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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Jeff Vandermeer has a good review of Castle by J Robert Lennon in the Barnes & Noble Review:
Intense psychological profiles dominate the literature of unease, sometimes known as "neo-gothic" and typified by such modern masters as Brian Evenson. In these tales, the suggestion of something not quite right about the narrator or the protagonist is followed by the dread that we will learn unsettling information not only about the character but about ourselves. In Castle, an often brilliant new novel by J. Robert Lennon, this classic paradigm is updated for a . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Here's another one I'm hoping to read in the next couple months. Dumitru Tsepeneag's Pigeon Post sounds great:
The term "pigeon post" refers to the use of homing pigeons to deliver messages. Perhaps the best known was the French Pigeon Post of the Franco-Prussian War in the late nineteenth century, which allowed messages to travel into Paris across Prussian lines, representing a fluidity between an otherwise rigid divide of East and West. The sometimes difficult task of crossing borders and disseminating information informs the underlying tension of Romanian writer Dumitru Tsepeneag's novel Pigeon . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Over at Open Letters, Karen Vanuska takes issue with Philipp Meyer's Pulitzer-contender, American Rust:
But wanting magic to arise from those circumstances doesn’t make one bit of difference to the story found between the covers of American Rust. This novel is in desperate need of an exceptional editor rather than a myth. Amidst all that rust, there’s a good story, a few good characters, and it’s the first book that I’ve read in a long while that deserves to have American in its title; Meyer’s take on what it means to be an average Joe-the-Plumber-American holds promise . . . continue reading, and add your comments
A first novel by Samantha Harvey, The Wildnerness, sounds good. The B&N review:
A device literary novelists sometimes use to pleasing effect is to unanchor certain images or thoughts so that they float free in the text, recurring for reasons that remain partially obscure. What the text loses in transparency is more than offset by what it gains in enigmatic resonance, musicality, and the delayed gratification provided to the reader by the eventual discovery of where these specially polished bits of the mosaic belong. In her astonishingly accomplished first novel, The Wilderness, Samantha Harvey has grounded this . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The Economist has a useful summary of Elaine Showalter's massive new overview of women authors in America, A Jury of Her Peers:
Ms Showalter does not attempt to unravel the intractable moral and legal conundrums raised by this unsettling parable, but she uses it as a metaphor to ask questions about literary judgment. Certainly, in the early 20th century, when literature was being defined as an academic subject, establishment male critics who wanted to make American literature “more energetic and masculine” actively attempted to exclude female writers from the canon. In the 1970s, when Ms . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Chad reviews a book whose premise is that Africa is as rich as the U.S., and the U.S. is as rich as Africa:
In the opening pages we’re introduced to Yacuba, a “flea-ridden Germanic or Alemanic carpenter” who has fled AIDS-ridden, poverty-stricken Europe in hopes of a better life in the much wealthier and cleaner United States of Africa. Through Yacuba we’re introduced to a world where Quebec is at war with the American Midwest, where the “white trash” of Europe speak an undecipherable “white pidgin dialect,” and where the African media fans the flames . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Wow. Peter Adolphsen’s Machine sounds pretty incredible. From Three Percent’s review:
Although Danish author Peter Adolphsen has made a name for himself as a formalist for whom economy is a virtue (to date his five novels and short story collections are less than 300 pages combined), “as a reader,” one reviewer writes, “you feel you have covered a huge distance with him.” Drawing comparisons to Borges and Kafka, Adolphsen has written parables and parodies, “ultrashort biographies,” children’s books, and a collection called En Million Historier (A Million Stories), which allows the reader to construct, well, a million . . . continue reading, and add your comments
We’ve just published my review of Yalo by Elias Khoury at The Quarterly Conversation.
Elias Khoury has been called Beirut’s answer to Joan Didion or Orhan Pamuk: the one contemporary author who has made that place his own. His novel Gate of the Sun is widely regarded as one of the major works of Arabic literature of the late 20th century.
Yalo, which is on the Best Translated Book Award shortlist, has been praised as a distillation of Gate of the Sun. It’s a quasi-first-person, highly unreliable account of the life of a man currently being . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation, by Martin Millar, has to be one of the stranger books that’s come out of the U.K. in a while. And I mean that in a good way. Powells.com:
Alby Starvation, the titular character of Martin Millar’s debut novel (originally published in 1987), is a speed dealer in Brixton who likes reggae and comic books. Sadly, but to the benefit of the reader, his physical and mental state are deteriorating at a rapid pace. He has no job. It appears as if he’s dying, with a face "that looks a hundred years . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Saw this review of The Vagrants, a first novel by a Yiyun Li, Chinese-American author who received much favorable attention for her first short story collection. The Guardian:
Yiyun Li’s 2005 story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers – which won four prizes, including the Guardian First Book award – was admired for taking a calm, Chekhovian look at a changing China and the lives of Chinese emigrants. It was also an impressive feat of cross-cultural adaptation, addressing Chinese experience in American English using mostly European literary models. Born in Beijing in 1972, Li moved . . . 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