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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

  • 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
  • nickelelr: I dunno, a lot of people get old. I agree that maybe his hea
  • Padraic: What a joke. Eagleton picks a very odd moment to argue for t

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 […]

Translation as Stylistic Evolution

Some people have asked for the title of the Calvino/Queneau translation book I referenced earlier this week. It is Translation as Stylistic Evolution: Italo Calvino Creative Translator of Raymond Queneau. It will cost you about $60.

The Genius of What Is Possible In English

Fascinating conversation between Adam Kirsch and Ilya Kaminsky on what translation can and can’t do. I’ll grant that Kirsch is well-informed, and his concerns are fair enough, but this response of Kaminsky’s really gets at the inherent error in focusing to exclusivity on the source text w/r/t translation:

But what interests me is not only the genius of the poet translated but also the genius of what is possible in English as it bends to accommodate or digest various new forms. By translating, we learn how the limits of our minds can be stretched to absorb the . . . continue reading, and add your comments

50 Outstanding Translations from the Last 50 Years

The Literary Saloon points me to: 50 Outstanding Translations of the Last 50 Years.

I certainly won’t quibble with the inclusion of Barbara Wright’s courageous rendition of Exercises in Style, but I will say that if ever a book is crying out for a new translation, this is it. Wright’s language may have been correct when she made her translation in 1958, but much of it just seems completely off-base now. I’d like to see a new translation, one that uses period language that has stayed a little more relevant than the words Wright chose.

Another thing . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Audience Expectations

Dan digs this out:

. . .A few years ago I had lunch with then-editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Sonja Bolle. When asked what books I was soon to publish on my Sun & Moon Press label, I replied that we had just published a translation by the French Oulipo writer, Raymond Queneau. “O, I love Queneau,” she gushed, much to my surprise. “He’s a wonderful writer. But, of course, we couldn’t possibly do a review of his work!” “Why not?” I naively responded. Oh, our readers couldn’t understand a review about his literature. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Bouvard and Pecuchet

Just a quick blurb for the Dalkey Archive’s new translation of Bouvard and Pecuchet, a book I finished reading last week.  This was my first dose of Flaubert, and it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. I’d, of coures, heard all about how Flaubert created the realist novel with Madame Bovary, and, well Bouvard and Pecuchet is definitely not your classic realist novel.

What the fine introduction and preface (by translator Mark Polizzotti and Raymond Queneau) explain, however, is that Bouvard and Pecuchet may be the first modernist novel, or at least a forerunner. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

99 Ways to Tell A Story

Derik Badman gives a positive review to Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell A Story over at Comic Book Galaxy. The book is an innovative comic based on a simple conceit. Following Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, in which Queneau tells the same story in 99 different ways, Madden

has created his own Exercises in Style in comics form, and I’m here to say that it stands as an equal to Queneau’s linguistic masterpiece. Matt tells a simple story: Matt gets up from working at his computer. He walks into another room of the apartment. . . . continue reading, and add your comments