Summer took off my glasses with a swift, practiced motion, the better to wrap her breasts around the bridge of my nose. "Can you still see okay?" Her first move, it must be said, was devastating. Straddling my legs with her knees on my chair, she flicked her long blonde hair over the top of my head so that the two of us were now in a sort of dark, warm tent, eye to eye. My view of her body was foreshortened, so that her breasts, though not large, obscured most of her slim, bare torso, down to the thighs. It is a view you get in only one other context. Read More

Dear all,

Director of our research branch, Mark Greif, has sent me on a French fishing expedition. Here are some results, though for the moment just the Paris branch of them (no colonies). I'll also try to call Houellebecq this week, for those translation rights, if we have the right number.

A brief history of 20th century French fiction:

in the oughts and teens it was Catholicism, Conservatism, Dreyfus
in the twenties it was the Unconscious and Communism
in the thirties it was Anthropology and Communism
in the forties, well, we don't talk much about the forties, but it was
a hard time to be a novelist and you can understand that one must make compromises.
in the fifties, it was language as structure
in the sixties it was language as destructure
in the seventies it was sex, sex, sex, and feminine writing
in the eighties, it was still sex with some regrets and gay sex
in the nineties it was the free market. Read More