Conversational Reading

The Novels of Kim Young-ha
Colin Marshall in the LARB: Within 50 pages, Kim name-checks The Death of Marat, Henry Miller, Oscar Wilde, William... »
The Uncollected Fiction of DFW
It's coming, Dec 1.... »
Marketing the Bolano
This caught my eye, mostly since I just got through delivering a paper on precisely this topic. Javier Calvo: The other day... »
Gaddis in the NYT
It's nice to see Gaddis's letters reviewed in the Times, even if this review is symptomatic of that paper's decline. Kinda... »
Technology!
It's almost as though they learned nothing from the past decade. For the moment, data about how well MOOCs work are diffuse... »
On the Road
Traveling this week. Blogging might be a little light.... »
Gombrowicz’s Kronos
Witold Gombrowicz was a strange guy. Kronos, apparently his last unpublished text, sounds like an especially strange book. ... »
Not a Concern That I Have
We seem to be in a weird place right now vis a vis books. For the most part, Jaron Lanier comes across as non-alarmist... »
Graphs, Maps, Trees
Somewhere at the intersection between the social sciences and literary criticism we find Franco Moretti's writing on... »
All for the $$$
Obviously I get the point of why things like this are necessary, and to the extent that artistic endeavors can make a good... »

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.

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 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.

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.

The Summer of Genji

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

Your Face This Spring

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

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, […]

The Novels of Kim Young-ha

Colin Marshall in the LARB:

Within 50 pages, Kim name-checks The Death of Marat, Henry Miller, Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Gustav Klimt, B.B. King, Animal Kingdom, Chupa Chups lollipops, Chet Baker, Antonio Banderas, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Stranger Than Paradise, at which point the book only has 69 pages left. Comparisons to Murakami come easily, and those looking for his South Korean equivalent will, at least in this particular novel, find pieces of what they seek: modern topics, pop references, narration that refuses to strain for belletristic heights. But Kim writes with a harder edge, under a . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Uncollected Fiction of DFW

It’s coming, Dec 1.

Marketing the Bolano

This caught my eye, mostly since I just got through delivering a paper on precisely this topic.

Javier Calvo: The other day I saw a book by Alejandro Zambra on a list of the most anticipated books of 2013 in the United States, and I wanted to ask you this: what do you think of this phenomenon, which to me is one of the most important things that have happened in American publishing in a long time? I’m talking about the attention Spanish-language fiction has been getting since Bolaño. How have you experienced this change as a translator, . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Gaddis in the NYT

It’s nice to see Gaddis’s letters reviewed in the Times, even if this review is symptomatic of that paper’s decline.

Kinda ballsy to make the lede how the critics completely messed up on The Recognitions and J R and then not quote from the Times’ participation in said fiasco . . .

Technology!

It’s almost as though they learned nothing from the past decade.

For the moment, data about how well MOOCs work are diffuse and scant. A cornerstone of the case for them is a randomized study that Bowen helped plan, through the Ithaka organization, a Mellon Foundation spinoff. It showed no significant difference in educational outcomes between online learning and traditional classroom learning. The MOOC in question was a statistics course, however, and a “hybrid” one: its students had a weekly in-classroom Q. & A. session. When MOOCs are a purely online experience, dropout rates are typically more than . . . continue reading, and add your comments

On the Road

Traveling this week. Blogging might be a little light.

Gombrowicz’s Kronos

Witold Gombrowicz was a strange guy. Kronos, apparently his last unpublished text, sounds like an especially strange book.

The new book lays out Gombrowicz’s meticulous monthly tabulation of concerns – his erotic ventures as lists of partners’ first names and his health and lack thereof are the carnal, corporeal priorities. Then travel, meetings, invitations, exchanges of gifts and letters. In finding a form for his unrelenting self analysis, the new book gives the writer something of a last word on his life.

A key work that was conspicuously absent for decades – as a full biography of . . . continue reading, and add your comments

We seem to be in a weird place right now vis a vis books. For the most part, Jaron Lanier comes across as non-alarmist non-techno-utopian in this interview (e.g., “My cyber-friends think if you can just come up with a perfect scheme, that some perfect digital scheme will solve all the problems.”) but then we get on to the book business and it’s “oh my god!!!!”

To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Graphs, Maps, Trees

Somewhere at the intersection between the social sciences and literary criticism we find Franco Moretti’s writing on literature.

“The form of any portion of matter, whether it be living or dead,” writes D’Arcy Thompson in his strange wonderful book On Growth and Form, “may in all cases alike be described as dur to the action of force. In short, the form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces’ . . .” Diagram: Cartesian space. But diagram of forces. The distribution of events between the Black Forest villages and the administrative towns is the diagram . . . continue reading, and add your comments

All for the $$$

Obviously I get the point of why things like this are necessary, and to the extent that artistic endeavors can make a good argument for themselves in the language of capitalism, good for them. But I do also feel that this sort of thing takes away from the message that the arts should be sending: we’re not capitalism and we don’t want to be.

As the post points out, the arts don’t exist to make money; they only do so because anything that doesn’t make money in this world soon dies. Art is practically unique in this regard. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)

DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.

The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)

The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.

Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)

Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)

Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)

A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.

The End of Oulipo?

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

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