Conversational Reading

Stealing from Conversational Reading
Something called the Ohio Irish American News has stolen large parts of my posting on Anakana Schofield's novel... »
Latest Krasznahorkai Link
Right here, on Melancholy of Resistance. The story is somewhat complex, but not as crucial as it may seem, the... »
On the Purpose of Long Sentences
A great answer to the question of "why do you write long sentences?" The respondent is László Krasznahorkai, the author of... »
Oh Really?
Cynthia Ozick is an incredible writer and a smart critic, but she should really stop talking about Amazon reviews. She's... »
Mallarmé as Jesus
Without comment. As Meillassoux summarizes it, Un Coup de Dés centers on the aftermath of a shipwreck, which leaves a... »
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... »
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... »
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... »
Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
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... »
See Attacks, Vicious
Douglas Messerli on Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard. In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we... »

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.) […]

The New Ways to Reach Readers

Kevin Smokler has an excellent op-ed at Publishing Perspectives on how authors and publishers need to think in order to reach readers. I don’t agree with all of it, but the basic message is right on target: “Don’t ask readers to buy a book based on trust. Find a compelling way to preview it for them, and mass produce that.”

What we need is the equivalent of an “MP3 format” for fiction: a modest snack-sized dabble of new books and stories, capable of the same ubiquity that the MP3 has brought to recorded sound. Say what you . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Wal-Mart/Amazon Price War

Interesting:

NEW YORK – An online book special offered by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is turning into a full-fledged price war with Amazon.com.

Wal-Mart got things started Thursday, offering $10 prices on such upcoming hardcover releases as Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” and John Grisham’s “Ford County,” a cut of 60 percent or more from the regular cost. Wal-Mart will also offer free shipping.

Amazon.com, the largest online bookseller, matched the $10 price, prompting Wal-Mart to take its offer to $9. By Friday morning, Amazon.com also had priced the books at $9.

The price cuts come at a time . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Books Erased from Kindles by Amazon

Yesterday, Amazon remotely erased hundreds of copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from users' Kindles, according to the NY Times. The books in question were deemed unlicensed copies, and Amazon erased them without permission and credited users' accounts.

These actions appear to break Amazon's own terms of use, according to the Times. The terms "grant customers the right to keep a 'permanent copy of the applicable digital content.'" The Times also reports that this is not the first time Amazon has stripped Kindles.

Beyond the obvious concerns here, this dramatizes why readers should not consider ebooks . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Amazon Applies for Patent to Advertise in Your Kindle

The patents are here and here.

Speculation thereof here:

Before everyone gets in a huff, let’s consider Amazon’s intentions with these patent applications. Surely they would never allow advertisements to be placed in books which you have purchased legitimately at full price, so let’s put that out of our heads. But what if you could take a few bucks off the cover price at the cost of a few contextual ads relating (if possible) to the book’s content? Personally, I wouldn’t mind — partially because I don’t use a Kindle or intend to any . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Amazon Threatens CA Gov’t For Contemplating Taxes

As I discussed a couple weeks back, it’s only fair that Amazon should be taxed. My cash-strapped state government is considering doing just that, and now Amazon is biting back:

According to a Wall Street Journal report by Geoffrey A. Fowler, Amazon sent a letter to “Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and leaders of the state assembly and senate” on Monday about California’s proposed law AB 178, calling it “unconstitutional” and “threatening to end its business with marketing affiliates in the state if legislation passes forcing the Seattle e-commerce company to collect sales tax from California customers.” . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Newspaper Design and Another Problem With The Kindle

At Three Percent I saw this piece by Farhad Manjoo describing how the Kindle subverts traditional newspaper design elements:

Every newspaper you’ve ever read was put together by someone with an opinion about which of the day’s stories was most important. Newspapers convey these opinions through universal, easy-to-understand design conventions—they put important stories on front pages, with the most important ones going higher on the page and getting more space and bigger headlines. . . .

Getting through these same stories on the Kindle is much harder and more tedious. First, they’re out . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Why Be An Amazon Affiliate?

Max runs down some reasons why he uses Amazon for his book links on The Millions. I don't want to rehash all his points, but I agree with all of them, and if this is something you think about, you should see what he says. Basically, this is the heart of the matter:

When it is suggested that we link to an "indie" when we link to books, the implication is that The Millions is a shopping site and that we can by our linking policy direct people where to shop. But the reality is that The Millions, . . . continue reading, and add your comments

How to Turn a Kindle Into a Brick

A poster named "Ian" in a forum on the website MobileRead (a website for people who read books on mobile devices) has made the following claims about Amazon's Kindle in a posting entitled "Amazon has banned my account – my Kindle is now a (partial) brick":

I have been a loyal Amazon.com customer for many years, but today, I received an email stating that I have been banned from the site and my account has been closed, because I apparently have an extraordinary rate of requesting refunds due to a variety of factors. . . .

. . . continue reading, and add your comments

Amazon Fail: The Aftermath

Vroman's echoes a point I made about this earlier in the week:

Do you want that much power in the hands of one company? Even those among you who believe in the benevolent dictator model must be worried about this. Think for a second about what Amazon did here. In the world of ecommerce, the search is king. Almost everybody who shops online visits a site to find a specific product. By intentionally obscuring and manipulating the search results of your site, you are making a clear statement: We don’t want you to read these books. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

Amazon Fail: The Online Giant Censors Content?

Apropos of my interview with Ted Striphas, I want to discuss the weekend's news that Amazon is/was censoring books with "questionable" content–"questionable" in this case being defined as homosexual behavior. It's not completely clear what was happening, but it is arguable that this represented an effort to censor books.

The known facts are that many books that have little to do with each other–besides dealing with gay and lesbian issues–were suddenly "delisted" over the weekend. Many of these books were literary in nature: e.g. Giovanni's Room and Brokeback Mountain. Others were serious nonfiction (e.g. . . . continue reading, and add your comments

The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)

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 Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)

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.

Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)

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.

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)

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.

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)

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.

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

Translate This Book!

Spring 2011 Group Read

Book Lists

You Say

Popular Posts

Shop though these links = Support this site

Interviews from Conversational Reading

Group Reads

Reader Picks

Recommended Books

Archives

Categories