By Brigid Brophy
The Brigid Brophy bundle will include In Transit and Hackenfeller's Ape. Get Brophy's groundbreaking, gender-bending, postmodern masterpiece as a Dalkey Archive Essential and her delightful first novel (now available in the US effectively for the first time) together at a reduced price. See below for more details on each.
About In Transit
Paperback: 9781628976717
Publication Date: October 13th, 2026
A gender-bending satire from one of Ireland’s most brilliant and outspoken writers, as fresh and thought-provoking today as it was on its original publication in 1969.
Set in an airport lounge, In Transit follows contemporary traveler Evelyn Hillary O'Rooley who has “lost” his/her gender, prompting him/her to perform a series of unsuccessful, yet bizarrely hilarious, philosophical and anatomical tests to rediscover it. Divided into four symphony sections, Brigid Brophy surrounds this simple plot device with an endless stream of puns, allusions, and experiments with narrative consciousness, as our protagonist finds him-/herself in a situation quite similar to a modern Orlando.
Widely considered the novel which catapulted Brophy to renown as a postmodern writer, In Transit is a textual labyrinth—littered with word games, metafictional events, and surreal encounters that challenge readers’ preconceived notions of gender, identity, and reality. With a new introduction by Katherine Packert Burke, Dalkey Archive Press is thrilled to reintroduce Brophy’s relentlessly clever and prescient masterpiece to contemporary readers.
About Hackenfeller's Ape
Paperback: 9781628976731
Publication Date: October 13th, 2026
A “pointed and amusing satire” (TIME) of animal rights from a trailblazing twentieth-century writer and activist.
At the London Zoo, Professor Clement Derrylhyde has been studying Percy and Edwina, a pair of Hackenfeller’s Apes, for some time: serenading them with Mozart, learning their habits, hoping to witness the mating of this endangered species. Percy observes him back through the bars of his enclosure, wary of a species that is both captor and companion. When the Professor learns that the zoo has sold Percy to a government space program and that the ape is due to be launched on a one-way rocket trip in a matter of days, he teams up with a plucky young lockpick named Gloria in the hopes of securing Percy’s freedom.
In a prescient, provocative novella written almost a decade before the first animal was sent into outer space, Brigid Brophy meditates on the human tendency towards violence and self-alienation. At once fable and comedy, gallivanting heist adventure and elegant philosophical treatise, Hackenfeller’s Ape reveals the human animal inside of us all.
Biographical Note
Brigid Brophy (1929-1995) was an Irish-English author, literary critic, essayist, and polemicist. Born in London to writer John Brophy, Brophy studied Classics at St. Hugh’s College, and was influenced by writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, and Sigmund Freud. Alongside writing, Brophy was an avid activist who championed several types of social reform, including vegetarianism, humanism, and animal rights. She was a staunch feminist and pacifist, writing columns opposing the Vietnam War and openly rejecting sexual orthodoxy along with her partner, art historian Michael Levey.