Reading Orly Castel-Bloom’s "Dolly City"

OK, let’s admit upfront that the odds of my ever getting around to finishing the Jean Echenoz post I really want to write are longer than the Mets blowing a 5 game lead for the third wild card (and 96.7% chance of making the playoffs) over the past three-plus weeks. Which is [checks standings] oh. Well, OK. I guess all you Echenoz-heads should just hold tight . . . and if the Reds actually make the playoffs and knock the Mets out, I’ll dedicate a whole week to crushing this piece and trying to make a case for Echenoz—along with Jean-Patrick Manchette—recentering the American stereotype of “French literature,” despite violating most all of the trends uncovered in Tom Comitta’s People's Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels. (For more on Comitta’s book and research, check out this podcast.)

In the meantime, the Reds still aren’t favorites to pull this off (the have a 41.9% shot entering into the games on September 22), so I don’t have to back up that claim quite yet. And given my generalized bad luck related to sports, I believe I just cursed both teams somehow the D-Backs will make an improbable run, in which case, I’ll . . . IDK, write about snakes for a month or something.

If for one reason or another—like my ADHD, feeling the need to post about other books and authors, wrapping Echenoz into a podcast with one of his translators or fans, or in a post about Minuit & Jérôme Lindon, etc.—I never get to this, I just want to recommend, wholeheartedly, Echenoz’s Command Performance. Along with the two Solvej Balle books, and Stanislaw Lem’s The Investigation, this was one of my favorite reads of the summer. Funny, engrossing, well-plotted, overstuffed with characters, and, like most Echenoz books, it features a rather surprising ending.

And while I’m on about NYRB and baseball—two of my favorite things!—you might be interested in knowing that NYRB is reissuing Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. next March (with a new intro by Ben Marcus), just in time for spring training! As a big Coover fan, who absolutely loves this book and wanted to reprint it more than any other book in recent memory, I’m so glad that it’s coming out again. Also, Coover does have a couple books with Dalkey, sorta: A Night