In the new LA Weekly, FOTEV Jim Ruland takes a look at a pair of novels by Jean-Philippe Toussaint . Regular readers will remember his review of Monsieur on Bloomsday of last year. He continues his obsession with all things Toussaint by tracking down some of his translators. JORDAN STUMP translated ...

The summer of 2008 was an eventful one for me. I attended my first BEA, interviewed John Banville in Dublin, went to a wedding in West Belfast, and turned 40 years old; but twenty years from now when the details have faded and withered, I suspect I'll still be reading Belgian author Jean-Philipp...

The next edition of Converminsations features David Francis, author of the literary thriller/family saga Stray Dog Winter, which was published by MacAdam/Cage late last year. JIM RULAND: What will be reading on April 5? DAVID FRANCIS: I’ll probably read the opening of Stray Dog Winter . JR: Your n...

Patrick deWitt's debut novel has a superb hook: a bartender in a Hollywood bar collects notes about his clientele — the coke dealer, the transvestite, the cop fetishist, the alcoholic child actor, etc.. Although the tone is as curiously detached as a 19th-century naturalist's ("Discus...

  Way back in 2003, Black Warrior Review published my short story The Previous Adventures of Popeye the Sailor. BWR only features online content from their current issue so the story, which was briefly featured online, eventually was expunged from the Internet. (Archives of past is...

Gary Amdahl and his pet squirrel, Dr. Sugerman, reflect on the current crisis in book publishing. Welcome to Converminasations with Gary Amdahl, the first of what I hope will become a regular feature of Vermin on the Mount: conversations with future Vermin performers and members of...

Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb is a bedeviling book. Here's the story: A writer from a small town who rises swiftly to fame with the publication of a brilliant collection of short stories. That fame, however, is nothing compared to the media shitstorm that arises when the author, Rob Castor, sh...

This image comes from Goodloe Byron, the dementedly genial genius behind Brown Paper, a publishing concern about which I'll have more to say later. It's sharp, strange, and bristles with unspeakable intensities. (You'd be advised not to make too much of the figures embedded in the noise....

If a literary website enters the blogosphere, does it make a sound? That's what the editors at Harper Perennial must be thinking woth the launch of Fifty-Two Stories. The idea, for the mathematically obtuse, is to publish a short story a week for an entire year. The stories will come, ostensibly...

I’ve wanted to read Oakley Hall's Warlock since I spied Thomas Pynchon’s endorsement in his introduction to Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, in which he reveals that he and Farina were fond of aping the book’s peculiar dialect. “We set about getting others to ...