Mining the Dalkey Archive Podcast

Vince ( A Book No One Wants ) and Chad talk about Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s novella, The Dregs of the Day , translated from the Irish by Alan Titley. Dregs is available from from Yale University Press, who also published The Dirty Dust & Graveyard Clay — two very different translations of the same book, and the primary topic for a good chunk of this episode. In terms of The Dregs of the Day , it’s about...

Vince ( A Book No One Wants ) and Chad talk about Ralph Cusack’s only novel, Cadenza , a semi-surreal trip on a train through time and space. They discuss the humor, the difficulty holding on to the prose, Anthony Cronin’s criticisms from Dead As Doornails , and then digress off into myriad topics . . . Next month Vince and Chad will be discussing The Dregs of the Day by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, transal...

Ted McDermott ( The Minor Outsider ) comes on to talk about his time at Dalkey Archive as Chad’s marketing assistant back in 2005. They talk about the ethos of the “real Dalkey,” what was going on when the press started looking abroad for great literary fiction, what’s changed at the press over the past twenty years, the critical importance of reading and knowing how to talk about the books you pu...

Ross Ufberg (writer, translator, co-founder of New Vessel Press , and author of the new introduction to the forthcoming Dalkey Archive edition of Dead As Doornails ) joins Chad and Vince Francone (author of A Book No One Wants ) to talk about Anthony Cronin’s memoir of mid-century Ireland and the lives of Brendan Behan, Ralph Cusack, Paddy Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien, and more. It’s a book loaded with...

Dan O’Brien ( From Scarsdale , True Story , A Story that Happens ) joins Vince Francone ( A Book No One Wants ) and Chad to discuss Dermot Healy’s Collected Plays . After discussing Healy’s life and other works ( A Goat’s Song in particular), they focus on a handful of the plays, including “Blood Wedding,” “The Long Swim,” “Men to the Right, Women to the Left,” “A Night at the Disco,” and “Metagam...

On this episode, Christopher Sorrentino ( Sound on Sound, Trance , The Fugitives , Now Beacon, Now Sea ) talks about his Substack, “ Scarcely Human ,” in which he documents his various writing projects playing around with LLMs, including an almost Oulipian experiment related to Raymond Roussel and Gilbert Sorrentino’s Under the Shadow . . . He also discusses the hypocritical stances of publishers,...

Rather than focus on a single book this month, Chad and Vince discuss a range of Irish titles (and one British one) that they’d like to read this year. Some of these are new, some old, some will be featured on the podcast, some won’t. But if you’re looking for some Irish books to check out, they’ve got you covered. Here’s the complete list of titles mentioned: Dead As Doornails , Anthony Cronin Bo...

From now until 1/31/26, EVERY Open Letter title is 40% off! Shop now!! Last January, Matt Martinson started an approximately ten-year project of reading every single Dalkey Archive title (based on this spreadsheet ) and writing a short poem about each one. On this episode, he talks about the project and how far along he is, trends he’s picked up on, and how he guides his reading, before a discussi...

Rob Doyle ( The Other Irish Tradition (ed.), Here Are the Young Men ) joins Vince Francone and Chad to talk about his most recent book, Threshold , and to tease his forthcoming novel, Cameo . Through the lens of Doyle’s work, they talk about a host of topics: mushrooms, DMT, autofiction, narrative architecture, the search for spiritual enlightenment, John O’Brien, Flann O’Brien, (the always apostr...

Given that Mark Polizzotti is publisher, author, translator, and literary executor for the Harry Mathews estate, this podcast covers a wide range of topics and authors. The conversation starts with information on the reissues of seven Harry Mathews titles ( Cigarettes , The Journalist , and The Conversions are available now), then moves on to talking about Jean Echenoz (especially Chopin’s Move an...

Although Dalkey Archive did publish two works by Desmond Hogan ( A Farewell to Prague , The House of Mourning and Other Stories ), this episode covers The Ikon Maker , Hogan’s first novel from 1976, reissued in 2013 by Lilliput Press. Vince and Chad talk about this short, moving book about a woman whose adult son has moved to England and fallen out of touch, about the forthcoming (in 2039?) opera...

Without question, Gertrude Stein was one of the most influential writers of the past century. And thanks to the three guests on this episode—Francesa Wade ( Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife ) and Cecilia Konchar Farr & Janie Sisson ( As I Was Saying: A Companion to Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans )—along with the forthcoming Dalkey Essentials edition of The Making of Americans , Stein is havi...

