Gift Ideas for Literary Obscurists

giftliiterary For some, the right book is always going to be the one that challenges and excites; that tests the boundaries or manages to open up a whole other brilliant, fictive world. And, most importantly, it's also going to be the book that few others have been lucky enough to read (because, let's face, don't so many of the great ones travel unnoticed for a time?). In this spirit, we've asked Will Heyward and Miles Allinson of Readings St Kilda to come up with their best under-the-radar reads for the discerning thinker in your life - here's what they came up with.

Non-Fiction

Working the Room
Geoff Dyer

Rarely do collections of journalism and reviews read as well as Working the Room. Geoff Dyer, who clearly has no interest in settling down and focusing on one form of writing, is probably best known for his novels. Yet the pieces in this book, which are never more than a few pages long, are just as clever and offbeat as any of his previous works of fiction. The full list of subjects that he covers here is too long to name, but includes D.H. Lawrence, sex in hotel rooms, W.G. Sebald, Rodin, Jacob Holdt, the Olympics and Susan Sontag. This is an exhaustingly energetic book - for those who want to read some of the best writing published in newspapers in the last decade or so. – Will Heyward, Readings St Kilda

Read our review

Is That A Fish In Your Ear?
David Bellos

I’m not sure if anyone has ever written a book quite like Is That A Fish In Your Ear before… If so, I can only hope that I discover it one day. David Bellos, the translator of Georges Perec, has won many prizes and teaches comparative literature at Princeton. Is That A Fish In Your In Your Ear is an incredibly erudite piece of writing about translation and the relationships that exist between languages. Bellos, who writes with a daggy and kindly sense of humour, gives the impression of being omniscient on the subjects he chooses to consider. This is a book full of both information and explanation - for those who enjoy learning about the world, and the way we think, read, and speak. – Will Heyward, Readings St Kilda

The Hall of Uselessness
Simon Leys

This book collects over three decades of writing from Simon Leys, who may well be the best essayist working in Australia today. Since he left his career as a university teacher – a decision he discusses in one of the included essays, 'An Idea of the University' (‘A university is not a factory producing graduates, as a sausage factory produces sausages,’) – Leys seems to have written more, which is wonderful. The Hall of Uselessless builds on his previous collection, The Angel & the Octopus, and covers an immense range of subjects: French writers, the act of reading, public feuds with Christopher Hitchens, Chinese culture, and the sublime nature of cigarettes, to name just a few. The essays, which range in length from a few paragraphs to sixty or seventy pages, are written without jargon, but instead with wit, grace and style. – Will Heyward, Readings St Kilda

The Memory Chalet
Tony Judt

Tony Judt, who became well-known after he wrote the authoritative account of European history after World War II, Postwar, died not long ago. He suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which left him paralysed. This collection of essays, which he physically could not write himself (he needed a friend to transcribe his sentences for him), is the last full work of his to be published. His subjects are his own life, and his development as a historian and thinker, as well as a father, a husband and a friend. – Will Heyward, Readings St Kilda

Fiction

Bartleby & Co.
Enrique Vila-Matas (translated from Spanish by Jonathan Dunne

The narrators of Enrique Vila-Matas's novels are obsessed with literature; they are obsessed with it and they are sick with it because they can never reconcile this obsession with their real life. In Bartleby and Co. Vila-Matas’s narrator is a reclusive hunchback who conceives of a novel (this one) that consists of an exhaustive account of writers who, for one reason or another, have given up literature for good, and who refuse to write. What follows then is a set of footnotes to an invisible novel, a playful and finally very moving glimpse into the abyss that pulses at the very centre of art, and, strangely, at the centre of life itself. - Miles Allinson, Readings St Kilda

I Curse the River of Time
Per Petterson (translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund)

Per Petterson is, I suppose, what they call an existential writer, and in his latest work, I Curse the River of Time, he really rubs it in. The title, which comes from a quote by Mao Tse-tung, incidentally, says it all, though it’s perhaps the most gregarious phrase of the entire novel – a novel of such restrained Norwegian despair and beauty that I called out time and again in my own living room and wept. - Miles Allinson, Readings St Kilda

The Literary Conference
César Aira (translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver)

César Aira, Argentinean provocateur, is the author of something like ninety very small books. The large book is a vulgar object, he reckons. Of these ninety, only five have been translated thus far into English – and one of those is this one, The Literary Conference. It tells the story of César Aira, famous writer and evil scientist, who travels to a literary conference in order to see his own work performed in an airport, and to take over the world by stealing the DNA of Carlos Fuentes. It is a very silly book, which may also be brilliant. Reading it is like trying to hold a live fish. It keeps twisting a way. - Miles Allinson, Readings St Kilda

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willheyward Will Heyward works for Readings in Carlton and St Kilda. He has been published in the ABR and a few other publications. He helps edit Voiceworks and is a contributing editor for Higher Arc.