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. 
Lady Chatterley’s Brother Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series,  called “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  read" 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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21st Century Lit
It’s obviously a little early for this, but fun nonetheless: The Millions speculates about a 21st-century literature syllabus. They’re doing it on behalf of an American high school teacher, and although the teacher doesn’t specify that the course only deals with American literature, this is almost a completely American list.
Some examples of the choices offered at The Millions:
Garth: This is sounds like a great class. I wish I’d had you as a teacher! One of the implicit challenges of answering the question is the tension between the need to appeal to high schoolers and the search for formal innovation. These two are not mutually exclusive; I vividly remember falling in love with Infinite Jest as a high-schooler. Still, some of the aesthetic strategies that separate contemporary writers from the hoary old 1900s (which are so last century) come at the cost of emotional immediacy. some of my favorite works of 21st Century fiction – Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai; Kathryn Davis’ The Thin Place; Lydia Davis’ Varieties of Disturbance; Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno – may be a little too cerebral for high schoolers.
It’d be great if high schoolers were actually made to read this stuff.
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- 20th-Century Compositions A couple weeks ago, New Yorker critic Alex Ross gave an MP3-driven tour of 20th-century composition. These are works that do "not to represent all...
- Lit Journals The NYTBR has an article on literary journals. It’s pretty much "gee whiz, look at all this QUIRKY stuff going on UNDER THE RADAR." Really,...
- 14th-Century Mongolia The Guardian asks judges to recount Booker memories: Being a Booker judge was a strange, conflicted experience because I found just reading those books soul-destroying....
- A New Lit Manifesto Maud Newton reports on a new literary manifesto by Tom Robbins in the new Harpers. It’s not available online, but Maud has graciously typed out...
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Recommended Books Film criticism as prophesy: a unified field theory of cinema, an attempt to explain how film and America fused to create a new form of consciousness geared to the realities of the 20th century. Thomson's massive, inspired, unwieldy, poetic, and compelling account of how moving pictures became the dominant form of mass communication in our world, and how it created all of us, a creature we might now call homo cinematis.
Part economics book, part revisionist history of capitalism. A new story of the 20th century. An essential book for understanding our world and where it is headed, and a powerful broadside against income inequality. I compare it to Don DeLillo's Underworld right here, and I do think this is a book that cultural critics and literature-lovers can benefit greatly from.
Mavis Gallant was one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century. Full stop. Her understanding of narrative structure was also highly original. This book is edited by Russel Banks and collects much of her very best work. Read it, be amazed, see the world anew.
I have never enjoyed Laszlo Krasznahorkai's prose more than in Seiobo There Below. Here he is at his clearest, his most taut, his most imaginative, and his deepest. One of the world's great contemporary writers at the apogee of his art, and a truly important novel of ideas about spirituality, art, and just what is our purpose here on Earth.
The first volume of an epic trilogy by one of Eastern Europe's most renowned writers. Pychonesque, baroque, mad, the prose here must be read to be believed. Some of Cartarescu's images will never leave my mind. Read the interview with the author in The Quarterly Conversation.
The arrival of a major talent into English. As I write in the San Francisco Chroncile, thee four long stories "chart the lifelong effects of courtship, the months and years in which it turns from desire to heartbreak to nostalgia. Brilliantly translated by the gifted Katherine Silver, Torrente's remarkably precise sentences are as tightly wound as violin strings, his brutal stories coiled like pythons."
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.
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.
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Bissell/Vollmann
Yes, Virginia, My Struggle Is a Bestseller
The Whole Equation by David Thomson
Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty
Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant
Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasz-
Blinding by Mircea Cartarescu
The End of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente
The Box Man by Kobo Abe
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen
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