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

STATS! STATS! STATS!

A generally solid year of film.

Thanks, @letterboxd.social.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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

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.

Some ducks to start.