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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Donation Week
Thanks to all who have chosen to chip a little money my way. I’m impressed with and abashed by your generosity, but it is truly, gratefully appreciated.
Stay tuned for December when I round up my favorite reads of the year. 2010 seems to have been a better year than most, and I think there will be some cool stuff for people to read.
And now a few more memories.
My post on the innovative “statistical” literary critic, Franco Morett
Perhaps the most popular (hit-wise) post of 2010: Nicole Krauss’s ridiculously overwrought blurb. Was quite surprised to see this pop up on Laura Miller’s Salon blog, plus even Ezra Klein’s Washington Post blog. Truly bizarre, and hilarious.
An Idea Every Independent Bookstore Should Steal
My thoughts on critic Gabriel Josipovici’s fine book Writing and the Body
My Javier Marias Road Map
The Box Man by Kobo Abe and the Question of the Unstable First-Person
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- The Last Samurai References and Annotations Thread: Week 1 I'll have some initial thoughts later in the week, but I thought I'd try something new that we didn't do with the Your Face Tomorrow...
- Your Face This Spring in One Week A reminder for everyone that we’ll be starting our epic, multi-month reading of Javier Marias’ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy in a little over a week,...
- The Summer of Genji . . . . . . is off to an awesome start. There's still plenty of time to join. (Heck, you could completely blow the first two weeks...
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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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Marketing the Bolano
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)
That’s Morretti, for the record. I like his little book on using maps and charts in literary criticism. Haven’t cracked either volume of his compendium on The Novel, however.