Conversational Reading

Notes on Conceptualisms
Nice to see that Notes on Conceptualisms has been translated into Spanish, and is attracting some serious attention in that... »
Working with Chejfec
Sergio Chejfec's two main English-language translators, interviewed at Asymptote: Let's get back to the translating... »
FSG’s About Face on the My Struggle Covers
Apparently the abomination is over: as Michael points out, the market has spoken, and it hates the original paperback covers... »
Searching for the Self
A very insightful reading of Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? at The Point. Sheila and Margaux suffer from... »
Travel Notes (from here—to there) by Stanley Crawford
Calamari Press has recently reissued the long-out-of-print Travel Notes (from here—to there) by Stanley Crawford (whom you... »
Capital in the 21st Century
Long-time readers to this blog know that I very, very rarely talk about books that are not directly related to literary fiction... »
Two on Sergei Dovlatov
James Wood at The New Yorker: “POLITICAL WORK OUGHT TO BE CONCRETE”: this is one of the rousing Soviet mottos... »
The Fare Forward Reading at The Strand
So a little background: the poet Laura Simms is publishing this book called Fare Forward, which is basically her correspondence... »
Amzon Owns Your Ebooks
Anyone who buys Kindle books is giving Amazon the right to steal what they think is their property at any moment Amazon wants.... »
How to Make a David Mitchell Novel Sound Terrible
Let the PR flacks at Random House write about him. "The Bone Clocks" will be, Random House writes, "a stunning epic that... »

Mans: PT: I think if you click on my name now, it has a link to my
P.T. Smith: Mans! Good lord. I read your comment and wondered who the he
Chris: The old cover looks like Lisa Frank by way of Terry Gilliam.
Michael S: I was hoping to see a comment beginning, "As the founder of
Ed: I love ugly covers, and am proud to own one of these FSG Kna
Mans: I like the ugly ones better than the boring ones, but I gues
P.T. Smith: Yeah, I'm mostly sad. I wanted to see how chaotic they got a

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

A Treatise on Shelling Beans by Wiesław Myśliwski March 9, 2014
A man enters a house and asks to buy some beans, but we aren’t given his question, only the response: humble surprise from the narrator and an invitation inside. This modesty, though it remains at the core of the narrator throughout, is quickly overwhelmed when his questions, his welcoming explanations, flow into an effort to tell his whole life story, from […]
The Gorgeous Nothings by Emily Dickinson, edited by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin March 9, 2014
The Gorgeous Nothings, the dedicated work of visual artist Jen Bervin and author Marta Werner, presents in large format the first full-color publication of all fifty-two of Emily Dickinson’s envelope writings. As such, it opens up an aspect of her craft that suggests she was, in the so-called late ecstatic period of her career, experimenting with creating te […]
The Mehlis Report by Rabee Jaber March 9, 2014
The Mehlis Report follows the architect Saman Yarid on his daily perambulations around Lebanon's capital, where his memories of the city's past and his observations of the high-rises that have emerged from the ruins of the nation's civil war dominate the faint plot. But the book transcends Beirut: Jaber writes about what is left behind when pe […]
The Fiddler of Driskill Hill by David Middleton March 9, 2014
Middleton’s sensibility as poet and man is thoroughly Christian, Southern (or rather, Louisianan), and traditional, but he’s no unreconstructed romantic Rebel reliving the Civil War. His manner is meditative and elegiac, not rancorous or redneck. In a rare useful blurb on the back of the book, the North Carolina poet and novelist Fred Chappell describes Midd […]
The Fata Morgana Books by Jonathan Littell March 9, 2014
After The Kindly Ones, the nine hundred-page long Goncourt Prize-winning “autobiography” of a Nazi, fans of the Franco-American writer Jonathan Littell may heave an inward sigh of relief at the sight of The Fata Morgana Books. A slim collection of “studies” (as some of these stories were called in their original French incarnations), The Fata Morgana Books n […]
Novelty: A History of the New by Michael North March 9, 2014
There is no better way to ensure the early demise of a form or a style than to proclaim its newness; fewer epithets are as old as “new.” A well-known work by Italian artist Maurizio Nannucci reads, “All art has been contemporary”—we may wish to amend it, for present purposes, and have it read, “All art has been new.” Yet surely this is something of a truism. […]
A Life Among Invented Characters: A Tribute to Mavis Gallant March 9, 2014
Two things immediately come to mind when remembering Mavis Gallant: her unique sense of humor—stories always told with a wry half-smile—and her near-comical stonewalling when confronted with leading questions about her craft in interviews and with audiences. The first time I was in her simple three-room apartment on rue Jean Ferrandi, a mere three blocks fro […]
The Guy Davenport Reader March 9, 2014
Poet-critic. Think of that word, made of two—what a beaux construction. The first is wild, hair mussed, looking at a bird in a tree—yet the follower is practical, urbane, and seemingly obeisant to word counts. Together they bleach out the fusspot academic and appeal to logos—Davenport once said that he was “not writing for scholars or critics, but for people […]
[SIC] by Davis Schneiderman March 9, 2014
In 2011 Andrew Gallix, in the Guardian, wrote a piece on unread difficult books, and mentioned “an anthology of blank books [edited by Michael Gibbs] entitled All Or Nothing,” and we can consider Blank as continuing that line. Kenneth Goldsmith’s prefatory essay “Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?” in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (201 […]
The Ben Marcus Interview March 9, 2014
I do tend to generate a lot of pages when I’m drafting something, and I cut as I go. I make strange noises out of my face, on the page, and they are for the most part not worth keeping. Some of the stories don’t take shape until I overwrite and pursue every cursed dead-end I can think of, which clarifies everything I don’t want the story to become. But I don […]

