July 9, 2026 On Books César Aira’s Art of Not Editing By Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer Photograph by Nina Subin. César Aira coined the term “the flight forward” (huirhacia adelante) to describe his deceptively simple writing process. Every morning he writes for one hour at a local Buenos Aires café and then in the evening he types up that morning’s work on his computer, and once that’s done, there is no editing or revision—no polishing, no going back to fix continuity errors in retrospect; there is none of the labor of “the writer’s craft.” About his morning routine, he explained in an interview why a noisy café is perfect for him: The coffee shop is the ideal environment to write because I can write there for an hour (it’s all I need to complete the day’s work) since I only have my Montblanc and my notebook with me, while at home I have books to read, music to listen to, movies to watch, my wife to chat with … In my house there is always something more important to do than write. They ask me how I can concentrate in a coffee shop full of noise and movement and with the spectacle of the street on the other side of the windows. It happens that to write, to write what I write, I need to de-concentrate. Concentration would lead me inexorably to the tedious subject matter of my own boring life. And, given the stipulation in the flight forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages. And while Aira’s process relies on improvisation and incorporates chance events—a bird, for example, once flew into the café while he was writing, and he worked it into a story—the fruits of his technique fell far from haphazard. If Raymond Roussel’s feverishly detailed machines are a touchstone for Aira, so is the rigorous observation of Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Aira combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s would end the career of most writers. Read More
July 6, 2026 On Books Hélène Bessette and the Novel as Arc Lamp By Kathryn Scanlan The spark for Hélène Bessette’s third book came while she was on holiday with her two sons on the northern coast of France. One night, they heard a gunshot in the hotel where they were staying; Bessette later read in the newspaper that a boy had shot and killed his father. She continued to follow the case, and at some point began to reconstruct her findings on the page. A reader will quickly realize, however, that Bessette is not interested in anything like a straightforward true crime story; what burned in her were questions, and the book’s resulting form could be called an interrogation. Can we say she departed from the facts in the service of fiction, or should we say instead that fiction enabled a looser and truer vision of the crime? She published the book in 1955 as Vingt minutes de silence (newly translated as Twenty Minutes of Silence) with Éditions Gallimard, the home of her editor and champion, Raymond Queneau. It’s not surprising that Queneau admired Bessette’s novels, which resolutely ignore norms of grammar, typography, plot, character, and narrative, and look something like long, erratic dialogue-poems. In the introduction to the English version of his Exercises in Style, Queneau’s translator Barbara Wright describes the Oulipo cofounder’s interest in spoken French, citing a passage from his Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (1950): “I came to realize that modern written French must free itself from the conventions which still hem it in, (conventions of style, spelling and vocabulary) and then it will soar like a butterfly away from the silk cocoon spun by the grammarians of the 16th century and the poets of the 17th century.” Written language could be reformed by the spoken, and “the first statement of this new language should be … to put some philosophical dissertation into spoken French.” Twenty Minutes of Silence, though a novel, can also be read as a cacophonous speech-collage-turned-philosophical-investigation of crime and punishment, of social and familial mores, and of the genre of the novel itself. Read More
June 9, 2026 On Books The Vanishing Library: Timothy Ely’s Odd Little Book from Outer Space By Max Ross Borderline by Timothy Ely, front (left) and back (right) cover. Photographs by Max Ross. Late in the week I got an email from one of my book dealers. He was at a fair in New York and thought he’d found a buyer for Timothy Ely’s Borderline, a unique artist’s book I’d placed with him on consignment. It was welcome news; we’d been trying to sell Borderline for two years. Before traveling to New York, he’d asked if we might lower the price, from ten thousand dollars to seven thousand and five hundred, and I’d agreed that it seemed like time. Nothing was finalized, my dealer said, but he was optimistic. The prospective buyer had asked to be looped in if anyone else made an offer, and also wanted to know more about the book’s provenance. In my reply I explained how it had come into my possession: My father, a lawyer and book collector, had done some legal work for the founder of Granary Books, a publisher specializing in artists’ editions. As payment, he was able to buy titles from Granary at cost. He’d acquired a dozen or so through this arrangement, and Borderline was one of them. I’d inherited it when he’d died, about four years earlier. I didn’t want to sell Borderline, exactly. Like all the books I’d inherited, it was a little holy to me. To let it go would be to let go of another part of my father. I didn’t want to let more of him go. I’d begun to feel I was erasing him, forsaking him. He’d built his collection over four decades: a few hundred titles—first editions, special editions, illustrated editions—that, taken together, expressed him as vividly as a self-portrait. I knew who my father was because I’d worked to understand his tastes. His shelves held Joyce, Borges, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery; invention, philosophy, sensitivity, sensuality, beauty. (He’d joked once, after coming out, that he’d never been in the closet but between book covers.) Read More
