Conversational Reading

Enrique Vila-Matas Interview
This is a decent little interview with Vila-Matas. Here's a nice bit where he talks about where Never Any End to Paris came... »
Of Course, Calvino Was in Oulipo
Jonathan Galassi, NYRB: Calvino’s refined, gently pessimistic, humane irony rode the wave of the deconstruction of... »
The /n/oulipian Analects
Very cool book for people into Oulipo or interesting writing in general: The /n/oulipian Analects, published by Les Figues... »
Gaddis’s Letters
Nice review of Gaddis's letters by Paul Griffiths in the TLS. Particularly in the years after JR, with his work... »
On the Matter of Lorentzen vs Munro
Kyle Minor has taken it upon himself to defend Alice Munro from Chrstian Lorentzen's recent essay in the LRB. The response... »
Terry Eagleton on Coetzee’s and Auster’s Letters
If there's a grumpier review of a Coetzee book, I'd like to know what it is. (In the case of Auster, I already know it... »
Our Industry as We Know It Is Ending Because We Say So
Not a whole lot of point to this except to point out that people in other lines of artistic endeavor also do the whole "grand... »
The Hall of Uselessness
Saw this on Facebook yesterday from a trustworthy source: We've had to make do with mere notes from the halls of... »
Music & Literature 2 Launch Event [NYC Things Pt. 2]
Earlier in the week before the Cahier event, I was able to attend a launch party for Music and Literature Issue 2 at the home... »
Cahier 18 Reading at McNally Jackson [NYC Things Pt 1]
Although it's true that BEA is soul-sucking in about 20 different ways and reminds you all of the parts of publishing that make... »

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

All That Is by James Salter June 10, 2013
Salter has been described as a master of sentences, but what might be more accurate is his mastery of word choice and metaphor. His sentences aren’t the sinuous architectural behemoths of James or William H. Gass. Many are terse, quick jabs: “The kiss was light and ardent,” or, describing a writer’s opulent house, “It was like a small family hotel, a hotel i […]
Birds of the Air by David Yezzi June 10, 2013
Yezzi’s poems often hint at oblique narratives. Like a detective, he asks a lot of questions. He’s like a mathematician working an inverse problem, deducing inner dramas from externals. His spirit, however, is sympathetic, not forensic. A friend used to say when someone started complaining about another’s failing, “Be gentle. He’s just a human.” Yezzi’s poem […]
The Films of Sangsoo Hong June 10, 2013
Say you watch Korean movies. Often, outside the peninsula itself, this means you’ve gotten into the murderous grotesquerie of Chan-wook Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” or Joon-ho Bong’s simultaneously goofy and solemn political allegory of a monster mash The Host, or any amount of Ki-duk Kim’s vast, high-profile (and as some fans admit, uneven) output. But menti […]
The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim June 10, 2013
The Iraqi Christ is topical only in the sense of the earliest known newsflashes: the cracked screeds, battlefield reports, and shipwreck stories by the likes of Archilochus, for instance, which remain with us in the form of fragments. These were news before they were ever classical references—indigestible gobbets of event, borne on and on by the flow of tell […]
Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin June 10, 2013
Leonard Tsypkin's short and frenetic Summer in Baden-Baden is a meditation on the morphic and self-defining nature of memory. Tsypkin portrays the sometimes charming but mostly distressing European travels of Fyodor (Fedya) Dostoyevsky and his second wife, Anna Grigor’yevna, and their descent into a woeful situation brought about by the famous author’s […]
Silent House by Orhan Pamuk June 10, 2013
Faulkner’s literary spirit haunts the dusty, cobweb-covered rooms in Pamuk’s eponymous silent house. When the wind blows through the chinks in the masonry, we can even hear the skeletons of the Bundrens', Compsons', Snopes', and Sartoris’ Turkish cousins rattling in the Darvinoğlu’s closets in their decrepit ancestral villa. Cennethisar, once […]
A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal June 10, 2013
“Tulsa is heaven, Tulsa is Italy,” says Chandler on Friends to a boss who has just assigned him to their office there. “Please don’t make me go there.” Lytal, an Oklahoman talking to New Yorkers like a person in Prague persuading tourists to pay top dollar for cheap pilsner, does little to elaborate upon this vision of his native city. Jim recalls “[t]he day […]
Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro June 10, 2013
Mario Santiago Papasquiaro was no stranger to this kind of manifesto, and his announced the coming of the Infrarealists. “The way in to matter,” they proclaim, “is ultimately the way in to adventure: the poem is a journey and the poet is a hero revealing heroes.” And so, in Papasquiaro’s long poem, “Advice From 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic,” we […]
A Brief History of Yes by Micheline Aharonian Marcom June 10, 2013
Marcom’s new novel, A Brief History of Yes, is less overtly transgressive than its predecessor—less centered on sex than on solitude; on the loneliness left after love is over. Previously, Marcom scaled the peak of what two people can do together, whereas now she digs into what drives them apart. So if Mirror expressed ecstasy, Yes explores ecstasy’s ebbing. […]
What Comes Next June 10, 2013
If you were to ask me what comes next, the best answer is that I do not know. But if I try to reason through the question, I tend to divide the problem into parts. On the one hand, one of these parts, the personal facet, is what’s to come after my present literature. Or, rather, what will I be writing, what will the next books be like, or even more important […]

