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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Interviews from Conversational Reading  See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.
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Over at Critical Mass, Molly McQuade has a nice idea. After a particularly tumultuous year for book reviewing, why not look back and see what we can say about the state of the art? Choosing Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero as her test case (because it’s a book that forced critics to react differently than usual), McQuade writes 4,000 words in a three-part essay (1, 2, 3) on what she sees.
It’s not good. McQuade almost immediately finds most critics too "incurious" to approach Divisidero correctly; that is, their preconceptions of what a novel is and . . . continue reading, and add your comments
(Today we have a guest Friday Column by author Neus Arqués. Neus lives and writes in Barcelona and holds an MA in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Translation. She has authored the Catalan version of A Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fritzgerald (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1987) and writes fiction and non-fiction. Un hombre de Pago (Urano, 2006, www.unhombredepago.com) is her first novel. Contact Neus at uhdp@unhombredepago.com or recepcion@manfatta.com or on Skype at Manfatta.)
According to the Center for Book Culture, in the period between 2000 and 2006 a total of 12 . . . continue reading, and add your comments
A good reader, I think, is one who is always pushing herself forward; or, rather, is a reader who is being pulled forward by some force that is not completely discernable–a reader who never feels satisfied with that patch (or swath) of literary terra firma that has already been mapped out.
I believe this, unsurprisingly, because this is how I read, though I’ve not so much embraced this philosophy as been locked in a grip by it. Whenever I think back on my reading the past couple years, it feels like one big, long retreat from . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Classical music, I have been told, is near death. Similarly, I’ve read in many places (probably written by the same people) of the novel’s imminent demise. Strange then how some of the freshest work I’ve read recently has resulted from the union of these two dying art forms.
Proving that classical music can be as profound and bizarre as anything a novelist can toss into the mix, author Marc Estrin puts the fictitious Insect Sonata by noted maverick composer Charles Ives in his novel Insect Dreams. Here’s part of its performance on April 1, 1931:
Without . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Answers to last Friday’s quiz are in the extened text.
Continue reading Quiz Answers
Reading Jeffrey Toobin’s article on Google Books in The New Yorker, I was reminded of Jonathan Lethem’s recent Harper’s essay on copyright. Google is currently in court because publishers believe that scanning and placing books on the web is not a "transformation." Making a parody of a novel, for instance, would constitute a transformation, but publishers are arguing that turning a book into a web-searchable piece of text isn’t enough.
The interesting thing is that Google agrees that the books are protected by copyright. Their argument is that scanning a book and making it web-searchable is . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Answers next Friday, or maybe in the comments.
I. Famous First Lines
State what book starts with each of the following lines.
1. "The clock struck thirteen."
2. "Would I find La Maga?"
3. "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (A trick; not what you think.)
4. "Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at the critical moment it presumes itself as reality."
5. "A screaming comes across the sky."
6. "Stately . . . continue reading, and add your comments
With the passing of Ryszard Kapuscinski, I thought is a good time to look at writers who have pushed the boundaries of literary nonfiction. Whereas most of Kapuscinski’s work dealt with journalistic matters, the work of these three polymaths is difficult to categorize because with each new book they seem to take on entirely new territories.
The first one is Lawrence Weschler, whose most recent book, Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. This book is a fine example of how Weschler stamps out new territories . . . continue reading, and add your comments
I recently finished the first book I have ever read entirely in a language other than English. It was Las batallas en el desierto by Jose Emilio Pacheco. It’s a classic of Mexican literature, originally published in Spanish 1981 and translated into English as Battles in the Desert and Other Stories by New Directions in 1987.
As you might imagine for someone reading outside of his native language for the first time, this is a slight work: 68 pages total, and the chapters average from five to six pages each. It took me a while to get . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Earlier this week I commented on how much I enjoyed Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital. Reading that book, a realist telling of the end of the world via a neo-biblical flood, got me thinking about other recent, notable novels that have dealt with the end of the world.
The first one to cross my mind was Cormac McCarthy’s most recent novel, The Road. Critics have had mixed reactions to many of McCarthy’s previous novels, but there seems to be an overwhelmingly positive response to this one. This gushing first sentence from The Guardian’s review is . . . 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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