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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Garcia Marquez’s Dementia
Jacob Silverman has written a very nice personal essay on the recent sad news that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is has fallen prey to dementia.
Indeed, dementia contains a built-in irony—though irony seems too pale a term—in that it progresses slowly but perceptibly enough so that the patient has some awareness of what’s taking place. The sense of slippage, of losing control, is palpable—that is, before the rug is pulled out from under him entirely and he no longer understands the cause of his confusion (and no longer understands or recognizes much else).
For García Márquez, who has described himself as a “professional of the memory,” that awareness must be especially piquant, both because his work is so predicated on notions of memory, history, and ancestry, and because neurological conditions run in his family. He knew this might happen . . .
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More from Conversational Reading: - The Real Inventor of Magical Realism From the NYRB's review of the current Garcia Marquez bio: García Márquez popularized the style, but he was not its inventor, and One Hundred Years...
- Gabo’s New Novel The Guardian has more info on what’s likely to be a new novel from Gabriel Garcia Marquez: García Márquez’s next book will be a love...
- 99 Essential African Books That's what you'll find in my interview with Geoff Wisner at The Quarterly Conversation. He's the author of A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books that...
- The New Yorker's Shit Barrier Apparently we have Gabriel Garcia Marquez (and his translator) to thank for bringing shit to The New Yorker. ...
- Dominating Figures Via the Literary Saloon, I read: Several of the authors have spent a considerable amount of time in New York and Lago, who has been...
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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)
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