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.
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New Review @ TQC
The latest review at The Quarterly Conversation is of Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist , an author of which Thomas Mann once said “Kleist’s narrative language is something completely unique.”
Check it out:
Happy endings are in short supply in the Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist—a collection of tales that surprisingly calls to mind Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. The featured characters in von Kleist’s stories tend to be imperiled by those very qualities that human beings treasure most: unflinching love, generosity, loyalty, and a sense of justice. At the end of the day, the protagonists populating these narratives have little left except moral victories. It is a foregone conclusion that things will end badly for them.
The doom and gloom engulfing these characters shouldn’t come as a shock. Writers write what they know, and von Kleist certainly knew a thing or two about disappointment . . .
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- New Review @ TQC: Shadowplay by Norman Lock Just in time for Thanksgiving, read our review of Shadowplay by Norman Lock, from the estimable Ellipsis Press: With his short novel Shadowplay, Norman Lock...
- Newest Review At TQC: Notes On Susan Sontag By Phillip Lopate Monica McFawn reviews an interesting addition to the collection of Sontag scholarship: Lopate is a writer of personal essays, and Notes on Sontag is, among...
- Laird Hunt Review at TQC I’m sure a lot of people are still digesting Issue 17, but we’re now publishing new in-between-issue reviews at The Quarterly Conversation. First up is...
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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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So Much for the Granta
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)
I’ve been on the lookout for something like this for a few weeks now. I’ll absolutely have to check him out. Sometimes you need a good doom & gloom read that isn’t Russian and 700 pages thick.
MN
reminds me of the Danish writer Martin Hansen, who wrote ‘The Island’