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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

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


Interviews from Conversational Reading

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


  • The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov March 6, 2013
    Pevear and Volokhonsky’s ambition in bringing Leskov and all his stylistic peculiarities into English is impressive, and all the more so for how it contrasts with their previous role as translators of Russian. The pair are justly famous for their renditions of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists; their editions of Anna Karenina and Crime and Punis […]
  • Middle C by William H. Gass March 3, 2013
    What distinguishes Middle C from his other fiction, then, is not the that Gass’ protagonist, Joseph Skizzen, spends nearly a lifetime deflecting the dangers and horrors of life itself, but the ways in which the novel’s narrative voice buffers him from the responsibilities of being a protagonist at all. In this, the tale of his life, stretching from the Blitz […]
  • The Field Is Lethal by Suzanne Doppelt March 3, 2013
    This is a strange, engaging book that does not offer up its material to the reader without a struggle. Much of its strength comes from its juxtapositions, not only of idea with idea, word with word, phrase with phrase, but also text with image, image or text with white space, and in a larger sense, the abstract with the concrete. Doppelt is interested in how […]
  • 70% Acrylic 30% Wool by Viola di Grado March 3, 2013
    You can tell that Viola di Grado has a unique voice from the first line of her novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool: “One day it was still December.” If this line seems a little puzzling, the next one puts things in (ironic) perspective: “Especially in Leeds, where winter has been underway for such a long time that nobody is old enough to have seen what came before.” […]
  • Promising Young Women by Suzanne Scalon March 3, 2013
    Plath’s ghost haunts the pages of Scanlon’s book, a non-linear narrative that hinges around Lizzie, a bright liberal arts student from Barnard and aspiring actress who has much in common with Plath’s protagonist. We’ve fast-forwarded forty years to New York in the early 90’s’; like Esther before her, Lizzie has come from the provinces to make a name for hers […]
  • The Available World by Ander Monson March 3, 2013
    What happens to all the old, new things after two or three new, new things replace them? And what of the ideas and memories of which they are ultimately extensions and souvenirs? This is one of the larger questions, really, that Ander Monson poses in his most recent collection of poems, The Available World, though he does so in varying shades of subtly and e […]
  • The Whispering Muse by Sjón March 3, 2013
    There is something immediately seductive about Sjón’s The Whispering Muse. The narrator, a peculiar old Icelander named Valdimar Haraldsson, receives a letter from an old acquaintance, inviting him on a sea voyage aboard the newly launched merchant ship, the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen. Haraldsson, who has long been cooped up in his shabby Copenhagen apartment, r […]
  • Wolf and Pilot by Farrah Field March 3, 2013
    When Farah Field announced the opening of Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop (Field and Jared White’s pop-up shop the only all-poetry bookshop in New York City) two Februarys ago on her blog Adultish, she wrote this: It is kind of an anti-capitalistic act because no one could ever pay what poetry is worth. This sentiment is exactly true ofher new book, Wolf and Pil […]
  • The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht March 3, 2013
    Unless he is John Keats, a poet’s letters seldom stand alone as literature. They might hold our attention as gossip (Lord Byron), psychiatric case study (Robert Lowell) or the after-hours thoughts of a combative poet-critic (Yvor Winters), but few could be pleasurably read without the additional scaffolding provided by the poetry. Even Marianne Moore, one of […]
  • Kind One by Laird Hunt March 3, 2013
    Readers who go into Laird Hunt's Kind One looking for kindly characters are presented with an array of unlikely candidates. It simply cannot be Linus Lancaster, a farmer with delusions of grandeur (his farm is named Paradise) who beats his wife Ginny, rapes his young female slaves Cleome and Zinnia, and whips Alcofibras, the slave who tends his garden, […]

Cesar Aira in NYRB

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Since 1975, the Argentine writer César Aira has published about seventy novels—it is difficult to arrive at an accurate count, and the number continues to grow at the rate of two per year. They are usually no longer than one hundred pages: dense, unpredictable confections delivered in a plain, stealthily lyrical style capable of accommodating Aira’s fondness for mixing metaphysics, realism, pulp fiction, and Dadaist incongruities. The sheer quantity of books has engendered a mini-industry in Buenos Aires, involving start-up presses as well as more established publishers that share the job of putting Aira’s work between covers. “Publish first, write later” was a dictum of Aira’s literary mentor, the late Argentine poet Osvaldo Lamborghini.1 This is just the sort of joke that Aira has embraced as a kind of aesthetic ethos. It was from Lamborghini that he seems to have developed his idea of an avant-garde literature that could combine the impossible with the real, a literature in which every statement of fact suggests its opposite and even casual observations and plot twists are turned upside down. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

New Boll Books in WSJ

Melville House’s three just-published Heinrich Boll books have been reviewed by Sam Sacks (of Open Letters Monthly) in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a bit on The Clown, which I wrote an afterword to: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Zone Review

My review of Zone by Mathais Enard has been published at The National. Here’s a bit: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Well-Deserved Praise for Mark Slouka

Nice to see Mark Athitakis putting Mark Slouka’s criminally overlooked essay collection Essays From the Nick of Time in his 10 best of the year list: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

More Crazy Ebook Stuff

The entrepreneur in me loves seeing all the business models people are trying out in these Wild West days of the Internet and ebooks. For instance, Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts, is selling the Kindle version of his book for £1 at Amazon.co.uk in an attempt to boost it into Amazon’s top 100. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

What Ebooks Can't Do

“Are we writing books or producing content that can be reproduced in any form?” asked Ander Monson, a poet and essayist whose “Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir” (2010) experiments with the interplay between digital and printed books. A collection of autobiographical essays, “Vanishing Point” has some pieces laid out in columns while others appear without margins, text bleeding off the edges of the page. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Sebald's Photos

Interesting stuff here about Sebald the photographer, as well as possible differences in the photos between the German and English editions of his books: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Interview with Bolano's Widow

Anagrama is about to publish a “new” posthumous Bolano book, Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (roughly, “The Troubles of a Real Cop”), which seems to be about the roots of Amalfitano, from 2666. For the occasion, the Argentine cultural magazine, Revista Ñ has interviewed Bolano’s widow, Carolina López. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Ebooks Do Wacky Things

For instance, all of the currently translated novels by Jose Saramago, plus one novella, for $36. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

And Speaking of Bedbugs . . .

. . . here’s Leeches. . . . continue reading, and add your comments