what I’ve been reading lately:

There’s a piece in what purpose do i serve in your life called “cybersex” that consists mostly of screenshots of Facebook chats between Marie Calloway and one or more interlocutors, with the other party’s name/photo blocked out. In one of these conversations, in which a guy talks about wanting to be rough with her, Marie

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The No Variations (originally published in Spanish in 2007), is described in Darren Koolman’s Translator’s Preface as “an omnium gatherum of obscure references, cryptic anagrams, parenthetical remarks, indecipherable aide-mémoire, overblown critical extracts, imperfectly-wrought poems, bewildering drafts of unfinished stories, characters with unpronounceable names…everything, in other words, a reader might expect to find in the diary

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The Ring (which was originally published in French in 1994) is the story of a man adrift. At the start of the book, Quentin Corval’s lover announces she’s leaving him for his brother. They’re off to America, where Quentin’s brother has landed a teaching job. “I’m leaving too,” Quentin says, all bluster (7.) Pressed, he

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This book of thirty short stories is odd and sometimes funny and definitely grew on me: I read it quickly, and wasn’t sure how much I liked it, and then I read it again and I liked it more. (Though, as the blurb on the back cover from Helen DeWitt puts it, “Heti’s stories don’t

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The first half of Climates, which was originally published in French in 1928, made me think a whole lot about Proust, particularly about The Captive: the story of Philippe, who is consumed by jealousy over the possibility (and, eventually, the actuality) of his wife’s infidelity, has a lot of the same claustrophobia as that book.

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