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.
|
Shop though these links = Support this site
|
Misreading
Dan Green with a great post on critic Harold Bloom’s idea of how literature is created:
"Misreading" (or "misprision," as Bloom would have it) is the motivating force, the ultimate inspiration, behind all poetry (which in Bloom’s critical universe, is synonymous with "literature" and is not to be attributed solely to self-identified poets). In the effort to emulate and finally surpass "anterior" texts, poems that fire the poet’s passion for poetry in the first place, strong poets "misread" these texts in a psychoanalytically defensive gesture that allows the "something new" of literary creation to occur. Milton misreads Shakespeare, Blake misreads Milton, etc. Weak poets merely imitate their predecessors, fail to engage with the deeper and more unwieldy impulses that ultimately account for great poetry.
You Might Also Like:
More from Conversational Reading: - 30 Footnotes It’s almost a requirement that some of the reviews of DFW’s new book are going to try and imitate his style. Most of them will...
- Slate Best Of Huh. Slate asks a bunch of their editors, critics, and columnists to name their best reads of the year, and the one book that sounds...
- New Greenblatt Bard Bio The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article (sub req) about Steven Greenblatt’s new biography of William Shakespeare, Will in the World. In the book,...
- Bard etc Salon.com’s Laura Miller has a review (reg req) of Greenblatt’s new Bard bio. The big talk about this book has been regarding Greenblatt’s technique for...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Leave a Reply
|
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.
|
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)
Dee’s article is an example of the kind of real criticism that puts Batuman’s n + 1 article about the death of the short story to shame. It gives some context, both for Eisenberg and her latest work, Twilight of the Superheroes; develops a nuanced position on Twilight; and supports that position with extensive evidence. It naturally won’t get as much attention as the asinine n + 1 article–or, for that matter, the NYT top 25 novels crap–because it doesn’t offer any sweeping statements or inflammatory pronouncements. But, I guess, we should at least be thankful that something like this is published in a major “culture” magazine. Kudos to Harper’s.
I haven’t read any Eisenberg, but Dee makes me want to. She seems to share a lot of qualities with Stephen Dixon: “One of the great pleasures of Eisenberg’s work is the violence it does to the old chestnut that a short story’s artfulness is best measured by how much is left out; on the contrary, what impresses about her stories is all that she dares to throw into them. They are as unafraid of digression as most novels, which makes them seem–relative to other stories especially–orgainic, spontaneous, unconstructed: in a word, lifelike.” Dixon’s been throwing all kinds of likelikeness into his stories for the past 30 or so years. Eisenberg seems to be a less colloquial writer than Dixon, but I wonder how close the two are in their approach. Guess I’ll have to read Eisenberg!