56 Water Street

Somethings not right at number 56 Water Street. From the sidewalk in front of the abandoned house, ten-year-old best friends Derek and Ravine watch lights flicker on and off, again and again. When they race home to tell their parents, theyre in for a shock: there is no house at 56 Water Street! The house is invisible to everyone but Derek and Ravine, and the ghost haunting the old place wants to get their attention. Trapped for more than a hundred years, Isabel Roberts needs to solve the mystery of her younger sisters fate before she can truly rest in peace. And shes chosen Derek and Ravine to help her. When the two friends summon the courage to venture inside the house, theyre unprepared for what they find (after all, meeting a ghost face-to-face isnt exactly normal) and for the spine-tingling adventures in store for them. But Derek and Ravine are determined to help Isabel. If they dont, she could be a ghost forever!

Seventeen years after the publication of the first volume of Jacques Roubaud's epic and moving "The Great Fire of London," Dalkey Archive Press is proud to publish the first English translation of The Loop, the second novel in Roubaud's Proustian series, which has in its capacity to astonish been compared to the compositions of Messiaen and the buildings of Antonio Gaudi. Devastated after the death of his young wife, Alix, the author conceives of a project that will allow him not only to continue writing, but continue living--writing a book that leads him to confront his terrible loss as well as examine the lonely world in which he now seems, more and more, to exist: that of Memory. The Loop finds Roubaud returning to his earliest recollections, as well as considering the nature of memory itself, and the process--both merciful and terrible--of forgetting. Neither memoir nor novel, by turns playful and despairing, The Loop is a masterpiece of contemporary prose.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.