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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. The End of Oulipo

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series, Lady Chatterley's Brothercalled “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 Life Perecread" 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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Group Reads

The Tunnel

Fall Read: The Tunnel by William H. Gass

A group read of the book that either "engenders awe and despair" or "[goads] the reader with obscenity and bigotry," or both. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Naked Singularity

Summer Read: A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava

Fans of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo: A group read of the book that went from Xlibris to the University of Chicago Press. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Life Perec

Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec

Starting March 2011, read the greatest novel from an experimental master. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Last Samurai

Fall Read: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

A group read of one of the '00s most-lauded postmodern novels. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Tale of Genji

The Summer of Genji

Two great online lit magazines team up to read a mammoth court drama, the world's first novel.

Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face This Spring

A 3-month read of Javier Marias' mammoth book Your Face Tomorrow

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Ten Memorable Quotes from William Gaddis’ Letters

New Books
Here are ten of my favorite moments from these hugely interesting letters.


Interviews from Conversational Reading

New Books
See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.


  • All That Is by James Salter June 10, 2013
    Salter has been described as a master of sentences, but what might be more accurate is his mastery of word choice and metaphor. His sentences aren’t the sinuous architectural behemoths of James or William H. Gass. Many are terse, quick jabs: “The kiss was light and ardent,” or, describing a writer’s opulent house, “It was like a small family hotel, a hotel i […]
  • Birds of the Air by David Yezzi June 10, 2013
    Yezzi’s poems often hint at oblique narratives. Like a detective, he asks a lot of questions. He’s like a mathematician working an inverse problem, deducing inner dramas from externals. His spirit, however, is sympathetic, not forensic. A friend used to say when someone started complaining about another’s failing, “Be gentle. He’s just a human.” Yezzi’s poem […]
  • The Films of Sangsoo Hong June 10, 2013
    Say you watch Korean movies. Often, outside the peninsula itself, this means you’ve gotten into the murderous grotesquerie of Chan-wook Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” or Joon-ho Bong’s simultaneously goofy and solemn political allegory of a monster mash The Host, or any amount of Ki-duk Kim’s vast, high-profile (and as some fans admit, uneven) output. But menti […]
  • The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim June 10, 2013
    The Iraqi Christ is topical only in the sense of the earliest known newsflashes: the cracked screeds, battlefield reports, and shipwreck stories by the likes of Archilochus, for instance, which remain with us in the form of fragments. These were news before they were ever classical references—indigestible gobbets of event, borne on and on by the flow of tell […]
  • Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin June 10, 2013
    Leonard Tsypkin's short and frenetic Summer in Baden-Baden is a meditation on the morphic and self-defining nature of memory. Tsypkin portrays the sometimes charming but mostly distressing European travels of Fyodor (Fedya) Dostoyevsky and his second wife, Anna Grigor’yevna, and their descent into a woeful situation brought about by the famous author’s […]
  • Silent House by Orhan Pamuk June 10, 2013
    Faulkner’s literary spirit haunts the dusty, cobweb-covered rooms in Pamuk’s eponymous silent house. When the wind blows through the chinks in the masonry, we can even hear the skeletons of the Bundrens', Compsons', Snopes', and Sartoris’ Turkish cousins rattling in the Darvinoğlu’s closets in their decrepit ancestral villa. Cennethisar, once […]
  • A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal June 10, 2013
    “Tulsa is heaven, Tulsa is Italy,” says Chandler on Friends to a boss who has just assigned him to their office there. “Please don’t make me go there.” Lytal, an Oklahoman talking to New Yorkers like a person in Prague persuading tourists to pay top dollar for cheap pilsner, does little to elaborate upon this vision of his native city. Jim recalls “[t]he day […]
  • Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro June 10, 2013
    Mario Santiago Papasquiaro was no stranger to this kind of manifesto, and his announced the coming of the Infrarealists. “The way in to matter,” they proclaim, “is ultimately the way in to adventure: the poem is a journey and the poet is a hero revealing heroes.” And so, in Papasquiaro’s long poem, “Advice From 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic,” we […]
  • A Brief History of Yes by Micheline Aharonian Marcom June 10, 2013
    Marcom’s new novel, A Brief History of Yes, is less overtly transgressive than its predecessor—less centered on sex than on solitude; on the loneliness left after love is over. Previously, Marcom scaled the peak of what two people can do together, whereas now she digs into what drives them apart. So if Mirror expressed ecstasy, Yes explores ecstasy’s ebbing. […]
  • What Comes Next June 10, 2013
    If you were to ask me what comes next, the best answer is that I do not know. But if I try to reason through the question, I tend to divide the problem into parts. On the one hand, one of these parts, the personal facet, is what’s to come after my present literature. Or, rather, what will I be writing, what will the next books be like, or even more important […]

Leslie Fiedler–I Admit I Was Missing Out

I've read the first few essays in Love and Death in the American Novel, and now I will wholly endorse the notion that I should have got on the Fiedler wagon earlier. The breadth of knowledge (far beyond literature) and synthesis thereof is simply incredible . . . talk about someone who sounds like he's read everything and knows just how to put it into a cohesive framework. This is the kind of oracular voice that I think we all wish James Wood (who, admittedly, seems to have read everything) was.

Or, to put this all another way, I seem to be underlining an unprecedentedly high amount of my copy of Fiedler. Seriously; the footnotes in this book sound a lot more interesting and promising than a lot of abstracts I've read.

Usual caveats about a great text's resistance to quoting aside, I've got to pass along this:

The American writer inhabits a country at once the dream of Europe and a fact of history . . .

And then at greater length:

A recurrent problem of our [American] fiction has been the need of our novelists to find a mode of projecting their conflicts which would contain all the dusky horror of gothic romance and yet be palatable to discriminating readers, palatable first of all to themselves.

Such a mode can, of course, not be subsumed among any of those called "realism." Our fiction is essentially and at its best non-realistic, even anti-realistic; long before symbolisme had been invented in France and exported to America, there was a full-fledged native tradition of symbolism. That tradition was born of the profound contradictions of our national lise and sustained by the inheritance from Puritanism of a "typical" (even allegorical) way of regarding the sensible world–not as an ultimate reality but as a system of signs to be deciphered . . .

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More from Conversational Reading:

  1. Leslie Fielder Apropos my mention of the publication of a book of criticism by Leslie Fielder last Friday, Scott McLemee forwarded me a couple articles of his...
  2. James Wood Redux I’m always happy to see a new James Wood essay, except when I’ve already seen it. Reading his piece in Prospect, Realism Rules (still), I...
  3. Literary Realism Wow. James Woods quotes actual blog-related people in his new article "The Blue River of Truth" up at The New Republic. Here are two recent...
  4. What We’re Missing Words Without Borders has an interesting follow-up to that recent Guardian story that asked prominent Arab writers to tell us what Arabic book they’d most...
  5. First-Person From Dan Green’s review of Skunk: A Love Story: One of the reasons I liked this book is precisely its skillful use of first-person narration....

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3 comments to Leslie Fiedler–I Admit I Was Missing Out

  • Scott

    Scott–it’s FieDler, not FieLder.

  • Tom

    Scott — are you familiar with Lionel Trilling? He’s another great mid-century critic whose work achieves a kind of synthesis of literary, cultural and sociological criticism. Plus, he’s a nice stylist. Here’s a quotation from his book Beyond Culture that I’ve always loved (and which seems more and more relevant each generation):
    “The function of literature , through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.”

  • Wasn’t familiar either until I read their writing about Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym in graduate school.

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