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Fair play to the Pullman. I imagine Kleist's style and the implausibility of his plots* might put some people off, but I enjoyed reading him. He killed himself in his 30s so there's not very much of it to get through. Get the Penguin collection above - it's got all 8(!) of his stories...

Oh, I just edited it a couple of times. The end of that list of unrelated thoughts. Yeah I heard he was an influence on Philip Pullman alright. Is that how? I wouldn't know.

Weird stories that usually pivot around a single, even weirder detail. A lot of overlap, and where there is, the Penguin version is usually superior. The guy was a wizard at describing gesture and movement. The end.

Yeah? Well, 'round here we only read sophisticated literary fiction. Like Paul Auster, Jonathan Safran Foer, or whatever was nominated for the Booker Prize last year. Ya know, proper intellectual stuff. !gloat

No, and I don't want to now. :p

This might interest a few people on here, James Wood's critic-as-wrecking-ball job on Paul Auster: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/30/091130crbo_books_wood?currentPage=all

Just had a reread of it there, Gass's introduction was OK, insightful in parts, but a bit odd; very heavy on interpretation some of which struck me as obscure/dubious. He mashes Walser's biographical details in with his work to produce his result in a way which seemed careless to me, although...

Right. Christopher Middleton is his other main English translator as far as I know. I think I got more out of his translations, the first Walser I read was a Middleton collection called 'The Walk'. Although... I posted this in Nov '09, I still think that sums up Walser for me. I don't have a...

Yeah? I'm (sort of) a fan of his short pieces and I've been planning on reading his novels in the near future. I find Walser to be almost entirely padding, which I don't have a problem with actually, I think he's a very 'pure' writer. It's the sort of thing I enjoy reading at the time, but...

Just spotted... "Visitors found this page by searching for: st. fechin filth thumped.com" wha???

Argos Beckett !gloat

I'm about a third of the way through this and it's fuckin' great. If it carries on like this it'll end up being one of my favourite novels EVAR. I should have read it years ago.

One of the best books I've read recently is: This edition includes the 'Dictionary of Received Ideas'. It was probably the 'Stuff White People Like' of its day.

Mostly great, the notes are annoying though. I suspect I should have gone for the Penguin edition. Here's his rather ... um, reductionist take on sexual intercourse: I other news, I met John Banville by chance in Waterstones earlier this evening and managed not to make a fool of myself (I...

16 year old Gustave Flaubert on the futility of love, the futility of language, the futility of thought itself. The most emo thing ever written. Joking aside, it's quite good on its own terms, insanely precocious in parts and its flaws are covered over by 'hey, you do remember these are the...

hahaha This is my favourite Amazon review (of Ulysses): The comments are great too.

You need: I came *this* close to buying a copy from upstairs in Chapters a couple of months ago. (not really) If you read FW out loud in David Norris's voice it makes perfect sense, apparently.

Read 'The War Against Cliché' too, if you haven't already.

Recent days: Disappointingly dull. Full of really stilted writing. Lots of: "I did not think that my girlfriend/brother/father would not like it if I did not..." type sentences. Great Not so great. The final story redeems it a bit.

Last few days: Finished this. I suppose It's humorous enough in parts, gives an interesting insight into the period and has got some appealingly out there metaphors here and there, but too many chunks of it verge towards unreadability for me: Not quite sure whether that falls into the...