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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News
* Google’s getting into the online encyclopedia biz
* The Hartford Courant is the most recent newspaper to deem book coverage unimportant
* Roberto Bolano is in The New Yorker. Also see Conversational Reading’s coverage of Bolano, and and all of our reviews and essays about him at The Quarterly Conversation.
Reviews
* The Complete Review on Reading the OED (yes, that’s what you think it is):
A book about someone spending a year reading the over twenty-thousand pages of a dictionary does not sound particularly . . . continue reading, and add your comments
This ironic image found at No Caption Needed, which in this case lives up to its name
News
* For the sci-fi inclined, get in on Tor’s free ebook orgy while it still exists
* Does the Internet makes the new generation worse writers? A recent study finds changes in the kind of mistakes students make, but doesn’t attribute the changes to the digital environment:
One thing that Lunsford and Lunsford conclude is that when student writing from the mid-80s is compared to student writing today, “new error patterns” emerge. Of course, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The University of Chicago publishes a new book of rarely seen Dorothea Lane photos. Press release, excerpt.
News
* Quarterly Conversation contributor Lee Rourke on the decline of the British avant-garde
* Paul Verhaughen, whom you’ll all remember as the author of the Pynchonesque work-in-translation Omega Minor, has a blog. I find it amazing that a guy capable of writing this on his blog didn’t get better publicity in the States:
I shoot an email back asking if I can have the money (4,950 euros, or about $7,500) donated . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Yes, you know Falling Man. But what about Falling Girl?
News
* In writing about the battle to keep Fernando Pessoa’s correspondence in Portugal, the NYT does a pretty good job of discussing the writer and his major works
* Borders becomes the latest online bookseller to offer downloadable audio books. Unfortunately, they force you to download through a clunky "media console" that’s Windows-only. And we wonder why Borders is going out of business.
* Max has some great news for Alvaro Mutis fans. If you’re not familiar . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The NY Times profiles library-ladder makers Putnam Rolling Ladder Company
News
* Not exactly news, but could someone with greater influence than I possess help The Guardian understand that they’re not obliged to cover every single Harry Potter-related story that comes down the pike?
* The Millions discusses anticipated books left to publish in 2008. And if you want more hot forthcoming books action, you can check the catalogs I run down regularly on Fridays and my two BEA roundups
* FC2 is getting dropped from the University . . . continue reading, and add your comments
How nonprofits will meet in the 21st century? From the flickr photostream Nonprofits in Second Life.
News
* More cutbacks in the Chicago Tribune and LAT book sections are likely
* NPR, by contrast, is upping its coverage
* Chad Post lets the cat out of the bag that NYRB will be publishing the 1600-page book on Borges by Morel-author and best friend Adolfo Bioy Casares (albeit, somewhat abridged)
* This just sounds odd: "The city of Frankfurt’s prestigious art museum, the Schirn, cancelled Friday its plans for a literary . . . continue reading, and add your comments
From the piece "Composition for Robert Walser," published at Words Without Borders
News
* Cody’s Books is now really, truly, and, one must accept, irrevocably, dead
* A new documentary exploring the life and death of Cody’s Books and Kepler’s bookstore will air on PBS in November
* Marcelo reports on Bolano’s literary executor, who possibly lost his job for writing a negative review. Marcelo also reproduces this quote from him, with which I need not state my agreement:
The way things are … the critic tends to act exactly like . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The Smithsonian now has a flickr photostream.
News
* Matt Cheney releases the TOC for Best American Fantasy 28
* Blackwells in the UK is testing out the so-called book ATM in one of its stores. At 40 pages per minute, you could POD a copy of Vollmann in under half an hour.
* The Wall Street Journal shows how Amazon shows its clout, turning a summer book into a bestseller:
Driving that unexpectedly heavy demand has been strong reviews and promotional support from Amazon.com. The Web retailer chose the . . . 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 Novels of Kim Young-ha
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)
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