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.
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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 for 99 cents.
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Interviews from Conversational Reading  See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.
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About a Mountain by John D'Agata
How did About a Mountain slip by me? Looks awesome. It sounds something like Don DeLillo, and D’Agata has been praised by DFW. From Publishers Weekly’s review:
Starred Review. In this circuitous, stylish investigation, D’Agata (Halls of Fame) uses the federal government’s highly controversial (and recently rejected) proposal to entomb the U.S.’s nuclear waste located in Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, as his way into a spiraling and subtle examination of the modern city, suicide, linguistics, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, ecological and psychic degradation, and the gulf between information and knowledge. Acting as a counterpoint to Yucca is the story of a teenager named Levi who leapt to his death off Las Vegas’ Stratosphere Motel. It is testament to D’Agata skillful organization of the book, broken into Who, What, When, Where, and Why, and his use of a rapid sequences of montages—Levi’s suicide is spliced with Orwellian Congressional debates on the stability of Yucca Mountain . . .
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- Missing Children The New Republic reviews a novel. The abductees are still the focus of news stories and Amber Alerts. But–as a mother will learn in Charles...
- Rick Moody Needs To Thank John Leonard This, more than anything I’ve read, seen, or heard (including a live appearance by Moody at City Arts and Lectures), makes me want to read...
- Big Money or Critical Taste Who wins? At Art Basel in Miami Beach last December, just as we were about to go out and perform on the imminent death of...
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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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Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
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)
I believe Harper’s – maybe it was The Believer – had an essay regarding the Las Vegas suicide. Must have been an excerpt from this book.
It was The Believer. I read it there and dug it, but felt it was something larger, felt really interesting glances, but didn’t realize it was part of a larger work.
I’ve gone from disappointed in the piece to really, really wanting to read this book.
Thanks for the post.
That Believer essay had a fantastic premise, but was so burdened by grammatical errors and sentences that didn’t make any sense. One whole paragraph about a cat attacking a string was so terribly written that it gave me a headache all day. I hope it was an editorial problem, and not representative of what’s in the book.