Toward An Understanding of The Last Samurai: Quests

The Last Samurai is an exceedingly long and complex novel, and I don’t want to try and attempt a full and rigorous reading of it here, but I do think I can say a number of useful and interesting things about the book without going quite that far. I think it’s worthwhile to consider how Samurai might be a variant of the quest novel. That’s what I’m going to explore right here. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Last Samurai: Charles-Valentin Alkan

I just finished up with The Last Samurai today, and I was tickled to see the composer Charles-Valentin Alkan make an appearance toward the end. While I’d disagree that Alkan is quite as obscure as DeWitt makes him out to be (or maybe his reputation has grown in the 10 years since TLS was published), it’s very true that he gets nowhere near the acclaim of his more celebrated contemporaries (e.g., Chopin) even though he did compose some remarkable music. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Last Samurai: A Good Samurai Will Parry the Blow

I was out of action for half of last week, but I’m hoping to finish up The Last Samurai today and get together some concluding thoughts on the book in short order. In advance of that, here’s something that I can’t quite reconcile: I’m struck by the fact that Ludo compares declaring a man is his father to an elegant samurai cutting down a man with one awe-inspiring blow of his sword. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Last Samurai: Why Have So Many of Us Petered Out for the Moment?

“We don’t do anything.” We said this to our parents, and now we hear our children saying it all over again. Ludo’s complaint is plastered in the most obvious place imaginable: chapter headings at the beginning of the novel. Think back: . . . . . . . . . .

As the novel grows, the situation gets better, for Ludo at least. He starts doing things. Not just turning around in circles on the Circle Line. . . .

. . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Last Samurai: Fathers and Reasons

I’ve been thinking a lot about the story of Hugh Carey this week, which comprises roughly the last half of this week’s reading. I like the story a great deal, but the way it relates to the rest of The Last Samurai remains elusive. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Last Samurai: Week 4 Notes and Annotations

We’ve pulled into the nice, fat middle of The Last Samurai. Here are a few notes I found for this section–add yours in on the comments.

Tyrone Power school of acting. Now hat Sibylla has mentioned the “Tyrone Power school of acting” more than a few times to deride certain individuals, I thought I’d pull up an image to we can see what she means when she says, for instance, “and he did change, but only in the way that someone from the Tyrone Power school of acting would show maturity: mouth set, furrowed brow, this is someone . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Last Samurai: Cultural Literacy and Other Grown-Up Things

Now that we’re into the meat of this book, I think it’s time to talk about a theme I’ve been tracking for a while and that has really taken center stage in our third section. That would be cultural literacy. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Last Samurai References and Annotations Thread: Week 3

Last Samurai-ers–you know what to do. And here’s a thought that occurred to me from last week’s section. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Last Samurai: The Burden of Genius

For instance, the section starts out with the piano-playing dreams of the narrator’s mother (and I like how each of our sections has begun by narrating the life history of each of the narrator’s parents). It turns out that when her mother goes for an audition at Julliard, she’s essentially told that though she is a pianist of talent, she is nowhere near prepared to explore that talent. So she is instructed to perform a set of exercises ever day for two hours for a year, after which she may be prepared to begin. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Last Samurai References and Annotations Thread: Week 2

Here’s the spot for any extra-textual matter you’ve seen referenced in pages 85 – 186 of The Last Samurai and want to share with everyone. And a huge extra-textual question: How many of you have seen The Seven Samurai? (I watched it for the first time just this July as part of a summer-long Kurosawa festival, in which I had the chance to see a number of his films.) And if you haven’t seen it yet, do you plan to watch it for this read? . . . 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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