Bookstorm

French novelist Michel Houellebecq commits suicide.

New York Magazine has a round-up of some of this fall's most anticipated books, which includes Tom McCarthy's C, William Gibson's Zero History, and Lydia Davis's translation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Regarding Davis: earlier this month, the Observer ran a profile of her:

Davis, who is 63, published her first collection in 1976 (at the time she was married to Paul Auster) and has gone on to complete a further five collections and a novel, The End of the Story. She also translates French literature, and it is the time she spent wrestling with Proust that she holds responsible for turning her into a miniaturist. "I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating Swann's Way," she recalls. "There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences. The sheer length of a thought of his didn't make me recoil exactly--I loved working on it--but it made me want to see how short a piece of fiction could be that would still have a point to it, and not just be a throwaway joke."

Despite owning The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe--which I've been dipping into since Halloween of last year--I haven't yet read "The Black Cat." Here's an interesting--and, sadly, unfinished--adaptation.

In today's Observer, William Skidelsky considers whether experimental fiction is making a comeback.

Closer to home, there are a notable few who remain committed to experimentation. David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, is hardly an avant-garde figure--his novels are too mainstream for that--but with his twisting, time-bending narratives, he is a high-profile example of someone doing something different. And this month there's a double reminder that experimentation is still possible, with the publication of Tom McCarthy's new novel, C, and the Collected Stories of American author and translator Lydia Davis. McCarthy and Davis are in many ways antithetical figures: while McCarthy is something of a literary showman, a disseminator of maverick manifestos, Davis keeps herself out of public view, and offers few explanations for what she is doing. But in their different ways, both writers help us see that, where fiction is concerned, it is a mistake ever to assume that there should be limits on what is possible. Even if, as Zadie Smith says, lyrical realism has the run of the highway now, there are still a few slip roads down which others might go.