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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Friday Catalogs: Simon & Schuster and Counterpoint/Soft Skull Summer ’08
Simon & Schuster
First up is a book I’ve been hearing a lot about lately, The Book of Chameleons by Angolan Jose Eduardo Agualusa (available, trans. Daniel Hahn). The book received last year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and has been likened to Barges and Calvino. It involves a man who sells pasts, and the plot deals with Angola’s history. Reviews in The Complete Review and the Orlando Sentinel.
I’m heartened to see Simon & Schuster publishing a collection of short stories in . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Open Letter, the press started up by Chad Post at the University of Rochester upon his departure from the Dalkey Archive, is on the verge of publishing its first round of books. Here’s two of the first six that struck me:
The Pets (Bragi Olafsson, trans Janice Balfour, October) strikes me for two reasons: the first is that it’s translated from Icelandic, and that just seems appealing to me, probably because Iceland has always seemed like an interesting place, but also because I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen an Icelandic translation; the . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Just when Francois Monti’s piece on Eric Chevillard has got me wondering about contemporary French literature, I see that Archipelago Press is publishing Small Lives by Pierre Michon (April, trans. Jody Gladding and Elizabeth DeShays). The catalog describes it as:
In Small Lives, Michon explores the act of writing through the intimate portraits of eight interconnected characters. In this evocative poetic narrative, the quest to breathe life into the stories of these individuals becomes an exploration of the author’s own voice.
I’m curious about what seems like a metafictional . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Were I stranded for a couple months with nothing but Dalkey’s spring ’08 lineup, I don’t think I’d mind. There’s really a lot of very-intriguing sounding stuff here. These are my favorites from this strong season.
First-off, Dalkey is happily giving me more of two of my favorite non-American authors. First is Jean-Philippe Toussaint, whose short comic novel Television, which reads kind of like a book Jim Jarmusch would have written, made a wonderful impression on me when Dalkey published it a couple years back. Now they are publishing Monsieur . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Columbia University is publishing a book on Sebald that sounds worth a look. Called W.G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, it looks at Sebald’s narratives with attention to "archival institutions and processes that lit at the heart of modernity"–photography, museums, libraries, and others. March
Also from Columbia is The Journey Abandoned, an unfinished and lost novel from the critic Lionel Trilling. That it’s by Trilling merits some attention, but the catalog describes it as only a "third" of a book. June
Did you know that Dubai is an expatriate, undemocratic city that’s the Gulf’s premier . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Published in hardcover last year but still worth mentioning is the paperback release of Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet. (May) If you haven’t read it yet, this is a good one to tide you over between the publication of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666, currently slated to come fro FSG in November. (As a sidenote, I really like what New Directions is doing with the covers to Bolaño’s paperback releases.)
As mentioned earlier on this blog, B.S. Johnson’s famous "book in a box," The Unfortunates will be published by New Directions . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Here’s what caught my attention as I browsed Soft Skull and Counterpoint’s Winter 2008 catalog.
Lydia Millett fans will be happy to know that she has a new book out, How the Dead Dream. The cover features an extreme close-up of what I think is a T. Rex face, and the book deals with a supercharged LA estate developer named T. who eventually takes a "Conradesque" journey up a tropical island river. Pubbing in January.
Counterpoint is publishing two new books from the late Donald Barthelme. Not-Knowing (February) is a book of essays and interviews. . . . 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