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.

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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.) […]

Against Argument

Stephen Burt has a post over at the Columbia University press blog against argument for the sake of argument:

The academy thrives on argument, at least in the traditional
humanities: arguments get us noticed. Travel guides and scientific
discoveries may both sell books, but to get attention within the realms
of the arts and the humanities now, one almost has to make an extended
argument: to take issue with some dominant view, to explain why what we
already knew was wrong, or (especially in literary studies) to
demonstrate some big connection between features within some
literature, and features of history or (more rarely) philosophy or
natural science outside it.

There’s nothing wrong with making extended arguments, of course, and
I spend much of my time (at least during the school year) teaching our
students how to do just that. Yet our sustained interest in arguments
might be making us keep at arm’s length, or under a cloud, the reasons
why we care for the arts at all, the smaller-scale features that
distinguish works of art from one another, the features which help us
explain (if it can be explained—can it?) why we care for this one, not
that one.

There’s a lot that makes sense in ths post. Argument for the sake of argument has always struck me as being a tacit acknowledgement that whatever you’re saying isn’t interesting enough to grab someone on its own merits, so thus you have to jimmy up some kind of striking argument to get people’s attention. And so, you get stuff like that weird Slate piece where it was argued
that now that Robbe-Grillet died all the experimental writers won’t be
afraid to experiment any more.

The problem with this is that it sells a lot of the arts short; that is, it implies that people won’t be interested in just reading an interesting article about a worthwhile artist. (Lost in that Robbe-Grillet piece, for instance, was some explanation of what exactly he stood for or what his movement consisted of.)

That’s not to say that an essay shouldn’t make an argument (and certainly arguments aren’t mutually exclusive with the idea of describing an artist’s work), but just that this whole thing about getting farther and farther out on a limb to grab readers’ attention is rather silly.

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