barth, Steven Milhauser, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Harry Matthews, Marguerite Young, Stanley Elkin, Ben Marcus, Robert Coover, Ishmael Reed, Gilbert Sorretino, Rikki Ducornet.

Today, because it is well supported by the NEA, the Mellon Foundation, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund, and the Lannan Foundation, Dalkey Archive Press is one of the most stable nonprofit presses in the country.  Rather than rest on this status, they are taking advantage of their stability in order to create the Center for Book Culture in Chicago.  John O'Brien's vision is to create a haven in Chicago for people involved in nonprofit literary production and distribution to come together and to learn from each other regardless of a bottom line.

It's been a long journey since I first read CONTEXT, a journey that, happily, included a fellowship at the press.  Over time my initial enthusiasm for Dalkey books has deepened and strengthened into a serious commitment to the press and its books.  The Dalkey title I'm reading now, Marguerite Young's classic, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, includes a line I love -- "There was no landscape but the soul's, and that is the inexactitude, the ever shifting and the distant."  It's the landscape for Marguerite Young's novel, and publishers like Dalkey, people who have the courage to publish authors who dare the inexactitude, the ever shifting, and the distant, help chart our vast, indefinable souls.

Check out the website, www.centerforbookculture.org.  It's particularly nice for educators. There are casebook studies, in-depth author interviews, and text adoption request forms. The backlist is broken into sections -- English language literature, literature in translation, poetry, criticism and theory, African American literature, American Jewish literature, literature by women and women's studies.  There are links to the Review of Contemporary Fiction and CONTEXT.  There is an interesting interview with John O'Brien about the press, its programs, its commitment to the community, and the state of publishing today.

                                                                                               --Marinella Macree