Lady Chatterley’s Brother

Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series, Life Pereccalled “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.

Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from this site:


Translate This Book!

Ever wonder what English is missing? Called "a fascinating Life Perecread" 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.

Spring 2011 Group Read

Life Perec

Spring Read: Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec

Starting March 2011, read the greatest novel from an experimental master. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

For low prices on Las Vegas shows visit ShowTickets.com

You Say

Shop though these links = Support this site

Interviews from Conversational Reading

New Books
See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.


Group Reads

Last Samurai

Fall Read: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

A group read of one of the '00s most-lauded postmodern novels. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Tale of Genji

The Summer of Genji

Two great online lit magazines team up to read a mammoth court drama, the world's first novel.

Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face This Spring

A 3-month read of Javier Marias' mammoth book Your Face Tomorrow

  • The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus March 5, 2012
    With his second novel, The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus has diverged from the path he trod while becoming one of America’s best-known experimental fiction writers. He’s written a plague fantasy told in first-person by a middle-aged, Jewish husband and father living in the suburbs. It is cold and coherent in its execution, with one narrator and a clear plot, an […]
  • War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann March 5, 2012
    Bachmann famously described the entry of Hitler's troops into Klagenfurt as the end of her childhood. From these pages, though, it isn't clear what immediately followed. Here she seems to exist in a liminal zone between self-determination and powerlessness: she has worked out tactics of flight, but not full resistance or solidarity with others. Thi […]
  • Us by Michael Kimball March 5, 2012
    Michael Kimball’s novella Us originally appeared in the U.K. under the title How Much of Us There Was. Tyrant Books has now brought it out in the United States, where Kimball was born and lives, and his website lists the widespread praise that the book has received. Here are but two of the many accolades: “disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as ac […]
  • The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb March 5, 2012
    Since embracing economic reforms in the early 1990s, India has undergone swift and wrenching changes that are remaking the country from the ground up. As village and farmland give way to tech companies, call centers, factories, and malls, these new landscapes are increasingly peopled by new archetypal characters, much as the similarly radical transformation […]
  • The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky March 5, 2012
    The first English-language publication of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction would not follow until 2006, three quarters of a century after its conception. His extensive repertory consists principally of short stories, of which there are more than one hundred, as well as five novels. The first of these novels selected for English translation (by Joanne Turnbull) and p […]
  • Zona by Geoff Dyer March 5, 2012
    Now we have Zona, Dyer’s book-length explication of the film that he has been mulling over in print for more than a decade. Like the film’s journeying hero, who devises his route by randomly tossing bolt nuts and trudging after them, he’s taken his time getting to the point. But the end result is revealing; despite its critical trappings, Zona reads like a p […]
  • Remaking the Short Story: Four Untranslated Authors from Spain March 5, 2012
    Authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story have had a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inv […]
  • Dogma by Lars Iyer March 5, 2012
    A lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Iyer is the author of Spurious—which won The Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” last year—and, now, Dogma, a sequel to the previous work. Both books are novels in name only—bookstores require these convenient taxonomies. In reality Iyer has written scabrous philosophical comedies about two men […]
  • Mercè Rodoreda and the Style of Innocence March 5, 2012
    The Autonomous Republic of Catalonia now holds up Mercè Rodoreda as a national treasure. Barcelona offers commemorative sculptures, libraries, gardens in her name; government-supported institutes sponsor conferences and translations; a yearlong festival marked her 2008 centennial. Her international champions include Gabriel García Márquez. Apart from two rec […]
  • The Clarice Lispector Roundtable March 5, 2012
    Barbara Epler: The whole Lispector re-launching began innocently enough: our plan had been to bring out a new edition of The Hour of the Star in the old Pontiero translation with an ardent Colm Tóibín preface. (With a backlist of our size—about 1,100 titles from 75 years of publishing—we are always trying to repackage classic backlist to reach more readers.) […]

Why Is Everyone Reviewing HHhH?

With the James Wood review in this week’s New Yorker, it’s official: everyone has reviewed HHhH by Lauren Binet. And, well, the critics that I trust haven’t thought too much of it. Wood gives it a very mediocre review, pointing out sloppy prose and a facile meta-narrative structure.

Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal writes,

The Heydrich story is one of the war’s darkest, his murder a sensational coup; it would be hard not to turn the tale into an exciting book. Mr. Binet has tried. His rendering (translated from the French by Sam Taylor) . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Are People Starting to Tire of the Franz?

The new book isn’t getting very good reviews. And this review even started out with a meta-critique of Franzen the media hound.

