Years ago, while dining with Michael Silverblatt, Orhan Pamuk came up as a topic. He said, “You know, I was supposed to have dinner with him tonight.” “Why didn’t you?” I asked. “I had already made plans with you,” he said. “You’re nuts!” I yelled. Dear Michael, I will miss you.

So excited about this reading project. 2026 will be The Year of the Faustian Bargain for me and these are the books I’ll read, except my own novel (it’s in the picture because it features a Faustian bargain, a topic I’m passionate about and one I hope to revisit someday).

Done with The Guermantes Way. Another jewel, although not as beautiful as volumes 1 and 2, but the 47 pages (425-471) in which the Narrator describes his grandmother falling ill and eventually passing contain some of the most beautiful and heartbreaking passages I’ve ever read.

I know I’m rather late to the Thomas De Quincey party, but I’ve arrived.

“Stellar” doesn’t even begin to describe today’s book mail. Finally, John Cowper Powys is in my house. I know a new edition of A Glastonbury Romance is coming out fairly soon, but I couldn’t resist owning the one featuring Jan Provoost’s work on the cover.

In January of 2024 I read Swann’s Way and since then I set out to read one volume of In Search of Lost Time every January, so it’s time for The Guermantes Way. While reading Proust I like to picture everything as if it belonged in an impressionist painting, which makes it even more beautiful.

‘Tis the season of Norwegian arrivals. I’ve been told that Tarjei Vesaas only wrote masterpieces. Looking forward to reading his work in 2026.

Up next, the complete works of Fleur Jaeggy, whose succinct books can be read in a single seating, but linger in your mind with the resilience of a brain virus.

A thing of beauty and the closest thing to a miracle: when a poet decides to write a novel. This 568-page brick collects essays about novels or “novelistic attempts” written by such creatures. I’ve been dipping in and out of it and I’m absolutely fascinated by the topic.

A 20 years in the making translation has reached my front door. Peter Weiss’ magnum opus has been criticized for being “plotless,” “nonsensical,” and for featuring “unpsychological [?],” characters (everything I want in a novel!). W.G. Sebald admired it. That’s good enough for me.

Up next: the dramatic works of Jean Genet.

This novel is wild. Don’t be misled by the title. Haven’t read much Mailer, but enough to know that this is absolutely unMailer. A combo of open-mic mixed with a bit of Finnegans Wake, some nakedlunchesque joie de vivre, stream of consciousness galore and profanity up the wazoo.

Done with Camus. The Fall is his masterpiece, followed by The Plague. The short story The Renegade is his most abstract and best piece of writing. His essay Reflections on the Guillotine is a brilliant analysis of capital punishment and how it engenders a Sisyphean cycle of revenge.

To say that I was elated a few days ago when I found out that a Peter Matthiessen biography (by Lance Richardson) had been published is selling it short. His Far Tortuga, which is phonetically and structurally challenging, is one of the finest novelistic achievements in American fiction.

I blame the purchasing of 15 biographies, 6 volumes of letters, 2 memoirs and 1 volume of diaries on a recent monthlong bout of literary nonfiction fever. Now I must remain optimistic and believe that I’ll have time to read them all. I’ll start with May Swenson’s biography.

Oh, hi! 2,413 pages of Sylvia Plath in today’s #bookmail.

Two tomes were acquired. Two.

Rewatched Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. I understand why so many abhor this film, but if you’re willing to abandon all hope, surrender to its grueling monotony, and be governed by its sepulchral atmosphere you’ll have one of the most transcending cinematic experiences of your life.

Masterpiece! Camus turns the book into a confessional and the reader into a priest. It features one of the darkest, most reprehensible narrators (thankfully). If I ever dare to write a Top 20 of the best novels I’ve read, it wouldn’t surprise me to see this one on that list.

Fresh from the press and my latest addition to the Gertrude Stein pile. Probably the 113th book in my home library written by (or about) the matriarch of Modernism.

Come on board the Kraszna train, darlings. You won’t regret it.

Worked all day. Went to a bookstore. Both titles were sold out. Drove to another. Found them a few minutes ago. Can’t read them now. Still happy to have them.

Pausing the Dostoevsky read through I started at the beginning of the year (I need a short break from his voice). Up next: the complete fiction of Albert Camus.

How does one engage with a writer whose body of work seems to represent the epitome of solipsistic creation? His purported novels are no more than countless vignettes conjoined in a universe of hopelessness, solitude, and total indifference. Award the Nobel Prize to Botho Strauß.

She’s recorded in a tongue on the verge of collapse a litany of transposable voices and disjointed perspectives that reject Manichaean dualities, all to create the foundations of refurbished identities that can neither be named nor described. Award the Nobel Prize to Chus Pato.

In his exceedingly long poetic sequences –always epic in scale– polyphony can turn into a cacophony of everyday voices as he renders, in a most accessible way, a peculiar migrant experience while expanding the possibilities of the poem. Award the Nobel Prize to Π.O. (Pi O).

Yesterday’s purchases… I had read everything by Olga Tokarczuk available in English translation before she got the big prize, but nothing that was translated after it, so I need to remedy that. And The Sea, the Sea has been on my radar for many years. It’ll be my first Murdoch.

