19. A Fictional Inquiry by Daniele Del Giudice (tr. Anne Milano Appel). This graceful novella about the narrator’s indefatigable search for Roberto Bazlen, a real-life Bartleby writer who refused to publish, becomes a quest for the absence that animates all literary work.
what is the charge? reading a book? a miserable Norwegian book with a pint?
now everyone saying to me ‘actually, you could be’ 😤
some guy has asked me to leave the pub because he believes I’m CIA 😞
I think the writing about the 19th century mines is sublime but overall a bit rambly. He sure loves an adverb prefixed with ‘un-‘.
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18. Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. More like Against the Night’s Sleep the way it made me wanna keep reading. Some of Pynchon’s best prose but doesn’t all hang together but wouldn’t edit anything out either so it is what it is in all its blazing brilliance.
Looking forward to speaking to Nina Allan at Argonaut about the new biography about J.G. Ballard written with her late husband, Christopher Priest on May 7th.
i similarly felt sad that i didn’t go to one of these when i saw this this morning. would’ve loved to have compared to the anarchist coops.
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17. Hidden World by Grant Maierhofer. An experimental college novel that zips across the whole UFO phenomenon, from the first accounts of asteroids to FBI coverups.
leo pointing meme
when Pynchon writes ‘against the day’ on page 903 of Against the Day
still from ‘On a Silver Globe’ where Mark monologues ‘I, an eunuch in the landscape of despair’
hate it when you end up as an eunuch in the landscape of despair
t-shirt says ‘I’D RATHER BE READING BEN LERNER’
publishers have really been producing some unhinged merch recently
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16. Cynics by Anatoly Marienhof (tr. Bryan Karetnyk). A tragicomic love story against the backdrop of post-revolutionary Russia as well as a lacerating satire on those tumultuous early years of the USSR.
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15. My Death by Lisa Tuttle. An ancestor to the now quite played out ‘biographer becomes too obsessed with their subject’ genre but executed much more succinctly and evocatively than the flabbier successors, as well as added bonus of being set between Edinburgh and Argyll.
was this me talking about his TS Eliot obsession? i wonder if his beatnik proclivity was unlocked by reading his pal Richard Farina’s book which also has an Odyssean vibe. still need to read it!
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14. The Secret Crypt by Salvador Elizondo (tr. Joshua Pollock). An occult metafictional labyrinth that is in flight from the nothingness it fears it rests upon. Reads like Cortázar rewriting Lautreamont’s Maldoror in the best way.
13. Pedro the Vast by Simón López Trujilo (tr. Robin Myers). The mycelial Messiah complex novel I didn’t know we needed, just wish it had been vaster.
12. Ch4sing 4lien5 by D4ni3l L4vel13. At times an entertaining tour of the cranks of contemporary UFOlogy but otherwise this only ever really hovers over the surface of the phenomenon, not alive to what attracts people to it and the metaphysical implications.
they are indeed but that may change soon
sorry to brag! would be keen to talk about it, it’s really quite out there
no, thank you! got a lot out of it and looking forward to selling it very soon.
11. Air by Christian Kracht (tr. Daniel Bowles). A peculiar parable of the present about a graphic designer in Orkney who falls into some alternate, Ursula Le Guin-esque fantasy dimension. Still trying to wrap my head around it.
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10. Trilogy by Ágota Kristof (tr. Alan Sheridan, David Watson & Marc Romano). A simply stunning masterpiece of mitteleuropean literature, metabolising the trauma of Hungary’s experience of WWII.
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9. Like a Cat Loves a Bird by @drjamesbailey.bsky.social. A vivid and variegated portrait of Muriel’s many lives which is as elusive as her numinous fictions.
it’s certainly baggier but justified by its themes and always saved by DeLillo’s gnomic prose
just lacks something compared to other books of similar ambition that i can’t quite put my finger on.
thanks for reading! i enjoyed your piece too. maybe that hollowness rings true, as it were, but just wished for more from the prose. for me the only moment of transcendence is when he rhapsodises about the crucifixion, imagining it being his mother then the book itself.
8. The End of Everything by M. John Harrison. The end of the world is already here but never before has it felt so visceral. A sui generis masterpiece.