The problem reveals itself here, you see, because most of “Farther Away” takes Franzen himself as subject. Self-obsession is a hallmark of the essay. From Montaigne to Joseph Mitchell and beyond, sensibility, voice, and insightful idiosyncrasy offer the compelling arguments for publishing them. But Franzen isn’t Mitchell, and he’s surely not Montaigne. High standards, to be sure, but Franzen often invites himself into discussions of literary greatness, even though what we have to contend with . . . continue reading, and add your comments

On the Importance of Not Making People Loathe Literature

Maybe this is why I’ve generally found Simon Critchley’s philosophy quite rewarding, whereas many others in his genre are dull reads and not worth the struggle. What he says is so true. I happen to believe there’s a sizable audience of people who are interested in literature and don’t loathe it, but do loathe the people who like to make it seem loathsome.

The discipline of the sentence is very important to me. It’s important to write well, and the way you learn to write well is by studying the English language and other languages too. I’m working . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule

naked-singularity-chicago

Here is the schedule for the summer read of A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava. The dates correspond to the first day of the week in which we will be reading the indicated segment.

Discussion of each segment will occur during that week, probably with some looking back as we go further. And there will be four signed copies of the original POD edition to be given away at various points during the read.

Schedule

June 10: Chapter 1 to Chapter 3x2x1 (1 – 131) June 17: Chapter 3x2x1 to End of Part . . . continue reading, and add your comments

See Attacks, Vicious

Douglas Messerli on Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard.

In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we perceive that the feeling of disgust by some writers for others is not just an American phenomenon, but if we are to take the voice of Bernhard’s narrator as an example, perhaps even more virulently experienced in Austria. And, unless we are somehow involved in that scene, the petty hatreds and disgust (amounting almost to nausea) felt by the central character makes for great fun, as he cattily attacks his fellow dinner partners gathered together in Vienna’s Gentgasse for what the . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Review of Varamo

The next installment in the great Aira invasion of the North American continent is upon us: Varamo. My review has just published at The National:

Perhaps it is because Aira stays so close to Varamo’s daily routine that this is one of the most carefully observed of his novels. Due credit must be paid to the translator, Chris Andrews, for putting Aira’s quietly comic locutions into a well-tended English that maintains the compactness and freshness of the original. Each element Aira draws our attention to is placed into sharp focus before being discussed in short, entertaining digressions. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Explanation

AO Scott on Patience (After Sebald):

So “Patience (After Sebald)” may not, in the end, offer much in the way of explanation. It does not solve the puzzle of an oeuvre that, as it made its way from German to English, established its creator as a major and unique force in world literature. Once you read him, you may discern traces of his influence everywhere (in a book like Teju Cole’s “Open City,” for example) and may find yourself collecting thoughts and perceptions that qualify as Sebaldian. Whatever that might mean.

Harry Mathews, on confusion, as quoted in . . . continue reading, and add your comments

I Wouldn’t Have Guessed That

Lev Grossman talking about reviewing books is a little like that 50 Shades of Grey person talking about bring an author. Here, Grossman talks about how he picks books for review:

But then there’s the signal – that delicious, delicious signal. People often ask me how I choose books to review. There’s no simple answer; also no especially interesting answer. I review books if they do something I’ve never seen done before; or if I fall in love with them; or if they shock me or piss me off or otherwise won’t leave me alone; if they alter . . . continue reading, and add your comments

More on Bolano’s Journalist

The LARB has a sharp review of The Femicide Machine, plus an interview with author Sergio González Rodríguez.

This caught my eye:

But González Rodríguez agreed to meet us and (winkingly, I thought) chose the patio of the Four Seasons hotel, with its menu of fancy cocktails and uniformed wait staff, as the place. You couldn’t miss the contrast between the setting and the subject matter when González Rodríguez called over the waiter for another round of drinks and then, smiling, pulled out a black-and-white picture to pass around the table. It was going to be . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Someone Save Criticism from The Atlantic

It’s amazing that in 2012 The Atlantic can still publish something so clueless as this. Titled “Could the Internet Save Book Reviews?” the posting purports to be an investigation into just that. So, what vital new review sources does intrepid Atlantic reporter Sarah Fay turn up? After the obligatory smack at Amazon reviews, we learn,

But there are also signs of hope from pioneers like Nancy Pearl, the Seattle librarian behind “Book Lust.” Pearl tends to recommend rather than review but does so with the expertise that only a librarian or someone who works in an independent bookstore . . . continue reading, and add your comments