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.
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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.
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It's been a while since we've had a long-form book review/essay from Wyatt Mason, so it's good to see him in the current New York Review ($$$) with Toni Morrison's A Mercy.
The piece is the sort of close reading/deep interpretory analysis that I've grown accustomed to reading from Mason, but unfortunately his general boredom with the book he reviewed is apparent:
Naturally, the story of a country has many more meanings than a fable can reasonably contain. Morrison's A Mercy seeks that vaster quarry. Like Faulkner in . . . continue reading, and add your comments
I'm eager to read Ted Striphas’s book, The Late Age of Print, and so I was please to find that the author also has a blog with the same name.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that I can get with his latest posting, on what The Da Vinci Code chapter lengths can teach publishers:
In saying that The Da Vinci Code’s success is attributable in part to the brevity of its chapters, I should be clear that I am absolutely not suggesting that people’s attention spans are waning, or that we have . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The Economist has a useful summary of Elaine Showalter's massive new overview of women authors in America, A Jury of Her Peers:
Ms Showalter does not attempt to unravel the intractable moral and legal conundrums raised by this unsettling parable, but she uses it as a metaphor to ask questions about literary judgment. Certainly, in the early 20th century, when literature was being defined as an academic subject, establishment male critics who wanted to make American literature “more energetic and masculine” actively attempted to exclude female writers from the canon. In the 1970s, when Ms . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Over at The Millions, Garth Risk Hallberg has diagrammed a sentence of Barack Obama's, building on the central insight Zadie Smith laid out in her recent essay:
This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine… or rather, it may be one facet of a larger gift: what Zadie Smith calls "having more than one voice in your ear." Notice the canny way that the sentence above turns on the fulcrum of what may be Obama's favorite word: "but." What appears to be a hard line – "My view . . . continue reading, and add your comments
This seems about right:
It’s that the literary criticism Wood is doing is waaaaaay out of date, as far as literary criticism goes. It’s not Wood’s taste that is passé, it’s his method. Narratologists like Dorrit Cohn and Gérard Genette have apprehended and communicated nuanced distinctions and deployments of voice that go way beyond the starting notion of "free indirect discourse," and Wood’s attempts to understand how fiction gets at "the real" end up basically no closer to understanding it than when he began. His readings are sound, but the minute he gets away from paying local, close . . . continue reading, and add your comments
I’ve now read Jealousy by the experimental French novelist and (generally credited) inventor of the "New Novel," Alain Robbe-Grillet.
I like to think that I’m fairly ambitious in courting difficult fiction, but after reading some of the vitriol slung at Robbe-Grillet (see for instance Salon, "The man who ruined the novel"), I have to admit that I was a slight bit leery of this book. Would it be unreadable? Would it be utterly flat and dull? Would it be "a disaster" and "pretentious and dry"?
It was actually none of those things. Jealousy is a fairly easy . . . continue reading, and add your comments
No better way to honor Leonard’s memory than watching him smack down Dale Peck.
What the hell is Peck even up to since Leon decided to drop him? I would have guessed children’s birthday party clown, but Wikipedia claims he writes for these guys.
Over the weekend I came back to the Zadie Smith essay in the current NYRB. It’s really the kind of thing we should be seeing in more literary periodicals.
What you have here are two somewhat recent books paired for significant reasons (i.e. more incisive than that they’re both memoirs, or both take place in India, or whatever). Though it’s far from academic or pedantic, the piece has a discernible thesis to it, and it discusses an issue that’s paramount to the "global literary community."
In other words, Smith’s piece isn’t just some omnibus review or your typical . . . continue reading, and add your comments
From Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson.
Words are seen as already in a grammar rather as letters are seen as already in a word, but one is much more prepared to have been wrong about the grammar than about the word.
And later:
I remember once clearly seeing a word so as to understand it, and, at the same time, hearing myself imagine that I had read its opposite. In the same way, there is a preliminary stage in reading poetry when the grammar is still being settled, and the words have not all been . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Dan takes on James Woods newest work of criticism over at Open Letters.
The separate chapters of How Fiction Works are aimed at convincing us that this artistry consists of judicious use of metaphors (avoiding the kind of “writing over” of character committed by vulgar stylists such as John Updike and David Foster Wallace), creation of characters whose “life on the page” is presumably to be located primarily on that part of the page where “mind” is to be found, the supply of moderate detail that doesn’t indulge in an “over-aesthetic” appreciation of details, the near-exclusive use of . . . 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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