Lady Chatterley’s Brother Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series,  called “an exciting new project” by Chad Post of Open Letter and Three Percent. Why can't Nicholson Baker write about sex? And why can Javier Marias? We investigate why porn is a dead end, and why seduction paves the way for the sex writing of the future. Read an excerpt.
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Translate This Book! Ever wonder what English is missing? Called "a fascinating  read" by The New Yorker, Translate This Book! brings together over 40 of the top translators, publishers, and authors to tell us what books need to be published in English. Get it on Kindle.
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Interviews from Conversational Reading  See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.
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So this is what was either gifted to me or that I subsequently purchased in conjunction with the holidays this year:
To Siberia by Per PettersonIn the Woods by Tana FrenchSabbath’s Theater by Philip RothTrue to Life by Lawrence WeschlerAlphabet Juice by Roy Blount, Jr.The Golden Notebook by Doris LessingSelected Verse by Federico Garcia LorcaFin-de-Siecle Vienna by Carl E. SchorskeMusic Theory by George Thaddeus JonesThe Joy of Music by Leonard BernsteinWhat to Listen for in Music by Aaron Copland
For more on what readers of this blog received . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The New Republic offers a lengthy consideration of Toni Morrison’s newest novel:
In A Mercy, more than in any of Morrison’s previous books, slavery is as much a metaphor for the human condition as it is a historical fact. The novel is an extended consideration of the many ways in which people deliberately or unconsciously assert ownership over each other: spouses, lovers, mothers and children. The language in which Jacob considers his requirements for a wife — "an unchurched woman of childbearing age, obedient but not groveling, literate but not proud, independent but nurturing" — is a slightly . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Richard Nash takes some lengthy quotes from Jeff Barry on the future of book design, with regard to the growth of ebooks. His fifth point is the one that’s most pertinent for me:
5) Print book designers will still flourish as some publishers will realize that a niche audience is willing to pay a premium for a wonderfully designed book, heralding a surprising renaissance in book design. Also, print book designers can design PDF-based e-books with no problem since PDF is usually a byproduct in the print book design process.
Jeff Barry, in case you’re asking, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The New York Times reports that Amazon’s Kindle is currently out of stock, letting some of the other players in the field move in.
The $359 Kindle, which is slim, white and about the size of a trade paperback, was introduced a year ago. Although Amazon will not disclose sales figures, the Kindle has at least lived up to its name by creating broad interest in electronic books. Now it is out of stock and unavailable until February. Analysts credit Oprah Winfrey, who praised the Kindle on her show in October, and blame Amazon for poor holiday planning. . . . continue reading, and add your comments
You’d think after Frey et al. publishers would have become a bit more skeptical of incredible stories that jus sounded too good to be true.
A man whose memoir about his experience during the Holocaust was to have been published in February has admitted that his story was embellished, and on Saturday evening his publisher canceled the release of the book.
A bound proof of “Angel at the Fence” circulated in advance of the publication date. And once again a New York publisher and Oprah Winfrey were among those fooled by a too-good-to-be-true story.
The . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The Guardian previews some of the books to be published next year. Among others included is Pynchon, which everyone must certainly be aware of now, as well as AS Byatt, Geoffrey Dyer, and Kazuo Ishiguro (although his is not a novel but a short story collection).
Philip Roth is also publishing a new novel, which makes something like 4 in the last 8 years. That’s excessive.
If Amis’s new novel looks designed to be provocative, then the same is true of the forthcoming one by Philip Roth, The Humbling (also out in September). The . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Catching upon some of the coverage surrounding the publication of Susan Sontag’s first diary volume. Craig Seligman’s review in Bookforum reads like a rushed blog post:
Anyway, she wasn’t a writer whose life was informed by a few large ideas (except, perhaps, for seriousness, which isn’t an idea but an attitude). She was as promiscuous intellectually as she was with her body; or, more accurately (in both cases), she was serially monogamous. Though she had her cynosures, what always excited her was the new theory or writer or director, which she would wrestle into an essay and then . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The Guardian considers the new translation of The 1,001 Arabian Nights.
The review includes an interesting bit about the provenance of the stories:
When the stories passed from the storyteller to the scribe, nobody knows. The oldest surviving manuscript containing some of the stories and the Shahrzad motif, which is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, goes back only to the 15th century.
It was this manuscript that the French antiquarian Antoine Galland discovered and translated into French as Les Mille et une nuits between 1704 and 1717, thus launching the Nights’ brilliant second career in Europe . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Theoretically, we generated between $2,100 and $3,500 for small and indie presses this year. Awesome.
And, a pretty bad-ass collection of suggested reads.
What did books you receive during the holidays, and what books are you planning to purchase with your holiday cash?
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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Why Is Everyone Reviewing HHhH?
Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
More on Bolano’s Journalist
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
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