On this episode of this Irish Edition of the Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast, Chad and Vince talk about Brigid Brophy’s 1969 masterpiece, In Transit , a novel that is trans-positive at its core. They talk about Joycean punning and experimental structures, Chad’s love of airports (weirdo), masculine vs. feminine writing, Brophy and Brooke-Rose and literary history, and much more. The next book to...

Adam Levin ( The Instructions , Mount Chicago ) comes on the podcast to break down the Top Five Stanley Elkin novels according to Chad’s silly and fun “ Power Rankings .” They talk about what makes Elkin so great, which books they both want to reread, the coincidence of having giving their respective fathers the same book gift, and arguing about some of the final rankings . . . This episode’s musi...

Two of Allison a. deFreese’s recent translations are the focus on this particular episode: Elegy for Joseph Cornell by María Negroni and Flame Trees in May by Karla Marrufo. She talks about how these books came to be, the nature of translating more “experimental” or poetic works, her interest in literature from the Yucatán Peninsula, learning Yucatec Maya, the way both books are put together and h...

Chad and Vince struggle to talk about Bernard Share’s two novels available from Dalkey Archive Press: Inish and Transit . More respect than love for these books, which leads to an interesting discussion about how to try and approach these books, understand where Share is coming from, and what the differences are between criticism, reviewing, and whatever this podcast is supposed to be. The next bo...

In this month’s installment in the ongoing look at Dalkey Archive’s Irish Literature Series, Vince and Chad discuss The Dogs of Inishere by Alannah Hopkin, a short story collection from 2017. They talk about the short story form, the position of a collection in today’s marketplace, sequencing, aging, B. S. Johnson, and more. The next book to be featured in this series is Transit by Bernard Share (...

On this entry into the Irish-centric thread of this podcast Vince Francone ( The Soft Lunacy , Like a Dog , A Book No One Wants ) and Chad W. Post are joined by Angela Weaser, the longest tenured Dalkey Archive employee in its history, and ex-wife of John O’Brien. They talk a bit about Dalkey back in the day, about Angela’s trip to visit Aidan Higgins and his wife Alannah Hopkin (whose biography o...

Declan O’Driscoll ( The Irish Times ) joins Vincent Francone ( A Book No One Wants ) and Chad W. Post to talk about Tom O’Neill’s Grattan and Me , a brilliantly funny, perceptive book about a Quixote-esque civil servant (Grattan) and his cynical, chaos-making sidekick (Suck Ryle) as they travel Ireland trying to inject a bit more humanity and rational kindness into the world. A rambunctious novel...

Dan O’Brien joins Chad to talk about the new edition of his memoir, From Scarsdale: A Childhood , his other two Dalkey Archive books ( A Story that Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas , True Story: A Trilogy ) two of his poetry collections that relate to his and his wife’s cancer diagnoses ( Our Cancers , Survivor’s Notebook ), the state of drama in America, and much more. The musi...

Special guest Tobias Carroll ( In the Sight , Political Sign , and Reel , among other books and projects) joins Chad to discuss Andrew Elias Colarusso’s 2017 novel, The Sovereign , one of two titles in the Puerto Rican Literature Series. They discuss their fascination with this complex novel, it’s architectural form, their lack of awareness of Puerto Rican literature, potential influences, Colarus...

John Toomey joins Chad and Vince to talk about his debut novel, Sleepwalker , his experience being published by Dalkey Archive, and what it was like working for John O’Brien (very touching story in this section), looking back on your work from a 20-year distance, how many Dalkey titles have pink covers, and much more. The music in this episode is “ Spun ” by Wavves. You can subscribe to the Mining...

In the final entry in this series of podcasts on the NEA (for now . . . there may be a return to industry-based Three Percent episodes in the near future), Chad welcomes Hilary Plum ( Cleveland State University Poetry Center , Rescue Press , author of State Champ ) and Lissie Jaquette (executive director of Words Without Borders , translator from the Arabic of Minor Detail , Thirteen Months of Sun...

Our series on the National Endowment for the Arts continues by talking with three organizations and publishers about both the specific impact of the May 2nd “termination/withdrawal” emails, and the broader impact the shuttering of the NEA could have on the literary arts in the long term. Featured on this episode are: Michael Holtmann of the Center for the Art of Translation , Adam Levy of Transit...

This is part one of a two part series (for now) on the National Endowment for the Arts and the, by now, much reported on letters that NEA grantees received on May 2nd, 2025 terminating or withdrawing their approved funding. In this scripted episode, Chad goes over much of the history of the founding of the NEA, its core mission, the “Culture Wars” in the 1990s, trying to articulate how things are...