First (?) Pale King Review

Bookforum tells me that PW’s review of The Pale King is the first. The lede is decidedly dour: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

I registered two nice appearances yesterday in those big-time NYC periodicals. First off, The New Yorker’s Book Bench ran a very nice post on the simply beautiful covers for Melville House’s new Heinrich Boll titles. And, as you can see, right at the top of the item is the cover for The Clown, with my name, wee but quite legible . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

James O. Incandeza’s Films To be Screened

So a bunch of artists put together an exhibition of some films they made inspired by James O. Incandeza’s oeuvre, as described in a footnote to Infinite Jest. They’re calling it “A Failed Entertainment.” Here for instance is a still from The Medusa vs. the Odalisque by Jessica Segall: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

More Thoughts on The Pale King

I readily admit, I’m a Pale King skeptic. In fact, I’m pretty skeptical about all posthumous, incomplete texts. In most cases, if an author didn’t finish it, I’m not really interested in reading it (with obvious exceptions; e.g., Kafka). At The Howling Fantods, a great DFW site in general, Nick Maniatis has an alternative view that’s worth a look. Here’s the start: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Is This What The Pale King Should Have Looked Like?

Earlier this week, I mentioned that The New Yorker has published a work by David Foster Wallace entitled Backbone, an excerpt from The Pale King. Now there is an extremely interesting Google Doc that purports to offer “Changes between the transcription of David Foster Wallace reading ‘A fragment of a longer thing’ (Dec. 2000) and The New Yorker’s publication of that story as ‘Backbone’ (Feb. 28, 2011).” . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Pale King Excerpt in The New Yorker

In case that rock you’ve been living under is a little heavy . . . & if you want, you can pre-order the book here.

VIDEO: New BBC David Foster Wallace Documentary

45 minute DFW documentary from the BBC. Need I say more?

Surely you have 45 minutes . . . . . . continue reading, and add your comments

On Wallace’s Philosophy Thesis

Levi Asher isn’t too hot on DFW’s “new” “book,” Fate Time and Language: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Understanding DFW’s Thesis

Everybody who has a grasp of formal logic, raise your hand. Okay, unless I’ve vastly underestimated my popularity among the philosophy grad students, that should not be to many of you. But if you are to make an honest attempt to read DFW’s thesis, Fate, Time, and Language, then you’ll probably want to have some understanding of this stuff. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Introduction to David Foster Wallace’s Thesis

In case you’ve forgotten (and let’s face it, unless you’re an enormous fanboy, you probably have), David Foster Wallace’s college thesis goes on sale in December from Columbia University Press under the title Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. CUP is now offering an excerpt from James Ryerson’s introduction to the book: . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant

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.

Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasz-
nahorkai

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.

Blinding by Mircea Cartarescu

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 End of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente

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 Box Man by Kobo Abe

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

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.

The End of Oulipo?

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

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