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The End of Oulipo?

The End of Oulipo? My book (co-authored with Lauren Elkin), published by Zero Books. Available everywhere. Order it from Amazon, or find it in bookstores nationwide. The End of Oulipo

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series, Lady Chatterley's Brothercalled “an exciting new project” by Chad Post of Open Letter and Three Percent. Why can't Nicholson Baker write about sex? And why can Javier Marias? We investigate why porn is a dead end, and why seduction paves the way for the sex writing of the future. Read an excerpt.

Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from this site:

Translate This Book!

Ever wonder what English is missing? Called "a fascinating Life Perecread" by The New Yorker, Translate This Book! brings together over 40 of the top translators, publishers, and authors to tell us what books need to be published in English. Get it on Kindle.
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Group Reads

The Tunnel

Fall Read: The Tunnel by William H. Gass

A group read of the book that either "engenders awe and despair" or "[goads] the reader with obscenity and bigotry," or both. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.
Naked Singularity

Summer Read: A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava

Fans of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo: A group read of the book that went from Xlibris to the University of Chicago Press. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.
Life Perec

Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec

Starting March 2011, read the greatest novel from an experimental master. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.
Last Samurai

Fall Read: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

A group read of one of the '00s most-lauded postmodern novels. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.
Tale of Genji

The Summer of Genji

Two great online lit magazines team up to read a mammoth court drama, the world's first novel.
Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face This Spring

A 3-month read of Javier Marias' mammoth book Your Face Tomorrow

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Ten Memorable Quotes from William Gaddis’ Letters

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Here are ten of my favorite moments from these hugely interesting letters.

Interviews from Conversational Reading

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See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.

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  • All That Is by James Salter June 10, 2013
    Salter has been described as a master of sentences, but what might be more accurate is his mastery of word choice and metaphor. His sentences aren’t the sinuous architectural behemoths of James or William H. Gass. Many are terse, quick jabs: “The kiss was light and ardent,” or, describing a writer’s opulent house, “It was like a small family hotel, a hotel i […]
  • Birds of the Air by David Yezzi June 10, 2013
    Yezzi’s poems often hint at oblique narratives. Like a detective, he asks a lot of questions. He’s like a mathematician working an inverse problem, deducing inner dramas from externals. His spirit, however, is sympathetic, not forensic. A friend used to say when someone started complaining about another’s failing, “Be gentle. He’s just a human.” Yezzi’s poem […]
  • The Films of Sangsoo Hong June 10, 2013
    Say you watch Korean movies. Often, outside the peninsula itself, this means you’ve gotten into the murderous grotesquerie of Chan-wook Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” or Joon-ho Bong’s simultaneously goofy and solemn political allegory of a monster mash The Host, or any amount of Ki-duk Kim’s vast, high-profile (and as some fans admit, uneven) output. But menti […]
  • The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim June 10, 2013
    The Iraqi Christ is topical only in the sense of the earliest known newsflashes: the cracked screeds, battlefield reports, and shipwreck stories by the likes of Archilochus, for instance, which remain with us in the form of fragments. These were news before they were ever classical references—indigestible gobbets of event, borne on and on by the flow of tell […]
  • Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin June 10, 2013
    Leonard Tsypkin's short and frenetic Summer in Baden-Baden is a meditation on the morphic and self-defining nature of memory. Tsypkin portrays the sometimes charming but mostly distressing European travels of Fyodor (Fedya) Dostoyevsky and his second wife, Anna Grigor’yevna, and their descent into a woeful situation brought about by the famous author’s […]
  • Silent House by Orhan Pamuk June 10, 2013
    Faulkner’s literary spirit haunts the dusty, cobweb-covered rooms in Pamuk’s eponymous silent house. When the wind blows through the chinks in the masonry, we can even hear the skeletons of the Bundrens', Compsons', Snopes', and Sartoris’ Turkish cousins rattling in the Darvinoğlu’s closets in their decrepit ancestral villa. Cennethisar, once […]
  • A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal June 10, 2013
    “Tulsa is heaven, Tulsa is Italy,” says Chandler on Friends to a boss who has just assigned him to their office there. “Please don’t make me go there.” Lytal, an Oklahoman talking to New Yorkers like a person in Prague persuading tourists to pay top dollar for cheap pilsner, does little to elaborate upon this vision of his native city. Jim recalls “[t]he day […]
  • Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro June 10, 2013
    Mario Santiago Papasquiaro was no stranger to this kind of manifesto, and his announced the coming of the Infrarealists. “The way in to matter,” they proclaim, “is ultimately the way in to adventure: the poem is a journey and the poet is a hero revealing heroes.” And so, in Papasquiaro’s long poem, “Advice From 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic,” we […]
  • A Brief History of Yes by Micheline Aharonian Marcom June 10, 2013
    Marcom’s new novel, A Brief History of Yes, is less overtly transgressive than its predecessor—less centered on sex than on solitude; on the loneliness left after love is over. Previously, Marcom scaled the peak of what two people can do together, whereas now she digs into what drives them apart. So if Mirror expressed ecstasy, Yes explores ecstasy’s ebbing. […]
  • What Comes Next June 10, 2013
    If you were to ask me what comes next, the best answer is that I do not know. But if I try to reason through the question, I tend to divide the problem into parts. On the one hand, one of these parts, the personal facet, is what’s to come after my present literature. Or, rather, what will I be writing, what will the next books be like, or even more important […]

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10 Great Lit Crit Books

Former Booker prize chair John Sutherland on his 10 favorite books of lit crit:

10. Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey (1988)

The doyen of African-American literary critics, Gates has undertaken the pioneer task of fusing ethnic elements (previously thought wholly sub-literary) with cutting-edge theory – “semiology”, for example, as the word “signifying” indicates. In so doing Gates has defined a discipline within the discipline. More importantly he has widened the definition of what we classify as “literary”. Are rap lyrics literature? Gates, like Showalter, has drawn new maps of literary criticism.

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  1. Where’s the lit Crit? I’m not exactly sure how I’m supposed to read Nana Asfour’s recent Bookforum essay on Iranian women novelists. Quite strangely, the essay seems to...
  2. Math as Lit Crit Researchers have found a way to distinguish between classic authors based on how long they could write while still including words unique to the...
  3. New Source of Lit Crit? Be sure to read The National's reviews of The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano and The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales. Both are top notch–I'll...
  4. Strange Travel Books An interesting post over at The Millions on travel books to fake places. More of a fake atlas than a fake travel book, The Dictionary...
  5. Siegel Crit Michael Wood reviews Lee Siegel’s new book of cultural/literary criticism and finds that, like most of Siegal’s writing, it stinks. Quite a chorus, and even...

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January 4th, 2011 | Category: Uncategorized

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