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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NYT Top Ten
The Times has whittled their 100 notable books to the top 10 of 2006 (5 fiction, 5 non). Of the 5, there’s one reviewed in TQC–Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, which earned a rave from Brien Michael.
Admittedly, picking the top 5 fiction titles of the year is something of a crapshoot, so I can’t really complain about Absurdistan, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, The Empror’s Children, or The Lay of the Land. However, how Special Topics in Calamity Physics got there, I’ll never know . . . I’ve read a number of reviews of this book, and I’m still waiting for someone to make the case that it’s worth my time, let alone worthy of being one fo the top 5 fiction releases of 2006.
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- Cloud Atlas Done, Underworld back on top Well, I’ve finished with Cloud Atlas, and now I’m turning back to finish the last 200 pages or so of Underworld. I have a few...
- How Would A Patriot Act? Hits NYT Bestseller List Glenn Greenwald’s How Would A Patriot Act? is going to debut at #11 on the New York Times Bestseller List on June 11. This...
- Voice Top 25 The Village Voice Top 25 is online. On the whole I like the list a lot. I think it’s the best end-of year list I’ve...
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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)
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