José Vergara

A drawing of writer Georges Perec with a cat on his shoulder.

Your favorite examples of experimental literature? (Let's set aside debates about what that means for now. Just your favs.) Any genre, form, length, origin — as long as it's available in English translation.

One of the coolest books: Raymond Queneau‘s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems.

Seeing both The Brutalist’s intermission and Nickel Boys’ aspect ratio curtain masking this week made for special movie moments. The films are pretty great, too.

Not normally the kind of book I’d read, probably, but the Alaskan setting & theme appealed. A fine novel on a clash of cultures & identities. The interstitial chapters on wolves add an intriguing element and complement the narrator’s association with nature, but it’s hard to escape the human POV.

A novel-in-dialogue based on a summer of recorded conversations, Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk highlighted for me how reading fiction is an inherently voyeuristic act by dialing up that element to the max. Sometimes it’s just fun to listen in on what others are saying.

@nyrb-imprints.bsky.social

Gulag Fiction by Polly Jones | Book review | The TLS Polly Jones observes, in her fascinating Gulag Fiction: Labour camp literature from Stalin to Putin, that many of the Soviet state’s “grandiose

Very happy to have written a few words about @drpollyjones.bsky.social's excellent new book on Gulag fiction for @thetls.bsky.social. Really terrific overview and close readings of various texts and trends, older and recent!

www.the-tls.co.uk/regular-feat...

STATS! STATS! STATS!

A generally solid year of film.

Thanks, @letterboxd.social.

*dissociate, ugh

Sorry to say Malina did not work for me. I appreciate what Bachmann is doing, and the way everything from the events (rather than “plot”) to the language to the protagonist seems to disassociate from itself, but ultimately, it was a slog through not particularly intriguing spaces and style.

Just picked this up at the library the other day. 🙌

Pelé poses with a group of Muppets as if he’s their coach.

Looking for fiction, stories, and essays about soccer. Poetry would also do. Not sports journalism or traditional memoirs, but, uh, good writing involving the sport in some way. Any favorites come to mind?

The football (soccer) plot itself, the way life outside the games interrupts the narrative, and the ironic touches on set expressions all get at this bigger, existential level. An unexpectedly beautiful book for the beautiful game.

Here, he documents a season of his favorite club, along with some other matches, the many disappointments and the exciting victories. What’s really at play, though, is meaning — what we invest with significance or devotion.

Like his other works, Dmitry Danilov’s There Are Things More Important Than Football (Soccer) begins as an experiment but unfurls into more. Having gotten back to playing football (soccer) a year ago, I feel more in tune, maybe, with the thrills and bruises of the “novel” than I might otherwise.

Holding two books in front of my shelves: Anne Berest’s The Postcard and Anne Berest and Claire Berest’s Gabriële.

Stack of six books: three copies of Anne Berest’s The Postcard and three copies of Anne Berest and Claire Berest’s Gabriële to give away!

A look at the signed title page: Gabriële, signed by Anne Berest

Want a signed book? How about two! Giveaway alert! Last year Europa Editions published Anne Berest's The Postcard, translated by Tina Korver. Next year they are publishing Gabriële, a novel Berest wrote with her sister Claire about their great-grandmother.
I have three signed sets to give away!

Here is my deranged merch proposal for a little tote bag (10 x 7 x 3) that holds Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (9.25 x 6.5 x 2) and NOTHING ELSE

Unfortunately, the exhibition site with all the pieces, visual and textual, is no longer up; I’d like to find some other way to archive it and make it available…

to touch what’s “out there” through their creations, and to be seen. It puts us in a disorienting position, that of the artist behind the wall who imagines his family home, and challenges that oft-used word “welcome.”

The odd perspective, the swirl of colors, the bear-like cat in the window. The figures in the doorframe represent his children, though I probably wouldn’t have guessed that myself. “Welcome” speaks to Marking Time’s themes of incarcerated artists trying to make connections,

after witnessing the art, music, prose, and poetry produced by the men there, I wanted to see whether we could share it with the broader community. One of those pieces, which I won in the silent auction we held, was “Welcome.” I didn’t know Kevin L., but I loved this painting.

It’s also a productive example of scholarship that draws in personal experience and presents new modes of scholarship (much needed!). It has me thinking of the exhibition, Artists in Absentia, I curated—with help from man—in 2016. I was teaching at Oakhill Correctional Institution in Oregon, WI, and

Nicole Fleetwood’s Marking Time is a brilliant exploration of the many contradictions of what we call “prison art.” What effects do those labels have on incarcerated people? What motivates interest in the subject?

If this includes teachers/scholars/etc, too, I'd love to be part of it!

Thanks!

Could I please be added? 🫡

Stack of books published by the New York Review of Books

The @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social sale is always a beautiful thing.

Archers of Loaf 🙌

Tomato rats! Haven’t encountered those, but we suddenly have squirrels all over for the first time. They yanked out some of the garlic I planted.

A garden with several raised beds, early in the season.

A garden with several raised beds, plants and veggies growing.

A garden with several raised beds, in full bloom.

A garden with several raised beds, near the end of the season, plants fading.

Garden April-Oct. 2024. It was a tougher season with drought and other hiccups, but it’s always lovely to see it grow, bloom, and recede.

Any labels won’t do it justice, but @annedemarcken.bsky.social’s dirge-like, novella-length prose poem is amazing. Everything about it: the imagery, the tone, the humor. Just brilliant in what it does with the human body and the experience of loss, sculpting out and together vague memories.