Latest Krasznahorkai Link
Right here, on Melancholy of Resistance. The story is somewhat complex, but not as crucial as it may seem, the... »
On the Purpose of Long Sentences
A great answer to the question of "why do you write long sentences?" The respondent is László Krasznahorkai, the author of... »
Oh Really?
Cynthia Ozick is an incredible writer and a smart critic, but she should really stop talking about Amazon reviews. She's... »
Mallarmé as Jesus
Without comment. As Meillassoux summarizes it, Un Coup de Dés centers on the aftermath of a shipwreck, which leaves a... »
Why Is Everyone Reviewing HHhH?
With the James Wood review in this week's New Yorker, it's official: everyone has reviewed HHhH by Lauren Binet. And, well, the... »
Are People Starting to Tire of the Franz?
The new book isn't getting very good reviews. And this review even started out with a meta-critique of Franzen the media... »
On the Importance of Not Making People Loathe Literature
Maybe this is why I've generally found Simon Critchley's philosophy quite rewarding, whereas many others in his genre are dull... »
Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
Here is the schedule for the summer read of A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava. The dates correspond to the first day of... »
See Attacks, Vicious
Douglas Messerli on Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard. In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we... »
Review of Varamo
The next installment in the great Aira invasion of the North American continent is upon us: Varamo. My review has just... »

J.C. Hallman: Bravo on both your comments here, Edward...I read through th
Patrick O'Donnell: Good point about Ozick, and agreed that Amazon is a major pl
Gs: In my previous comment, wherever I used 'aesthete' substitut
anthonycummins: The bits between quotes in the first sentence didn't come th
anthonycummins: On the novel's prose, I think the English translation invite
Edward Champion: Mainstream writer, Patrick? Ozick certainly has a literary
Gs: I told you this would all lead to canonical tyranny. This a

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus March 5, 2012
With his second novel, The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus has diverged from the path he trod while becoming one of America’s best-known experimental fiction writers. He’s written a plague fantasy told in first-person by a middle-aged, Jewish husband and father living in the suburbs. It is cold and coherent in its execution, with one narrator and a clear plot, an […]
War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann March 5, 2012
Bachmann famously described the entry of Hitler's troops into Klagenfurt as the end of her childhood. From these pages, though, it isn't clear what immediately followed. Here she seems to exist in a liminal zone between self-determination and powerlessness: she has worked out tactics of flight, but not full resistance or solidarity with others. Thi […]
Us by Michael Kimball March 5, 2012
Michael Kimball’s novella Us originally appeared in the U.K. under the title How Much of Us There Was. Tyrant Books has now brought it out in the United States, where Kimball was born and lives, and his website lists the widespread praise that the book has received. Here are but two of the many accolades: “disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as ac […]
The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb March 5, 2012
Since embracing economic reforms in the early 1990s, India has undergone swift and wrenching changes that are remaking the country from the ground up. As village and farmland give way to tech companies, call centers, factories, and malls, these new landscapes are increasingly peopled by new archetypal characters, much as the similarly radical transformation […]
The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky March 5, 2012
The first English-language publication of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction would not follow until 2006, three quarters of a century after its conception. His extensive repertory consists principally of short stories, of which there are more than one hundred, as well as five novels. The first of these novels selected for English translation (by Joanne Turnbull) and p […]
Zona by Geoff Dyer March 5, 2012
Now we have Zona, Dyer’s book-length explication of the film that he has been mulling over in print for more than a decade. Like the film’s journeying hero, who devises his route by randomly tossing bolt nuts and trudging after them, he’s taken his time getting to the point. But the end result is revealing; despite its critical trappings, Zona reads like a p […]
Remaking the Short Story: Four Untranslated Authors from Spain March 5, 2012
Authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story have had a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inv […]
Dogma by Lars Iyer March 5, 2012
A lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Iyer is the author of Spurious—which won The Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” last year—and, now, Dogma, a sequel to the previous work. Both books are novels in name only—bookstores require these convenient taxonomies. In reality Iyer has written scabrous philosophical comedies about two men […]
Mercè Rodoreda and the Style of Innocence March 5, 2012
The Autonomous Republic of Catalonia now holds up Mercè Rodoreda as a national treasure. Barcelona offers commemorative sculptures, libraries, gardens in her name; government-supported institutes sponsor conferences and translations; a yearlong festival marked her 2008 centennial. Her international champions include Gabriel García Márquez. Apart from two rec […]
The Clarice Lispector Roundtable March 5, 2012
Barbara Epler: The whole Lispector re-launching began innocently enough: our plan had been to bring out a new edition of The Hour of the Star in the old Pontiero translation with an ardent Colm Tóibín preface. (With a backlist of our size—about 1,100 titles from 75 years of publishing—we are always trying to repackage classic backlist to reach more readers.) […]

What I've Read

31. Crawl Space by Edie Meidav
32. Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
33. Artificial Happiness
34. The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald
35. How Would a Patriot Act? by Glenn Greenwald
36. Skin by Kellie Wells
37. Eternal Curse on the Reader of these Pages by Manuel Puig
38. Triangle by Katharine Weber
39. Night Falls Fast by Kay Redfield Jamison
40. Pubis Angelical by Manuel Puig
41. Mohr by Frederick Reuss
42. Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard
43. Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
44. Pan by Knut Hamsun
45. The Blue Guide to Indiana by Michael Martone
46. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami
47. The Company of Ghosts by Lydie Salvayre
48. Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino
49. The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann
50. The Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski by Joseph G. Kickasola
51. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
52. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
53. Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster
54. The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers
55. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
56. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
57. Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
58. Distant Star by Roberto Bolano
59. ManBug by George K. Ilsley
60. Firmin by Sam Savage
61. Sideshow by Sidney Thompson
62. Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi Wa’Thiong’O
63. Seven Loves by Valerie Trueblood
64. Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
65. The Immoralist by Andre Gide
66. Golem Song by Marc Estrin
67. Opening Mexico by Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon
68. Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones
69. On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald

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The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)

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 Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)

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.

Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)

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.

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)

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.

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)

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.