A noted publisher of literary translations and experimental fiction, Dalkey Archive Press, and the University of Rochester have decided to part ways following a recent announcement that the press, whose titles include work by Gertrude Stein, Aldous Huxley, and Carlos Fuentes, was moving to the upstate campus.

An employee in the University of Rochester communications office, Helene Snihur, issued a statement yesterday saying that the university and Dalkey Archive “have mutually agreed to dissolve the contract.”

The associate director of Dalkey Archive Press, Chad Post, released a statement saying: “Though the Press was eagerly looking forward to working with the University of Rochester faculty and students, the Press felt that a move to the East Coast was not feasible.”

Begun in 1984, the Dalkey Archive Press favors experimental writing. A number of its avant-garde titles owe more to a lineage tracing back to Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” or Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” rather than the realist tradition. While the Dalkey authors’ plots generally do not make for “Move of the Week” material, Mr. Post said, the cover of one of its best-selling titles, Flann O’Brien’s “Third Policeman,” appeared on the ABC show “Lost.”

Mr. Post told The New York Sun that the Dalkey Archive Press is located at Illinois State University, but its contract ends December 31. The campus is located halfway between Chicago and St. Louis.

What precisely caused the demise of the arrangement between Dalkey Archive Press and the University of Rochester is unclear.

The chairman of the department of English at University of Rochester, Frank Shuffleton, said, “It was on and it was off.”

Other experimental literary publications formerly edited at the Illinois State University have been heading elsewhere. The American Book Review has moved its editorial office to the University of Houston-Victoria while retaining its production and marketing office at ISU. Fiction Collective Two, which originally grew out of a Brooklyn apartment, now has executive offices at Florida State University.

While university presses have individual relationships with host institutions, literary journals such as Kenyon Review or Antioch Review also reside at colleges. It is not unknown for a literary press to have a relation with a university: Arte Publico Press, which publishes American Hispanic authors, has ties to the University of Houston, for example.

Dalkey Archive Press, which publishes about 24 books a year, came to Illinois State University in 1992. ISU pays the Dalkey Archives founder, John O’Brien, a salary and provides office space. Dalkey in return provides opportunities for student internships and graduate assistantships, where one can learn about literary publishing.

In an article in September, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the University of Rochester planned to subsidize the press’s office space, that the founder and associate director of the press would join the university payroll, and that a “national center for translation” had been under consideration.

Writer and artist Richard Kostelanetz, author of “Soho: The Rise and Fall of an Artist’s Colony,” said publishers at universities rely on support from deans and faculty, who change over time. A longtime observer of the literary scene, he said it was conventionally understood that commercial publishing was about making money, small press publishing was about love, and university presses were about power.