Continuing Tavares's award-winning "Kingdom" series (begun in "Jerusalem," winner of the Saramago Prize), "Joseph Walser's Machine" recounts a life of bizarre routines and patterns. Routine humiliation at a factory; routine maintenance of the world's most esoteric collection; and the most important routine of all: the operation of a mysterious machine on a factory floor. Yet all of Joseph Walser's routines are violently disrupted when his city is occupied by an invading army, leaving him faced with political intrigues, marital discord, and finally, one last, catastrophic confrontation with his beloved machine.

"If anyone might be profitably compared to Clarice Lispector, it might well be Maria Gabriela Llansol. This is because of the fundamentally mystical impulse that animates them both, their conception of writing as a sacred act, a prayer: their idea that it was through writing that a person can reach 'the core of being.'" - Benjamin Moser, author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector "Llansol's text . . . creates spaces where conjecture and counterfactual accounts operate freely granting a glimpse of an alternative reality." Claire Williams, The Guardian Geography of Rebels presents the English debut of three linked novellas from influential Portuguese writer Maria Gabriela Llansol. With echoes of Clarice Lispector, Llansol's novellas evoke her vision of writing as life, conjuring historical figures and weaving together history, poetry, and philosophy in a transcendent journey through one of Portugal's greatest creative minds. Maria Gabriela Llansol (1931-2008) is one of the preeminent Portuguese writers of the 20th century, twice awarded the prize for best novel from the Portuguese Writers' Association.

Hailed by Jose Saramago as the best writer of his generation and a likely future winner of the Nobel Prize, Dalkey Archive is proud to introduce Goncalo M. Tavares and his breakthrough novel.