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.
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Two New Reviews
Couple of reviews of mine ran last week. The first was of the awesome book Malarky by Anakana Schofield, which can be found in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Anakana Schofield’s debut novel, “Malarky,” explores some of the most painful, emotionally difficult subjects imaginable. Yet the book does not feel heavy so much as honest: Schofield’s sharp wit is never far away (and constantly delightful), and her protagonist is a lovable, strangely charismatic character.
Set in an abstracted, overcast Ireland, the book centers on Our Woman. Her philandering husband has just died, and her son has run off to fight the American war in Iraq after embracing his homosexuality. In the very first scene, Our Woman is receiving therapy from a counselor named Grief. . . .
The other ran in The Washington Post and was of Patrick Flanery’s novel Absolution. This one wasn’t so good.
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More from Conversational Reading: - Malarky by Anakana Schofield Anakana Schofield’s Malarky, published by the highly consistent small press Biblioasis, is a fairly tragic story of an Irish woman who loses her son to...
- Stealing from Conversational Reading Something called the Ohio Irish American News has stolen large parts of my posting on Anakana Schofield’s novel Malarky. This is the post that the...
- War Poetry A very interesting post over at The Millions about a poet who spent several years in the army, including a tour in Iraq, and who...
- Negative Reviews, And the Virtues of Writing Short Reviews Mark Athitakis has a nice post-Kirkus posting. He discusses the publication’s much talked about policy of penning negative reviews: In short, it wasn’t a job...
- Electricity Quick! Hold a press conference! When I hear news like this, I’m oh so glad that I live in a country where the president 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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Enrique Vila-Matas Interview
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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