I first heard of novelist Doug Nufer from another writer who had gone to see a reading and said the person who had read (Mr. Nufer) had read from a work in which no word was repeated in the entire piece. The piece wasn’t a paragraph, but an entire novel. The writer seemed both puzzled by the feat, but also kind of taken aback by the sheer weirdness of this task. How was the work itself? Did it make the work better? The writer dismissed it as a kind of literary hi wire act. Only later after I had encountered Nufer’s work did I realize that while it was a literary hi wire act, the hi wire act wasn’t a mere gimmick, but rather an operating procedure that took the writing into some territory that most writers don’t ever visit. You could drive in the same way, for instance, drive by only taking legal right turns until you arrive somewhere new. Nufer came out of a tradition of writers writing with constraints, the Oulipo. But, Nufer used these methods in a way that was direct and loose to re-imagine pulp novels, corporate histories, and other handed down stories sentence by sentence. I recently asked him to list some of the books that he liked, and this is what he said:

This list doesn’t represent what I think of as the greatest or best books (although some of those are on here), but of books I enjoy. I include comments, in case that helps explain.

• Aberration of Starlight by Gilbert Sorrentino (Dalkey Archive) I’ve read all of his books, give or take one or two.
• Rebellion in the Backlands by Euclides da Cunha, trans. by Samuel Putnam (Chicago) Mario Vargas Llosa remade this non-fiction classic as a silly novel.
• The Red and the Black by Stendhal, trans. by Robert Adams (Norton) Kathleen [Mr. Nufer’s wife] and I read this aloud to each other over the course of a few weeks.
• Crawlspace by Daniel Comiskey and C.E. Putnam (PISOR) A long poem by my friends, complete with CD with musical background and 3-D glasses for viewing the cover.
• The Men by Lisa Robertson (Book Thug) A long poem that might have inspired a TV show.
• The High Priest of California by Charles Willeford (ReSearch edition, packaged as the original was, in the double novel format with the inferior Wild Wives, but with an introduction). His first and most spare novel. It doesn’t ramble, like the books of his middle period, or suffocate you with detail, like his latest books.
• Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec, trans. by David Bellos (David Godine)
• Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place (Les Figues) My favorite single-sentence novel.
• The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien (Dalkey Archive) Way better than At Swim Two Birds.
• Selected Declarations of Dependence by Harry Mathews (Sun and Moon) A weird hybrid of prose and poetry that takes on the perverb (a proverb made by sticking the front of one proverb onto the back of another one: e.g., A fool and his money are the devil’s playground.)
• How I Wrote Certain of My Books and other writings by Raymond Roussel edited by Trevor Winkfield (Exact Change), with translations by him and John Ashbery (who also wrote the introduction), Harry Mathews, and Kenneth Koch . . .

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Doug Nufer likes reading his own books aloud to animals, two demanding parrots and a forgiving dog. Five of his novels and a poetry collection have come out since 2004, and his next novel is due next year: By Kelman Out of Pessoa (Les Figues).