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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This week Three Percent is serializing Margaret Schwartz’s introduction to The Museum of Eterna’s Novel. I think this is well worth checking out, as Museum has to be one of the most interesting, most difficult new books I’ve seen in a while.
“Difficult” gets thrown around way too often by critics (for instance, all those books Franzen called difficult: not really so hard), but in the case of this book I think it’s justified, as Fernandez was really trying to create a form that hadn’t existed before. The result isn’t really approachable from the traditional angles that . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Our latest review at The Quarterly Conversation is Daniel Pritchard’s take on Seven Nights by none other than Jorge Luis Borges. They are, as Dan puts it, “lectures-turned-essays originally given in Buenos Aires in 1977.” he goes on to explain that
The topics covered in Seven Nights will no doubt reverberate for any reader who has spent time in the company of Borges’s writing, because they are his most intimate themes, his personal obsessions: the Divine Comedy, the Kabbalah, the fear of mirrors, dreams, and nightmares, the Thousand and One Nights, the hidden machinations of existence, his . . . continue reading, and add your comments
BookForum has now posted its February/March issue online, and as you can see their experiment in free content appears to be over. (Unless they’re planning some bit-by-bit delayed rollout.) Aleksandr Hemon’s review of DeLillo’s Point Omega is among the free offerings. Also note Eric Banks on A Time for Everything by Karl Knausgaard, published by the wonderful Archipelago Press.
Sadly, one of the pieces not available online is Matthew Ladd’s review of The Museum of Eterna’s Novel by Borges-mentor Macedonio Fernandez, certainly one of my most anticipated releases of the year. I’ll definitely be . . . continue reading, and add your comments
I've been reading Harold Bloom's classic work The Anxiety of Influence, and I've come upon an odd quote. It's the kind of thing that sounds so right that I really want to like it, but I'm not entirely sure I understand what it means.
So, I'm throwing it out to the crowd. Anyone want to take a shot at unpacking this?
Cultural belatedness is never acceptable to a major writer, though Borges made a career out of exploiting his secondariness.
Based on Amazon purchases made through links on this website, the following are the "picks" of Conversational Reading’s readers for 2008:
#1
By a large margin, The Invention of Morel was the most popular purchase among readers of this blog. Obviously, my sincere praise of this book helped move it along, but I’m convinced that not nearly as many copies would have been purchased if this wasn’t a great book, and if Borges wasn’t Bioy’s literary collaborator. A great read, and if you haven’t had a chance to yet, definitely pick it up.
#2
Not really a surprise, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel, reviewed at The Complete Review.
Sounds rather interesting:
The first point is the amusingly obvious one: that no matter how small the books in the Library, there isn’t nearly enough room in the actual universe to contain the library Borges envisioned (and that’s just taking into account the books, not the structure that houses them …). From the very large, Bloch moves to the infinitely small (well, thin), addressing the footnote that suggests a single volume could contain all that the Library holds — if it had "an infinite . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Recommended Books 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 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.
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.
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.
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The Rachel Shihor Interview
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
You Say