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Shop at Amazon though these links and this site gets a kickback.
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Infinite Bolano
Per the LA Times, fresh off of last year's Infinite Summer, another online reading group has spring up for Roberto Bolano's huge novel 2666 .
There's a proposed schedule that's a fairly lax 50 pages per week, which anyone should be able to fit into even the busiest schedule.
And since we're talking about reading groups involving Roberto Bolano, this seems like the correct time to mention that I'll be facilitating the first of what promises to be many fine discussions of international lit at The Booksmith's Found in Translation reading group. Our first book is The Skating Rink and those who purchase their copy at The Booksmith get 15% off. So if you're in the area, grab a copy, read it before January 26, and join us at The Booksmith at 7:00 pm for some Bolano.
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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. |
William Deresiewicz’s Your Face Tomorrow Pan
The Undiscovered Country: New Book of Sebald Criticism
Translate Zama!
The Quarterly Conversation Issue 21
More Essays by Milan
Speaking of Distraction
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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