HeyJaredReading Matter
Reading Matter reflects on one hundred novels first published in 1982. It is also the title of an unpublished novel using exclusively sentences from that set of novels.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 14, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Aug 15, 2026
Latest issues
THE IMPROVEMENT OF CENTRAL EUROPE, NOVEL (opens the original)
Read excerpt
<img alt="Oswald Wiener, Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa, Roman, screenshot of cover of first issue" class="sizing-normal" height="962" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!J4yi!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-
Reading PRŌTOKOLLON & JOSEPH KOSUTH (opens the original)
Read excerpt
After reading Protokollon & Joseph Kosuth by Fiona McMurrey, I first went back to Kosuth’s essay Art after Philosophy (AaP) in his Collected Writings. I know Kosuth’s art mainly through reproductions in various books and through his theoretical writing, but also through a more intense engagement with <a href="http://oturn.net/probe/narration-purloined.htm
The novel factory (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Yves de Lalande, a fictional portrait in the book The Temple of Iconoclasts by Rodolfo Wilcock (published in 1972 and the only of his books ever translated to English), can be read as a rendering of rote individual literary creativity as a highly conceptual process recursively selecting, combining and homogenizing elements of various sets: basic plots, characters, incidents, scenes, styles, and so on. Lalande runs a novel factory in a petit-hôtel in Meudon, employing “healthy, mentally nimble gi
Coat-of-arms animal (opens the original)
Read excerpt
The translationOn my way to the elevator, I had to avoid at all costs taking a closer look at those seascapes that I had already noticed with horror upon arriving at the hotel: I was beset by whirlpools, towering waves, the danger to ships in polar waters posed by the encroaching pack ice, and wild animals approaching. I clutched tightly in my pants pocket a talisman my aunt had given me on her deathbed—a brownish-green mineral (I didn’t know what kind), jagged yet rounded in shape, reminiscent
The first name of the great Garbo (opens the original)
Read excerpt
The processIn the dusty, mice-ridden hut where we tend to spend our summer holidays I found a few crossword puzzle magazines from 1995, some already filled in by aunt Elke, long deceased. The roundabout descriptions acting as a mould for the terms to be inserted in the crossword struck me as strange and alluring; and the thought arose if the seemingly mindless sequence of these utterly extraneous, thematically, temporally and geographically distributed terms, these numb words, could act as ancho
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.