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.
Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from this site:
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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Binky Urban, the agent responsible for a few people you might have heard of (Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Bret Easton Ellis, etc) is profiled at Haaretz, where she claims that Amazon is breaking the market:
Another issue that concerns her is book pricing: Amazon is breaking the market, she says. "Amazon prices books at $9.99. Books in hardback cost $30.00, and the stores give a discount and the price goes down to $15.00. Amazon is not regulated the way retail outlets are, so they can do whatever they want." So they might wipe out . . . continue reading, and add your comments
This is the biggest problem with the Kindle:
Amazon must address the needs of very real readers who read only a few books and magazines at a time, who like to download classic non-copyrighted lit and work-related documents for free, and who like to leaf through pages randomly. This last thing is important, though it may be insurmountable: Airport-friendly page turners don’t really require non-linear random-access reading, but everything smart from Harry Potter to Infinite Jest does, and that’s one concern that the Kindle, or any ebook reader, still does not address well.
Sure, there are people . . . continue reading, and add your comments
After I noted Citi’s suspicious 500,000 sales figure for the Kindle, some commenters from major cities (NYC, Chicago) registered the copious non-presence of Kindles in their urban environments. I’ll go on record as saying that, so far as my eyes can tell, the San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley Bay Area is a Kindle-free zone as well.
We can also add Michael Orthofer to the Kindle sales skeptics. As he noted:
There’s been lots of talk about the popularity of the device and the medium, but we have our doubts about that too. Two people did purchase the original Kindles by . . . continue reading, and add your comments
In the second day of Kindle 2 news, we’re beginning to see some opposition to the device’s "read-aloud" feature, in which a computer-generated voice reads to you.
Straining a metaphor to the absolute breaking point, Authors Guild is arguing that the read-aloud constitutes copyright infringement. Publishers Lunch:
Some in the publishing community are raising objections to the new device’s deployment of text-to-speech software that lets users have books read aloud by Kindle. Agents are raising questions and Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken tells the WSJ "they don’t have the right to read a book out loud. That’s an . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Being reported everywhere (see for instance, the NYT’s blogging the launch), Amazon released its Kindle 2 yesterday.
Publishers Lunch sums up the upgrade:
Kindle 2 is pretty much as advertised and leaked. Thinner ("pencil thin"–a third of an inch); a new five-way controller to improve navigation, which particularly helps for newspaper reading; improved placement of the page-turning buttons; a new E ink display with 16 shades of gray (just like Sony already has); 20 percent faster page turn; 25% longer battery life; seven times more storage (though who knows why); USB-charge capability and a more portable charger; and . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Based on Amazon purchases made through links on this website, the following are the "picks" of Conversational Reading’s readers for 2008:
#1
By a large margin, The Invention of Morel was the most popular purchase among readers of this blog. Obviously, my sincere praise of this book helped move it along, but I’m convinced that not nearly as many copies would have been purchased if this wasn’t a great book, and if Borges wasn’t Bioy’s literary collaborator. A great read, and if you haven’t had a chance to yet, definitely pick it up.
#2
Not really a surprise, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Seems like it would be fun and perhaps a bit revealing to check in every so often and see what readers are buying through the Amazon links on this site. So here’s the first in what will be an occasional look at what you bought through my links.
I went back to April 1 to compile this list–6 months.
By far, the most popular purchase was The Invention of Morel by Adolfo BIoy Casares. These purchases were quite obviously in direct correlation to this post, in which I exhorted everyone to read Morel after writing a short . . . continue reading, and add your comments
<A HREF="http://ws.amazon.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&MarketPlace=US&ID=V20070822%2FUS%2Fconversatio07-20%2F8007%2Faf83c381-e9bc-43e4-92bc-66bf676f8d12&Operation=NoScript">Amazon.com Widgets</A>
Being a dedicated fan of Manuel Puig and his masterpiece novel, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, I was quite pleased to find that Amazon now offers the film version for a $10 download.
This is a book I’ve always been interested in seeing the film of, and as a Puig-phile I almost feel that I should have already seen this movie.
I’m generally not a fan of films made from good books (there tends to be an inverse relationship between book quality and film quality), but I would make an exception in Puig’s case . . . continue reading, and add your comments
With a 6% commission, anyone who buys artist Robert The’s "Amazon Listing as a Work of Art" through my link will have pretty much settled my finances for life. And if you wondering, I find the items bought by those who viewed this listing somewhat bewildering and a little off-putting . . . I didn’t know Amazon sold medical supplied.
I you can also find The’s listing for nothing, improbably out of stock and with a model number.
Fans of The and his book art can find more on this strange artist in our article on . . . continue reading, and add your comments
William Ackerman, a billionaire with a majority share in Borders, is hoping Amazon will buy up Borders’s bricks and mortars and move in.
"Amazon could buy the company for about $400 million to get those locations that would take more than $1 billion to build," he told reporters on the sidelines of a conference in New York. "You have to think of it like how Apple has retail stores across the country."
One reason that might persuade Amazon is that the company may soon lose its state tax advantage across the nation. Some 18 states are . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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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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