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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.

Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from this site:


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

Shop though these links = Support this site


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.


  • The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov March 6, 2013
    Pevear and Volokhonsky’s ambition in bringing Leskov and all his stylistic peculiarities into English is impressive, and all the more so for how it contrasts with their previous role as translators of Russian. The pair are justly famous for their renditions of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists; their editions of Anna Karenina and Crime and Punis […]
  • Middle C by William H. Gass March 3, 2013
    What distinguishes Middle C from his other fiction, then, is not the that Gass’ protagonist, Joseph Skizzen, spends nearly a lifetime deflecting the dangers and horrors of life itself, but the ways in which the novel’s narrative voice buffers him from the responsibilities of being a protagonist at all. In this, the tale of his life, stretching from the Blitz […]
  • The Field Is Lethal by Suzanne Doppelt March 3, 2013
    This is a strange, engaging book that does not offer up its material to the reader without a struggle. Much of its strength comes from its juxtapositions, not only of idea with idea, word with word, phrase with phrase, but also text with image, image or text with white space, and in a larger sense, the abstract with the concrete. Doppelt is interested in how […]
  • 70% Acrylic 30% Wool by Viola di Grado March 3, 2013
    You can tell that Viola di Grado has a unique voice from the first line of her novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool: “One day it was still December.” If this line seems a little puzzling, the next one puts things in (ironic) perspective: “Especially in Leeds, where winter has been underway for such a long time that nobody is old enough to have seen what came before.” […]
  • Promising Young Women by Suzanne Scalon March 3, 2013
    Plath’s ghost haunts the pages of Scanlon’s book, a non-linear narrative that hinges around Lizzie, a bright liberal arts student from Barnard and aspiring actress who has much in common with Plath’s protagonist. We’ve fast-forwarded forty years to New York in the early 90’s’; like Esther before her, Lizzie has come from the provinces to make a name for hers […]
  • The Available World by Ander Monson March 3, 2013
    What happens to all the old, new things after two or three new, new things replace them? And what of the ideas and memories of which they are ultimately extensions and souvenirs? This is one of the larger questions, really, that Ander Monson poses in his most recent collection of poems, The Available World, though he does so in varying shades of subtly and e […]
  • The Whispering Muse by Sjón March 3, 2013
    There is something immediately seductive about Sjón’s The Whispering Muse. The narrator, a peculiar old Icelander named Valdimar Haraldsson, receives a letter from an old acquaintance, inviting him on a sea voyage aboard the newly launched merchant ship, the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen. Haraldsson, who has long been cooped up in his shabby Copenhagen apartment, r […]
  • Wolf and Pilot by Farrah Field March 3, 2013
    When Farah Field announced the opening of Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop (Field and Jared White’s pop-up shop the only all-poetry bookshop in New York City) two Februarys ago on her blog Adultish, she wrote this: It is kind of an anti-capitalistic act because no one could ever pay what poetry is worth. This sentiment is exactly true ofher new book, Wolf and Pil […]
  • The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht March 3, 2013
    Unless he is John Keats, a poet’s letters seldom stand alone as literature. They might hold our attention as gossip (Lord Byron), psychiatric case study (Robert Lowell) or the after-hours thoughts of a combative poet-critic (Yvor Winters), but few could be pleasurably read without the additional scaffolding provided by the poetry. Even Marianne Moore, one of […]
  • Kind One by Laird Hunt March 3, 2013
    Readers who go into Laird Hunt's Kind One looking for kindly characters are presented with an array of unlikely candidates. It simply cannot be Linus Lancaster, a farmer with delusions of grandeur (his farm is named Paradise) who beats his wife Ginny, rapes his young female slaves Cleome and Zinnia, and whips Alcofibras, the slave who tends his garden, […]

Stoner Killing It in the Netherlands

Yes, it is as close to perfect as a novel can be. And yes, you should read it today. Do as the Dutch do.

“Why isn’t this book more famous?” asked the writer C.P. Snow about John Williams’s Stoner in 1973, eight years after it was first published by Viking Press. A straightforward yet brilliant novel about an ordinary Missouri English professor, it seems almost fitting that for nearly 40 years, Stoner was quietly revered by its fans without being widely read. But by 2013, approaching its 50th anniversary, the novel is seeing a somewhat surprising . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Why We Read Bioy

“The last drops of arsenic (arsenicum album) dissolve in my mouth, insipidly, comfortingly.”

From this very first line of Where There’s Love, There’s Hate, we are inescapably in Bioy’s universe. It has all the hallmarks of his off-kilter, proper-but-also-slightly-looney voice. There’s a little masculine bravado about it, yet also delicacy, vulnerability. It’s the kind of pointless, red-herring detail he loves to toss at a reader for seemingly no other reason than pique, yet that also gives his universe its particular feel.

