MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

A Strange Commonplace by Gilbert Sorrentino. Coffee House Press, 2006. I began my review of Gilbert Sorrentino’s 2002 novel Little Casino, noting the growing sense of similarity among his works as I read more and more of them even as they also consistently varied in form. With this, his last novel, Sorrentino continues his work [...]

Over at the Litblog Co-op we’re discussing Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Television this week. It was my nomination this round and picked as the Read This! selection (i.e. the favorite of the bunch). My post about why I recommended the book is here. Later this week, at this blog: More on Bendis and Maleev’s Daredevil, Alex Toth’s [...]

The latest round of selections and discussions from the Litblog Co-op, of which I am a member, starts today at the LBC blog. This season’s Read This! selection was nominated by yours truly and selected as the favorite of the round by the members. You can read my nomination post and an excerpt from the [...]

(If you’ve already looked at my last post on Little Nemo and the images were missing, please check it out again. Some of the image paths were messed up, so they didn’t appear.) When it rains it pours, I just put up that long post on Nemo and now I find my review of Flaubert’s [...]

Last week over at the Litblog Co-op site saw a lot of interesting posts (including one by yours truly on novels and indexes) and a podcast on Anders Monson’s Other Electricities, a novel in stories I enjoyed quite a lot. Discussion continues this week with a second pick. Addition (8/23/09): Here’s the actually post I [...]

Stephen at This Space wrote a couple posts indicating his doubt at “graphic novels” [GNs, from henceforth] ability to be great literary works. In a previous post he made this statement about literary fiction: I shall myself evade defining literary fiction right now. Let this entire blog stand for that endeavor. I will say this [...]

Crowley, John. Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land. William Morrow, 2005. I’ve been awaiting new John Crowley novels for over a decade now, ever since I first read Little, Big (certainly his most well known novel) and Aegypt (1987) (arguably his masterwork in progress). The thing is, I’ve been waiting for more novels in his [...]

An interview with Harry Mathews in the Brooklyn Rail. He discusses the new book, a little of his past, his impressions of Queneau (“I think he had very catholic tastes in literature, but he was strict in deciding whether a method of writing was Oulipian or not.”) and Perec, and writing in general (he’s moving [...]

Having finally read one of Metcalf’s works, I went back and reread this interview (from the always brilliant interviews at Dalkey Archive). It is worth the time for a number of interesting takes on prose, novels, structure, organization, etc.: I: When you eliminate so many of the conventions of the traditional novel (i.e., plot, and [...]

After reading two of his novels (Never Again and Negativeland), I contacted Doug Nufer, and he agreed to answer a few questions. Thankfully, he had no trouble going on in depth and even managed to answer a few of my questions previous to me asking them. My questions and comments are in bold. (This is [...]

Metcalf, Paul. Genoa (1965). In Collected Works 1956-1976. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1996. I first learned of Paul Metcalf when I was searching for a Poe quote and found it in an interview with Metcalf on the Center for Book Culture site. What I read was enough to interest me, so I put his name [...]

Queneau, Raymond. Exercises in Style (1947). Translated by Barbara Wright (1958). New Directions, 1981. (A French version is available at ubu.com.) In one of her two introductions (1958 and 1981) to this book Barbara Wright notes that Exercises in Style (EiS) is one of Raymond Queneau’s best-selling volumes in France. This comes as a bit [...]

As I am putting up a brief review of Queneau’s Exercises in Style soon, I decided to (presumptiously) write my own using Queneau’s story as an example for the unfamiliar reader. Thus, I hearby humbly submit: “Recipe” 1 young man with long neck1 hat with encircling cord1 older man, who steps on toes when possibleliberal [...]

Nufer, Doug. Never Again. New York: Black Square Editions, 2004. Also available online at ubu.com. I think it’s safe to say that there is no novel like this one. This is a constrained novel on the level of Perec’s La Disparition in its level of ambition and difficulty. Doug Nufer (also author of the novel [...]

Nufer, Doug. Negativeland. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004. I first heard of Doug Nufer online. He wrote an article in Seattle’s “The Stranger” about the Oulipo Compendium. Following some links and searches I discovered his novel Never Again at ubu.com and then this novel, Negativeland. With glowing blurbs by Harry Mathews and Gilbert Sorrentino, the gold standard [...]

Zak Smith illustrated every page of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It is all online here. I saw it last year at the Whitney Biennial where it was displayed covering one large wall, my favorite piece by far in the show. Sadly, the online version is not the easiest way to look at this thing, but [...]

Markson, David. Going Down (1970). Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. I always felt that David Markson’s novels were of a fairly consistent oeuvre. Rereading Going Down, his first “serious” novel (there were three pulp novels and one comedic western previous), has reaffirmed that feeling. This novel forms the narrative beginning of a distillation process [...]