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A Note on Links
I think I might have confused some readers, as I've started placing links to articles mentioned in my posts at the bottom of... »
More Essays by Milan
Encounter, reviewed in the SF Chronicle by Philip Lopate: A tentative answer would be: extremely good, when he makes the... »
Bernhard’s Prose
I have a review of Prose by Thomas Bernhard at The National. Hard to believe this is the first English publication of... »
A Good Book Trailer
That's Art of McSweeney's.... »
Speaking of Distraction
Guess this distracted reading thing isn't all that new: In Marxism and Form (1971), Jameson was already on to the idea that... »
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
Last weekend I read Nicholas Carr's book on how the Internet is rotting your brain, The Shallows. The book is at times very... »
Another Review of The Novel: An Alternative History
Scott Bryan Wilson in Rain Taxi on The Novel: An Alternative History. This gives new meaning to in-depth: You might expect a... »
The Orange Eats Creeps
Publishing tomorrow: The Orange Eats Creeps, w/intro by Steve Erickson. Here's a quote from a short review. Krilanovich is... »
The Unconsoled and the Annihilation of Plot
I do not side with James Wood, who once wrote that Kazuo Ishiguro's 1995 novel The Unconsoled "invented its own category of... »
Bookstore/Lending Library
I have no idea if this is a workable business model, but David Kipen has opened a bookstore/lending library in Los... »

If you canâ€™t sell books, sell teddy bears September 3, 2010
Or that seems to be Borders’ solution to its constant financial problems, at least for the time being until the next quarter with lower than expected sales.Â Really, the problem with Borders is that it lost its identity about eight or so years ago when it decided to become a shadow of Barnes & Noble.Â Â [...] […]
Soo Jin Oh
Reflections on Rockwell September 3, 2010
In recent years, fans of Norman Rockwell, with the assistance of some art historians, have attempted to lift him into the canon of high art. As a fan of midcentury American illustration, I don’t really care how he is assessed on that scale: like the recurring fantasy that underlies so much of our politics of [...] […]
Levi Stahl
A Taste of Cherry in a Heat Wave September 3, 2010
I’ve been thinking a lot about heat waves. The thick summer weather has felt like a wall of fire that must be bravely pushed through to order to exit from an air conditioned office building and makeÂ my way to the corner to board a bus crowded with sweaty citizens. So perhaps it’s no surprise that [...] […]
Carrie Olivia Adams
The Ballad of David Markson September 3, 2010
"Whatâ€™s not so up for dispute is that Markson accomplished what, by all rights, should be a literary impossibility." (Colin Marshall for The Millions) […]
Jeff Waxman
Gass-X September 3, 2010
"Ich liebe dich. No sentence pronounced by a judge could be more threatening. It means that you are about to receive a gift you may not want." Via Dylan Suher, Greg Gerke's sort-of review of William H. Gass's Reading Rilke in BIG OTHER. […]
Jeff Waxman

In Homerâ€™s Head: Ransom by David Malouf
In Ransom, Malouf satisfyingly gives us a meeting between Priam and Achilles that builds from the interiority of Priam. The novel seems to want to teach the importance of doing something human to those who might never get around to picking up Homer or who, if they do, might wish they could get into the character's heads. […]
How Jeanette Winterson Makes Fiction
Winterson has always told and retold the same fictions: of parents and children; of origins, and adoptions; of differences, of margins; of love; of passion; she has always manipulated rhythm and language as an excavation of sources. Much of her fiction mirrors what we know of Winterson's own story, but she agitates against the idea that her work has to […]
Inveterate and Unrepentant Book Collecting: A Guide to My Favorite Contact Sport
It's difficult to pin down exactly why books as objects mean so much to me. I wasn't alive when William Goyen's excellent Come, The Restorer was published, but owning an original printing with the dust jacket—as it would have been purchased at the time of its release—makes the book more special to me than some beat-up paperback rei […]
The Master of the Not Quite: The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood
Wood can be harsh, yes, but he is seldom unfair. Wyatt Mason was wrong to accuse him of having suggested, by dint of a string of negative reviews, that no good contemporary literature exists. (He has written favorably of McEwan, Bolaño, Robinson, Ozick, Kirsch, Sebald, Roth, Saramago, Swift, Carey.) He never simply dismisses a writer (in the manor of, s […]

Cesar Aira At Feria Internacional del Libro de Guayaquil

Cesar Aira At Feria Internacional del Libro de Guayaquil

Nice write-up on Cesar Aira, who was speaking at the Book Fair in Guayaquil, Peru.

The piece opens with a typically modest statement from the Argentine author:

“Mientras más grueso es un libro, menos literatura tiene”. La frase fue una de las sentencias del escritor argentino César Aira (1949), durante un conversatorio desarrollado el pasado sábado en el marco de la Feria Internacional del Libro, en Guayaquil. Y el dictamen fue duro, cuestionable para muchos, pero ceñido a las convicciones del narrador no tan popular como otros de su nacionalidad, pero que en una de sus obras, Carlos Fuentes lo imagina como el primer premio Nobel de Literatura Argentina.

That is, the bigger the book, the less literature it contains (Aira's works being uniformly short). And as to the odd Fuentes reference at the bottom of that paragraph:

Sobre la referencia que Fuentes hizo en su novela, Aira comentó que se trataba de una réplica a un texto de su autoría titulado El congreso de su literatura, donde un científico decide hacer clones del autor mexicano a fin de dominar el mundo usando a un poderoso ejército de intelectuales, pero todo sale mal.

And I wonder yet again why Aira isn't bigger in the States.

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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.

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