Hooray for Gilbert Sorrentino! That second paragraph should be banner-headlined and painted on sandwich boards and puffed out by skywriters over Manhattan! But the problem is not going away anytime soon, because this is the pub-world legacy of focus groups and Oprah. Probably reading groups, too. The publishers themselves wouldn't read these books for fun, but they have no idea what will potentially connect with the great mass of consumers, the people who wouldn't be interested in contemporary equivalents of Joyce, Pound, or Williams, if there were any. Who knows what kind of dull mimetic fiction might function as a mirror for these unknowns, who apparently yearn for such a thing?

Seriously, I think all you have to do is get Oprah to say your book is good, and you have a best seller. Even if it sucks.

His An Beal Bocht is the definitive macabre comedy about an endangered language. In one chapter he has a half-blind and wholly senile British government inspector make some kind of incentive payment, a shilling per, to families with English-speaking kids, for an entire litter of 12 piglets, and then in the next chapter has a field linguist give a plug of tobacco and a shilling to one of the piglets working as one of his Irish-language informants.

I only discovered Sorrentino recently, and read his satire on art criticism, Lunar Follies.

The world of art criticism is almost beyond parody already, and it takes a good degree of skill to be able to skewer it so precisely without falling into the trap of easily-won laughter provoked by an sitting duck target.

Apart from that, the humour is excellent. One chapter is simply a list of titles of a late Baron's erotic prints collection. I re-read it the other night and the titles' cumulative effect is joyously funny.

I'm working on a theory of the novel which puts Flann O'Brien in the top ten, and Balzac and Zola in the second fifty.

Apropos of your links to Sorrentino and O'Brien, this is as good a time as any to champion the publisher that helps keeps both of them in print: Dalkey Archive. Dalkey and the Center for Book Culture is a shining example of how a "BOOKS" publishing house should be run. Inspired, industrious, curious, adventurous.

And its 100 books for $500 special sale (always running) is a small extravagance any good reader should deliver to herself. I partook, and find it pads the future in a way that makes me want to aim for a centennial.

Amen to that. (And I believe, though I speak under correction, that the l in Dalkey is silent: it's pronunced "Dawkey.")

I thought it was Coffee House Press. I got Sorrentino's latest book here in the UK for about 8 pounds. I almost felt guilty at it being so cheap.

(Our host, in this as in many details, has no need of correction.)

Thanks for the plug. I am a big fan of Flann O'Brien too. I think Harry Mathews and Julian Rios are pretty cool too.