The sentence hinges around that word, arsenic. It’s eye-catching, immediately raises twenty questions, has a hint . . . continue reading, and add your comments

So Then Why Do People Still Read Hemingway?

No doubt Brian Gresko didn’t like James Salter’s All That Is, but I don’t find this a satisfying explanation of why he didn’t like it:

I don’t mean to come across as cavalier, because I am a great fan of the Modernists, but when distilled to topic (men who love parties, art, women, and Europe, and are haunted or wounded by war) and attitude, Modernism could be just as limiting as any genre, and the ways in which Salter’s new novel conforms to its conventions is both a strength and a weakness. Because no matter how . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Wm & H’ry

Fans of either ye olde James brothers or creative criticism, or both, will want to have a look at Wm & H’ry by J.C. Hallman. The book deconstructs the brothers’ correspondence, a rather enormous collection of verbiage, and puts it back together into something idiosyncratic, intriguing, and fleet.

Reviewed at ForeWord:

Brothers William and Henry James are rightfully famous within their respective fields of philosophy/psychology and literature. But their influence on each other is seldom discussed, a failure remedied in J. C. Hallman’s Wm & H’ry, an outstanding overview of the voluminous correspondence . . . continue reading, and add your comments

New Castellanos Moya Novel

Horacio Castellanos Moya, probably best known in English for Senselessness (review), has published a new novel: El sueno del retorno.

Here’s the publisher’s page. Sounds like it has some potential:

En 1991, Erasmo Aragón vive en México, donde trabaja como periodista, y está a punto de regresar a San Salvador para emprender una nueva vida y participar en la fundación de una revista. Antes de partir, acude desesperado a la consulta del doctor Chente con la esperanza de que pueda aliviarle unos terribles dolores estomacales. El doctor lo somete a varias sesiones de hipnosis . . . continue reading, and add your comments

It Was a Pretty Good First Novel

Anakana Schofield, voice of tomorrow, picks up the First Novel Award for Malarky. I was down with this one before it was cool.

Irish-Canadian writer and literary critic Anakana Schofield was named winner Wednesday of the 37th annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award for her debut novel Malarky, the story of an Irish mother coping with grief, betrayal and desire.

Good group of people to be a part of.

The First Novel Award recognizes and rewards outstanding achievement by first-time Canadian novelists. Recent winners include David Bezmozgis (The Free World, 2011), Eleanor Catton (The Rehearsal, 2010) . . . continue reading, and add your comments

On the Kafkaesque

William Giraldi at The New Republic:

The gears of the Kafka industry will turn into perpetuity because the sources of his self-punishing perspective are obscured within his mellifluously baffling work.3 This is also precisely the reason “Kafkaesque” refuses definition: because Kafka himself contains too many meanings—the Talmudic-Catholic admix, the self-sabotaging disgust for women and sex, the father who haunts from far and near, our vassalage to a mechanical and mysterious bureaucracy, man’s spiritual isolation under an empty firmament, the criminally overlooked comic irony, the parabolic reaching for an elusive truth, the maddening impulse to shame and guilt, . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Music and Literature Issue 2

In case previously untranslated writing from Laszlo Krasznahorkai, paintings by Max Neumann, George Szirtes on translating Krasznahorkai, essays galore on the author, Chejfec on Bela Tarr, and a 10,000-word interview/preview with Seiobo translator Ottilie Mulzet was not enough to convince you to grab the second issue of Music & Literature, maybe the endorsement of The Paris Review will.

I had previously read Jonathan Rosenbaum’s excellent essay on Sátántangó (both László Krasznahorkai’s novel and Béla Tarr’s radical film adaptation) online, so I was excited to finally get my hands on Music & Literature’s second issue—and it doesn’t . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The 2666 Film

I’m a little afraid this might one day come to pass.

Although there are discrete crevasses of the Bolaño canon—“The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura” is one—more obviously disposed to cinema, there is no reason in the age of Spielberg and the Wachowskis to privilege “a kid’s silly celluloid fantasies” over raw baroque grandeur. In fact, the blockbuster potential of 2666 should be obvious to any reader who has braved its something-like-900-page-length. It is manifestly what György Lukács, creator of the Star Wars franchise, called “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Keeping the Novel Alive

Tell that to Philip Roth.

Joking aside, I’m surprised this point isn’t made more often, particularly when someone who has made a very successful career off of writing novels tells us that they’re dying. The form doesn’t exist separate from the actual human creatures who keep making them every generation. Whether or not novels have more cultural currency now than they did 20 years ago (debatable), they continue to live insofar as people who can make them do.

One thing he’s clearly not paranoid about is the state of literature. Despite a steady stream of laments about . . . continue reading, and add your comments