Conversational Reading

The Uncollected Fiction of DFW
It's coming, Dec 1.... »
Marketing the Bolano
This caught my eye, mostly since I just got through delivering a paper on precisely this topic. Javier Calvo: The other day... »
Gaddis in the NYT
It's nice to see Gaddis's letters reviewed in the Times, even if this review is symptomatic of that paper's decline. Kinda... »
Technology!
It's almost as though they learned nothing from the past decade. For the moment, data about how well MOOCs work are diffuse... »
On the Road
Traveling this week. Blogging might be a little light.... »
Gombrowicz’s Kronos
Witold Gombrowicz was a strange guy. Kronos, apparently his last unpublished text, sounds like an especially strange book. ... »
Not a Concern That I Have
We seem to be in a weird place right now vis a vis books. For the most part, Jaron Lanier comes across as non-alarmist... »
Graphs, Maps, Trees
Somewhere at the intersection between the social sciences and literary criticism we find Franco Moretti's writing on... »
All for the $$$
Obviously I get the point of why things like this are necessary, and to the extent that artistic endeavors can make a good... »
Synesthesia in George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time
A nice review of George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time. It's really nice to see this book continuing to be... »

beamish13: Surprised you didn't mention that the author of that piece i
vfrancone: I've been reading the Diary for about a month while in betwe
Paula McGrath: I found Barthes' Preparation of the Novel very affecting, lo
Sawn: The link is to the amazon page, do you have a link to the en
Padraic: "midfielder in a large pool of emerging and longstanding cri
Edward Champion: Here's your six word answer: "Reading almost never makes me
Tom: Didn't Tanenhaus call FREEDOM a "masterpiece of American fic

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

The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov March 6, 2013
Pevear and Volokhonsky’s ambition in bringing Leskov and all his stylistic peculiarities into English is impressive, and all the more so for how it contrasts with their previous role as translators of Russian. The pair are justly famous for their renditions of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists; their editions of Anna Karenina and Crime and Punis […]
Middle C by William H. Gass March 3, 2013
What distinguishes Middle C from his other fiction, then, is not the that Gass’ protagonist, Joseph Skizzen, spends nearly a lifetime deflecting the dangers and horrors of life itself, but the ways in which the novel’s narrative voice buffers him from the responsibilities of being a protagonist at all. In this, the tale of his life, stretching from the Blitz […]
The Field Is Lethal by Suzanne Doppelt March 3, 2013
This is a strange, engaging book that does not offer up its material to the reader without a struggle. Much of its strength comes from its juxtapositions, not only of idea with idea, word with word, phrase with phrase, but also text with image, image or text with white space, and in a larger sense, the abstract with the concrete. Doppelt is interested in how […]
70% Acrylic 30% Wool by Viola di Grado March 3, 2013
You can tell that Viola di Grado has a unique voice from the first line of her novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool: “One day it was still December.” If this line seems a little puzzling, the next one puts things in (ironic) perspective: “Especially in Leeds, where winter has been underway for such a long time that nobody is old enough to have seen what came before.” […]
Promising Young Women by Suzanne Scalon March 3, 2013
Plath’s ghost haunts the pages of Scanlon’s book, a non-linear narrative that hinges around Lizzie, a bright liberal arts student from Barnard and aspiring actress who has much in common with Plath’s protagonist. We’ve fast-forwarded forty years to New York in the early 90’s’; like Esther before her, Lizzie has come from the provinces to make a name for hers […]
The Available World by Ander Monson March 3, 2013
What happens to all the old, new things after two or three new, new things replace them? And what of the ideas and memories of which they are ultimately extensions and souvenirs? This is one of the larger questions, really, that Ander Monson poses in his most recent collection of poems, The Available World, though he does so in varying shades of subtly and e […]
The Whispering Muse by Sjón March 3, 2013
There is something immediately seductive about Sjón’s The Whispering Muse. The narrator, a peculiar old Icelander named Valdimar Haraldsson, receives a letter from an old acquaintance, inviting him on a sea voyage aboard the newly launched merchant ship, the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen. Haraldsson, who has long been cooped up in his shabby Copenhagen apartment, r […]
Wolf and Pilot by Farrah Field March 3, 2013
When Farah Field announced the opening of Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop (Field and Jared White’s pop-up shop the only all-poetry bookshop in New York City) two Februarys ago on her blog Adultish, she wrote this: It is kind of an anti-capitalistic act because no one could ever pay what poetry is worth. This sentiment is exactly true ofher new book, Wolf and Pil […]
The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht March 3, 2013
Unless he is John Keats, a poet’s letters seldom stand alone as literature. They might hold our attention as gossip (Lord Byron), psychiatric case study (Robert Lowell) or the after-hours thoughts of a combative poet-critic (Yvor Winters), but few could be pleasurably read without the additional scaffolding provided by the poetry. Even Marianne Moore, one of […]
Kind One by Laird Hunt March 3, 2013
Readers who go into Laird Hunt's Kind One looking for kindly characters are presented with an array of unlikely candidates. It simply cannot be Linus Lancaster, a farmer with delusions of grandeur (his farm is named Paradise) who beats his wife Ginny, rapes his young female slaves Cleome and Zinnia, and whips Alcofibras, the slave who tends his garden, […]

My Infinite Summer: Part II Of Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, from Girl With Curious Hair

Last week I discussed David Foster Wallace's important novella, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way." I thought it had a number of flaws–in fact, I'd say that on the whole the novella doesn't work for me. Although last week I did mention that the piece is still worth reading, especially as a bridge between his early writing and his masterpiece, Infinite Jest. Now I'd like to write a little about why I think that is.

Several years after reading Infinite Jest, one of the things I still most admire about that book is Wallace's . . . continue reading, and add your comments

My Infinite Summer: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, from Girl With Curious Hair

Given the author's own thoughts on it, it's difficult to read David Foster Wallace's novella "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" without bias:

Larry McCaffery: Why is meta-metafiction a trap? Isn’t that what you were doing in "Westward"?

David Foster Wallace: That’s a Rog. And maybe "Westward"’s only real value’ll be showing the kind of pretentious loops you fall into now if you fuck around with recursion. My idea in "Westward" was to do with metafiction what Moore’s poetry or like DeLillo’s "Libra" had done with other mediated myths. I wanted to get the Armageddon-explosion, the . . . continue reading, and add your comments

My Infinite Summer: “Good Old Neon,” from Oblivion

I'm fairly sure that David Foster Wallace's short story "Good Old Neon," published in the collection Oblivion, is the most celebrated piece of writing in the author's post-Infinite Jest career. It is certainly the most lauded story to appear in Oblivion: it received an O. Henry Award, was the most consistently praised piece in the mixed reviews that greeted Oblivion upon publication, and was mentioned again and again (for reasons both literary and autobiographical) after the suicide.

The piece, which I read this week for the first time, strikes me as in many ways . . . 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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