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.
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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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Faulkneresque
To paraphrase something that I have just read recently, few authors who walk under Faulkner's shadow ever actually climb back out of it, but here's one who might have pulled off the trick. From a review of Lark and Termite in The Guardian:
In the epigraph to her new novel, Jayne Anne Phillips acknowledges a debt to Faulkner's complex multi-voiced The Sound and the Fury. Phillips's decision to document the mental processes of the character Termite, who, like Faulkner's Benjy Compson, is unable to speak, as well as her non-chronological plot, which includes quasi-incestuous relationships and a suicide, suggest a species of homage. But Faulkner is dark and Gothic and his characters and all their works are doomed, whereas the triumph of virtue and innocence that concludes the adventures of the eponymous Lark and Termite has a very different effect. That said, this is not a cheerful book. . . .
The plot, unspooled through the musings of these characters, is complex, but since the novel is not in any important sense about the plot, it doesn't matter if you don't catch every frame. What comes through in a densely gathering cloud of images is the revelation that these characters are more than just related. Images in the mind of one reappear in the mind of another. They are emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and cosmically connected
More from Conversational Reading: - Greek Romances = Action Movies? I’ve been reading Bakhtin’s long essay on the chronotopic (that’s his word for time and space) in the novel. Basically, in this essay he’s laying...
- Chabon on McCarthy Be sure to read Chabon’s essay on The Road. Some very fine writing here. The Road is neither parable nor science fiction, however, and fundamentally...
- Hardboiled and Hard Luck The new book (or rather, pair of novellas) from Banana Yoshimoto gets the treatment from the Times Literary Supplement. As generally happens with the TLS,...
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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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Of Course, Calvino Was in Oulipo
Quarterly Conversation | Issue 32 | Summer 2013
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)
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