Did I drive like a maniac to my local bookstore upon learning that Eimear McBride’s latest novel hit the shelves on this side of the Atlantic? Is the night dark and full of terrors?🙄

His intellectually rigorous novels —mental abodes of a late Modernist that may produce in the reader a permanent feeling of vertigo—, masterfully explore the complexities of entropic realities, even through the consciousness of a disembodied entity. Award the Nobel Prize to Joseph McElroy.

Jacinta, the love of my life, left this world on Aug 1 at 2:59PM, shortly after turning 19 y.o. She passed away peacefully, in my arms (my request to the vet), while I whispered words of goodbye and gratitude, kissed her beautiful face, and rocked her gently, like the sweet baby she always was.

McElroy's language is a sort of liquid. His subordinate clauses, liberated from commas, constantly bleed into the main sentence. Highly ciphered, awe-inspiring, unequivocally dumbfounding novels you don’t need to fully decrypt to appreciate. Literary titans are almost extinct. Almost.

Two translations of Dante’s Paradiso are set to come out in the year of our Lord 2025. Come July we’ll get Mary Jo Bang’s "irreverent” conclusion, published by Graywolf Press, and in August NYRB will give us D. M. Black’s second installment (anyone knows if he plans on translating Inferno?).

One of the first books that comes to mind when asked the anxiety-inducing question “What’s the best novel you’ve read?” / Uno de los primeros libros que me viene a la mente cuando me hacen esa pregunta que invariablemente detona ansiedad: "¿Cuál es la mejor novela que has leído?"

After receiving Michael Brodsky’s Invidicum (considered to be his magnum opus: 1,190 pages, 20 years in the making) and thoroughly sampling it, I had to ransack my public library bookshelves to figure out if I’ve just started reading the King of Maximalists… Seems like it.

A reviewer once wrote that John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy was “a novel to offend everyone.” This can be said about D. Keith Mano’s Take Five, which is brilliant and one of the best kept secrets in American literature. It transcends its own mean-spiritedness through lavish verbiage and caustic humor.

I watched this last night. Andrei Tarkovsky’s first feature film reaches the level of perfection, cinematic artistry and rigorous composition most filmmakers dream of. Never have I seen a more attuned dialogue between foreground and background sustained through an entire film.

A thing of beauty: the "animal novels" of Günter Grass.

Arrived: the complete novels of Henry Green, a “late modernist” admired by major figures of the literati (Updike, Isherwood, Welty, Auden). These are the British editions, but you can find 8 of his novels in NYRB’s catalog (a.k.a. the literary counterpart of the Criterion Collection).

At the rate of one book per month, this year I will also tackle the complete works of Jane Austen. I’m just not sure if I should start with Sense and Sensibility, her first novel (The Watsons is unfinished), or her juvenilia (some of the material dates back to 1787, when she was 11!).

David Lynch (1946-2025). Sir, you will be terribly missed.

This year I plan to keep on reading authors’ complete works, like I’ve been doing since 2021. For many I’ll read 3 books at a time, switch to another and revisit them a few months later, but 3 writers will get special attention the entire year. Dostoevsky is one of them.

This one took me about 3 weeks. I struggled a bit with part I, but part II is as great as vol. I. Once the narrator (a.k.a. Marcel) sees Gilberte from the distance -or someone resembling her- accompanied by a man while strolling at a park, he unravels and Proust’s genius shines.

Starting the year with a deafening bang… Today, in the mail: the Holy Grail of Henry Miller’s correspondence: the ever-elusive 2-vol., 857-page edition of the “Hamlet Letters” (with Michael Fraenkel), in which they set out to discuss Shakespeare’s famous play, but not really.

Les presento a mi nuevo libro, el que me obliga a tartamudear, a rascarme la cabeza, a mirar de ladito 👀, a cambiar el tema de la conversación cuando me preguntan sobre qué es. "Es el acabose contigo, m’hijo", hubiera dicho mi Ma al respecto. 🤷‍♂️ Se presentará en la FIL Guadalajara.

There’s a passage in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in which Gertrude Stein, upon seeing her portrait, the 1 Picasso painted, tells him that it doesn’t look like her. “It will,” replied Picasso (it did). According to Stein, the artist’s “rose period” ended with that canvas.

Paul Cadmus: 49 Drawings, a deluxe monograph packaged in a portfolio envelope collecting never-before-seen drawings featuring Jon Anderson, the artist’s lover and muse, with “obsessive emphasis of his model’s erotic zones” is being released this Tuesday. A must have rara avis!

If you were a living and breathing human being during the first 70 years of the 20th century, then you probably received a letter from Ezra Pound. This is a fact.

Coming up in 2025… The Complete Fiction of Guy Davenport. Will savor it slowly: one short story each week. (The Death of Picasso is in the pile because it includes two previously uncollected stories: The Owl of Minerva and The Playing Field).

Context Collapse reached my doorstep and my book wishlist grew by a foot after reading the poem’s razo!

As good a time as any to remember that Mr. Lynch has given us one of the most creative and intellectually stimulating bodies of work in the history of cinema (even when all we can do is scratch our heads), including a masterpiece: The Elephant Man. Few can reach that level of cinematic perfection.