May 22, 2026 On Books Barthelme, the Houstonian By Susan Choi Donald Barthelme, via Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Public domain. Barthelme was a Houstonian. To me this is the single most salient fact about him, though the competitors for that distinction are many: that he was a contemporary-art-museum director; that his childhood was spent riding in an open-top car through the undeveloped Texas prairie; that his friend and neighbor in New York City was Grace Paley; that his students called him Don B. and associated with him the powers of a mystic or shaman, if one prone to sarcasm. Barthelme was a genre unto himself, the rare writer who never wrote toward or against any previously recognized form but simply, somehow, took his own form, which is always instantly recognizable as its inept imitations are also instantly recognizable. All these qualities attest to his home city, at least for me, who shared the city with him for a while in the mid-eighties. Houston is a city of unexpected adjacencies. Because it has no zoning regulations, it has no zones. Instead, things are put places—a church, an ice house, some houses for living in, a place for strippers, a place to buy your fishing boat, a place to eat chilaquiles—in whatever way they happen to go, as if the city has said, collectively, Let’s not get too hung up on formalities, we’ve got enough room not to worry about it. Even now, Houston is a city like a prairie, its urbanity thin as a threadbare quilt tossed onto the grass, a playful indication of the urban. And this is also very Barthelme, this playing with category rather than dutifully seeking to conform, this ignoring of the very many conventions—of living, thinking, and certainly of writing—with which the rest of the world seems to unquestioningly preoccupy itself. Read More
May 14, 2026 On Books The Literary Agent’s Invisible Hand: Laura B. McGrath on Middlemen By Rosa Lyster The literary agent is a mysterious and camera-shy creature, rustling busily in the literary undergrowth, her tracks visible only to those familiar with the species and its habits. If we were in the mood to further pursue this metaphor, we might compare her to one of those small but weirdly powerful wild cats one might glimpse in an episode of Planet Earth, only about knee-high but capable of causing great scurrying and alarm merely by swishing her tail. As Laura McGrath, a literary historian, argues in Middlemen, her history of the profession, “no figure has been more significant, and yet more invisible, in American literature than the literary agent.” Take, for example, the agent Candida Donadio, a legendary figure with impeccable taste whose regular table at the Italian Pavilion restaurant in New York was “the undisputed central node in the network of the U.S. publishing industry” in the sixties. One of her clients was Thomas Pynchon, whose first novel, V, Donadio had helped to publish in 1963. A few years later, Pynchon’s trusted editor was moving to a new publishing house, and Donadio persuaded him to “throw something together” in order to fulfill his contract and follow his editor to Viking. The product of Donadio’s prompting was The Crying of Lot 49, today considered a masterpiece of postmodernism. Agents, McGrath suggests, are the first and most consequential gatekeepers in contemporary publishing. Though the agent’s hand is rarely visible outside a book’s acknowledgments section, agents often play a decisive role in developing a manuscript long before an editor acquires the book. This can mean anything from editing “at the 30,000-foot level, thinking with their client about positioning their book in the market” to close line editing. “We all edit,” says one anonymous agent interviewed in Middlemen. “We think about the book not just as a piece of art … but also how it will be most appealing to the audience it’s intended for.” All of this will be obvious to anyone who works in the publishing industry, but one strength of McGrath’s book is that she comes to the subject as an unjaundiced outsider. A professor of English literature who has never worked in publishing, McGrath describes the mechanisms and eccentricities of the industry with a clarity and curiosity that insiders don’t necessarily have. Over email, McGrath and I discussed the importance of the debut novel, the relationships between agents, editors, and clients, and the almost mystical significance of the publishing lunch. INTERVIEWER You call agents the unacknowledged legislators of the literary field—what do you mean by that, and how did you come to see them that way? LAURA B. MCGRATH Agents have so much influence over American literature, and yet they’re virtually invisible outside of a few square blocks of Manhattan or a few corners of the literary internet. Agents decide who gets access to the literary marketplace and who doesn’t, by virtue of their decisions about who to represent. They control the way books get published, by determining which editors to pitch and how to position a project and how best to advocate on their writer’s behalf. They educate writers about the ins-and-outs of the publishing industry and help writers decode, and sometimes appease, the market. Because agents serve as mediators between the author, on the one hand, and the publisher, on the other, they embody the contradictions of contemporary publishing. It’s not either art or commerce with agents—it’s always both. INTERVIEWER You say that before you started working on this book, you knew agents only by their stereotypes. What changed your view? MCGRATH I imagined literary agents were like Looney Tunes characters, walking around with dollar signs for eyes. I assumed that they were interested only in money. I’d been influenced by the Hollywood agents I’d met—charming but also sleazy, doing a lot of coke. But the days of making a fortune in publishing are past. I didn’t have a good sense of the financial realities of the industry. If they only cared about making money, they would’ve gone to work at Goldman Sachs. Read More
May 12, 2026 On Books Sheila Heti on Andrés Felipe Solano’s Gloria By Sheila Heti I love a novel that tells you why it was written, a novel that has a bit of backstage to it. It’s like sitting at the edge of a row of theater seats, in a cheap seat that reveals an actor standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I hate that in the theater, but I love it in a book. Gloria, written by the Colombian novelist and journalist Andrés Felipe Solano, and elegantly translated by Will Vanderhyden, is that kind of novel. It is the story of one long night in the seventies, during a brief spell when the author’s mother lived in New York. She was twenty. It was before her marriage to his father, and before Solano was born. But the story of a young woman (not yet a mother) becomes, through a series of very delicate, very sparingly placed interruptions in the telling, also the story of a son imagining the life of a mother he can never meet. He lingers in the shadows, brings her to life, withdraws, and then returns again in brief passages, or stray sentences, offering little hopes, a bit of wonder, tiny narrative gifts, as if from a god in the sky. Read More