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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. The End of Oulipo

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series, Lady Chatterley's Brothercalled “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 Life Perecread" 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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You Say

  • P.: He was a serviceable to terrible critic, judging from the le
  • Gary H.: Silly me, I thought "Calvino was a member of Oulipo" was mea
  • SirJack: Yeah but Coetzee and Auster aren't raving Marxists, and so t
  • P.: One could play that game with respect to any of these little
  • Gary H: "Calvino, Italo. (Cuba, 1923--Italy, 1985) Elected to the Ou
  • Steve: "Under the auspices of writers that aren’t really all that g
  • P.: No he was not. The point of that article was that Calvino di

Group Reads

The Tunnel

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.

Naked Singularity

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 Perec

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.

Last Samurai

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.

Tale of Genji

The Summer of Genji

Two great online lit magazines team up to read a mammoth court drama, the world's first novel.

Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face This Spring

A 3-month read of Javier Marias' mammoth book Your Face Tomorrow

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Ten Memorable Quotes from William Gaddis’ Letters

New Books
Here are ten of my favorite moments from these hugely interesting letters.


Interviews from Conversational Reading

New Books
See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.


  • 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 […]

You Really Want to Be an eBook-Only Author?

You try telling Jonathan Franzen his next novel isn’t actually being printed:

What also gets squeezed, or I should say what gets squeezed the most, is the ability of publishers to continue printing books on paper. As Crain says, “It may not be possible for a single company to publish e-books at that price and also retain the infrastructure necessary to publish ink-on-paper books.” I added the emphasis, but I think it’s pretty obvious that it has to be there: as I noted above, one of the forms of control at stake in this haggling over price points . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The NYT's Pay Wall and Newsday's 35 Subscriptions

Levi Asher isn’t believing the NYT’s declaration that it’s going to build a pay wall:

New York Times management knows that a web paywall is a bad business move right now. The market is not strong for paid content and there is no foreseeable way they will profit from this. Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch ran the numbers, and his findings are quite conclusive. Even in the best case scenario, the added revenue from a few hundred thousand annual subscription fees will not add up to a significant amount on the New York Times balance sheet. And it . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The New Ways to Reach Readers

Kevin Smokler has an excellent op-ed at Publishing Perspectives on how authors and publishers need to think in order to reach readers. I don’t agree with all of it, but the basic message is right on target: “Don’t ask readers to buy a book based on trust. Find a compelling way to preview it for them, and mass produce that.”

What we need is the equivalent of an “MP3 format” for fiction: a modest snack-sized dabble of new books and stories, capable of the same ubiquity that the MP3 has brought to recorded sound. Say what you . . . continue reading, and add your comments

More Books You Won't Read in the U.S.

Lewis Manalo, the buyer for Idlewild Books in NYC, must be doing a good job. Though I’ve never been to the store, by all reports Idlewild has a great selection of world literature.

What’s more, Manalo has penned an op-ed where he describes his efforts to get books–often great works of world literature–that have never been published in the U.S. into the hands of his customers. At the very least, this is evidence against the claim that “culturally insular” Americans don’t want to read beyond their borders:

Telling your bookseller that you’ve tried every other shop in the . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Borders “In-Stock Guarantee”

Given that over the past year or so I've never actually found the novel that I'm looking for in Borders, I could make a killing here:

Borders, which earlier in the year struggled to keep books in stock as it reduced inventory levels, has introduced a new holiday program under which the retailer will provide free shipping on any item listed on Borders.com that is not carried in a store where a customer is shopping.

I understand this is all a ploy to get me to buy more books at Borders, but it is kind of . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Wal-Mart/Amazon Price War

Interesting:

NEW YORK – An online book special offered by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is turning into a full-fledged price war with Amazon.com.

Wal-Mart got things started Thursday, offering $10 prices on such upcoming hardcover releases as Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” and John Grisham’s “Ford County,” a cut of 60 percent or more from the regular cost. Wal-Mart will also offer free shipping.

Amazon.com, the largest online bookseller, matched the $10 price, prompting Wal-Mart to take its offer to $9. By Friday morning, Amazon.com also had priced the books at $9.

The price cuts come at a time . . . continue reading, and add your comments

On Correlating Sales and Quality

Nina Siegal has gone through the Publishers Weekly bestseller list since 1900 (I didn't realize PW kept stats this long) and attempted to correlate sales with literary quality and longevity. The results are as follows:

The period we might call the “Golden Age” of bestseller fiction came in mid-century. As I got into the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, I was surprised to find myself highlighting not one or two recognizable titles every couple of years, but three or four sometimes in a single year. In 1961, for example, Americans were reading, or at least buying, The . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Life of Print

There's a lot to agree with in Eric Obenauf's "print is alive" article in The Brooklyn Rail, even if none of his arguments strike me as novel. Nonetheless, this is a pretty good summation of why corporate publishing is in disarray:

Such efforts expose a key fundamental flaw within the mindset of modern corporate publishing: the perceived role of the book in today’s society. In the past, because of the necessary evolution required to actually create one, coupled with an ambition to deliver a valuable artifact to the world, a book was imagined by publishers as a . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Invest in Books

PW reports that the stocks of booksellers and publishers are beating the Dow Jones index by about 25% this year:

Led by a remarkable rebound by book retailers, the Publishers Weekly Stock Index jumped 23.9% in the first six months of 2009, easily beating the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which declined 3.7% in the January through June period. Borders Group, whose stock spent the end of 2008 trading below $1, had the best performance on the PWSI with its share price skyrocketing 820%, as investors expressed more confidence that the company has a chance to successfully turn . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Amazon Applies for Patent to Advertise in Your Kindle

The patents are here and here.

Speculation thereof here:

Before everyone gets in a huff, let’s consider Amazon’s intentions with these patent applications. Surely they would never allow advertisements to be placed in books which you have purchased legitimately at full price, so let’s put that out of our heads. But what if you could take a few bucks off the cover price at the cost of a few contextual ads relating (if possible) to the book’s content? Personally, I wouldn’t mind — partially because I don’t use a Kindle or intend to any . . . continue reading, and add your comments