What I'm reading this fine, wild thursday:

Still finishing PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT. In some ways, I think this is one of those books that must have been incredibly radical at the moment it was published, and is now a bit sleepy because its innovations have been completely digested into the culture, those being the repressed Jewish character (who Woody Allen subsequently developed and popularized completely) and the sex, which is now as common as cracks in the sidewalk.

Also finishing NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU, filmaker and performance artist Miranda July's forthcoming book of stories. If you like her work, this book will seem perfect to you. It's sweet, unabashidly sentimental at times, and sad in that satisfying way that sad can be sad.

And CD Wright's ONE BIG SELF, a revised, poems-only version of her collaboration with a photographer. They went into a handful of southern prisins and made work based on the experience. The book was only available as a fancy art book for a few years, and now Copper Canyon will bring out a handy paperback. This'll be one of the much talked about poetry books of the year, not that that will mean much talk.