In the introduction to her collection of novellas Wangran ji (Collection of What Have Never Been There, 1983), Eileen Chang (1920-95) cites a couplet from the poem “Jin se” (Majestic Zither) by the Tang poet Li Shangyin (813-58): . . . . . . .

A series in which I retell from memory the plot of some film, novel, or other narrative sequence. ---------- These were my favorite books when I was young. I don't exactly remember how young, but somewhere between 8 and 12, I suspect. Along with Tolkien, they set me off on a lifelong love of Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy literature, one that probably culminated in the period of time I spent playing EverQuest. I remember them fondly.

A series in which I retell from memory the plot of some film, novel, or other narrative sequence. ---------- (Last week's part 1). As I said, the rabbits have adventures. They are fleeing, and searching for a new warren. At a certain point they find shelter in a warren populated by sleek, healthy rabbits. These rabbits behave profoundly unnaturally.

A series in which I retell from memory the plot of some film, novel, or other narrative sequence. ---------- I read this novel seven or eight times between the ages of 11 and 14. In my memory now it is condensed to two or three scenes, only one of which I ever think of regularly, and which has become a weirdly recurring part of my intellectual life. The story begins with men gassing the rabbit warrens inhabited by the protagonists. Fiver, the ...

Alain Robbe-Grillet died about a month ago at the age of 86. Sadly, I learned of the event only by reading an embarrassing piece by novelist Stephen Marche on salon.com. Once again the American press has seized on the occasion of a French writer’s death to shake up that peculiar cocktail of smugness and injury that all things French seem, these days, to permit and even require. The upshot: Robbe-Grillet “was a disaster for innovative novels.” ...

Cathy said she would buy the bread herself. Leaving the children with Rosa she escaped into the corridor, which felt cold, dark, and sterile after the noise, heat, and familiar banana-and-soap smell of her apartment. Her feet padding on the carpet as she walked towards the elevator, pulling her coat around her, she thought again that stepping out was like the prequel to swimming: standing alone and without the protection of clothes, shivering,...

A 2002 feature on the French author Michel Houllebecq in The Guardian describes him as “a particularly unstunning, monosyllabic, frequently drunk fortysomething-year-old who has been known to make passes at interviewers” (enough to make me a bit sad I'm not interviewing him). In The New Yorker, John Updike calls his recent novel The Possibility of an Island “90% hateful”; eight days before September 11, 2001, the Morocc...

It sounds like a job for Franco Moretti, champion of “distanced reading” (see his “Conjectures on World Literature”): what do blurbs tell us about the institutions of world literature? Who has described the poetics of the blurb? Its interpellation of an implied reader? The degree to which a well-phrased back cover can replace the book in a hurried reader's experience?

There seems to be no real blueprint for literary magazines. There are good examples, and influential publications, but it's unclear how to go about making one, and it's equally unclear how to read one. They’re magazines, but they want you to read them as books. They’re shaped like books, they don’t have glossy pages, and for the most part they don’t inform you of anything – they are the things you’re being informed of. Soft Targets is as new ...

The last time I felt like a failure was during the final meeting of an ostensibly three-week-long workshop on Constrained Writing. I pitched the workshop to the directors of 826 Chicago, and, weirdly, at least one of them seemed enthusiastic about it. (Note: if you don’t know about 826, you should check it out – it’s a pretty great program [co-founded by author / publishing maverick Dave Eggers], and anybody who finds themselves despondent ove...

[*Spoiler Alert*: Key plot elements of a couple of novels revealed.] Half way through this semester, I started reading books again, ending a work-induced months-long hiatus. I might not have allowed myself the luxury of leisure reading until at least Winter break had it not been for a friend from out of town who’d left a book behind. It was Kazuo Ishiguro’s sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, just sitting there on the coffee table, too tempting to r...

This morning when I stepped out of my apartment to head down to campus I noticed the imprint of a solitary and apparently naked foot in the snow near the bottom of my steps. Though a balmy 31 degrees out this morning, the shoeless footprint struck me as an odd occurrence. Riding the bus it continued to perplex me, and all my thoughts of the day ahead were replaced by a curiosity about the foot. My mind assembled a variety of associations dur...

Dear Peter The thing I was struck by most, especially reading Magic Terror, was the quality of your sentences, which I found really extraordinary. I actually began to wonder how sentences like that could really be popular, mainly because they struck me as intensely literary and elliptical. This struck me in the first story of Magic Terror, and then on several occasions as I worked my way through the book. I read Koko later, and there of course...

As you may have read (#7 most popular Yahoo! news story yesterday, after all) there’s been something of a set-to over the meanings to be taken from the recent nature film March of the Penguins. Apparently, the penguin is poised to be conservatives’ most revered near-witless creature since Forrest Gump.

Aliens come to Earth. They refuse to communicate with humans, arguing that the most advanced life form on the planet is the multinational corporation (corporation = bodies, etc.), since it effectively operates at an inhuman scale and has humans serving it (and does not, as the humans imagine, serve them--this another sign to the aliens that the humans don't get it). The aliens, who have the capacity to destroy the Earth, therefore force the E...

The first two paragraphs of the novel: The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called. The motorists kept an impatient foot on the clutch, leavi...

I ended up reading two novels more or less in a row this weekend: William Gibson's latest, Pattern Recognition, and Ernst Junger's The Glass Bees, written in 1957. The coincidence prompted some pattern recognition of my own, a series of readings and thoughts produced by the kind of startling conjunction one makes for oneself as often as possible. 1. Where Gibson's Neuromancer worked best as a kind of prophetic vision of the future, Pattern Re...

After 551 pages of crystalline close readings of the West's literary history, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis turns in its final two pages to a meditation on the present. Auerbach has just finished discussing Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, noting that the realism of the early twentieth century concerns itself with "the random occurrence, to exploit it not in the serve of a planned continuity of actoin but in itself." This emphasis on...

The first chapter of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis offers a tour de force reading of two ancient stories, the Odyssey and the Abraham/Isaac episode from the book of Genesis. The writer of the former, Auerbach remarks, presents reality through "fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakble meanings," and offers few developments of historical or ps...

From the French blog Madame Martin, I find a description of a new game (my translation): The principle of the role-playing game Lexicon is very simple: you and the other players will edit an encyclopedia by making up articles in turn and citing each other. The final product: a coherent encyclopedia on a ficitonal subject. Four basic rules: Each player writes one entry per turn; the turns start at A and end at Z (and then can start over, I thi...