With the year drawing to a close, we wanted to spotlight a (somewhat arbitrary) number of books due out next year that we’re excited about. It includes the latest books from writers whose work we’ve long enjoyed to debuts to forthcoming tomes that are utterly unexpected. There’s more to come in this vein–in about ten days, we’ll be publishing our January book preview, which will include a lot more books we’re excited about for the first month of the year. […]
Morning Bites: Revisiting Harry Mathews, Scaachi Koul, Kelby Losack Interviewed, and More
In our morning reading: revisiting Harry Mathews’s fiction, interviews with Scaachi Koul and Kelby Losack, and more.
Morning Bites: Ottessa Moshfegh Interviewed, Harry Mathews Remembered, Min Jin Lee, Steve Himmer’s Playlist, and More
In our morning reading: interviews with Ottessa Moshfegh, Chris Gethard, and Min Jin Lee; talking books about the 1980s; and more.
Remembering Harry Mathews
I saw Harry Mathews read once a couple of years ago. It was an event at 192 Books in which he read along with Marie Chaix, his wife and an equally formidable literary figure. It felt like a rare event, two thoroughly singular writers in one space, in a city in which they rarely visited. I bought a copy of the essay collection The Case of the Persevering Maltese and asked Mathews to sign it and, I think, said something […]
Afternoon Bites: Greil Marcus’s Latest, Dorothe Nors, Revisiting Harry Mathews, Eileen Myles, and More
In our afternoon reading: thoughts on Greil Marcus’s new book, new music from John Darnielle and Christopher R. Weingarten, a Dorothe Nors essay, and more.
#tobyreads: Obsessions, Fixations, and Secret Crimes
Continuing in my read-through of Harry Mathews’s body of work, I recently delved into his novel The Conversions. It begins in a recognizable fashion: the narrator is invited to the home of a wealthy man, where he takes part in a competition; winning it, he’s given a mysterious adze. As the novel continues, the narrator must delve into the adze’s history in order to answer three fairly surreal questions. And while this might seem like the framework for an adventure story, […]
The Impossible, The Parallel, The Intimate: A Conversation with Eugene Lim
Eugene Lim’s novels tread the line between the hypnotically familiar and the surreptitiously terrifying. His latest novel, The Strangers, follows multiple sets of twins through landscapes alternately recognizable and surreal. Underground film scenes, stand-up comedy, shipborne communities, and totalitarian states all appear, and yet the entire work remains even-tempered and cohesive. As the publisher of Ellipsis Press, Lim has ushered books from the likes of Norman Lock and Eugene Marten into the world. As an admirer of both The Strangers and his earlier […]
Weekend Bites: Harry Mathews, New Noveller, Roxane Gay on “River,” Calvino Opera, and More
Wishing John Le Carré a happy birthday; getting operatic with Italo Calvino; Blake Butler on Harry Mathews; Roxane Gay on Michael Farris Smith; and more.