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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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(Beth Wadell is a senior editor of The Quarterly Conversation. Her most recent piece for The Quarterly Conversation was a review of Frank Bidart’s Watching the Spring Festival.)
In 2009 I’d like to go back and read some of the books that everyone has read but I’ve missed out on. First on the list is A Passage to India: I’ve read a lot of EM Forster, but never this one. I’d never heard of James Agee’s A Death in the Family until this year, but am now intrigued by it. I’ve also got a plan to . . . continue reading, and add your comments
(Javier Moreno last wrote on the work of Rodrigo Fresan for The Quarterly Conversation.)
See all of TQC’s Reading Resolutions here.
I think it is time for me to systematically read William T. Vollman. I’ve been postponing this for way too long. I loved his "Three Meditations on Death" but I’ve never gone beyond that lovely essay (besides some short pieces found here and there). My self-Christmas present last December, thus, included The Rainbow Stories and Rising Up and Rising Down (the abridged version, of course). Yesterday, I read the introduction of the later . . . continue reading, and add your comments
(Barrett Hathcock is a contributing editor to The Quarterly Conversation. He most recently discussed his creative writing vis a vis his work writing as part of Issue 14′s special Writing and Work section.)
See all of TQC’s Reading Resolutions here.
Like Scott mentioned in his Reading Resolutions for 2009, my reading tends to be haphazard, a sort of blind, intuitive groping. I’m a schoolboy at heart, so I’m always drafting lists of authors to read, periods and places still unexplored. But then after the list is complete, I often skip homework and flee the classroom of . . . continue reading, and add your comments
(Robert Silva most recently reviewed The Implacable Order of Things by José Luis Peixoto in The Quarterly Conversation.)
See all of TQC’s Reading Resolutions here.
Aristocrats in immaculate parlors, privileged ladies in romantic dilemmas, and peasants among heaths, moors, and overcast skies. This is more or less my conception of British literature. It’s been colored by Masterpiece Theatre, Merchant and Ivory films, and Yankee parochialism. And it’s unfortunately influenced my reading habits.
While diligently working my way through the great writers of South America, Japan, and Eastern Europe, I’ve barely dipped at toe into . . . continue reading, and add your comments
(Levi Stahl most recently reviewed The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolano for The Quarterly Conversation.)
See all of TQC’s Reading Resolutions here.
My reading pattern tends to resemble a drunken stagger: I veer, I backtrack, I wander aimlessly. Or maybe I’m a crow, my eye constantly caught by shiny baubles. As such, though I read a lot, I’m not good at holding to plans or patterns, and my bookshelves are the opposite of food-service’s "first in, first out" system. One author mentions another in an interview, which leads me to another one that is mentioned in . . . continue reading, and add your comments
(Ryan Call is af requent contributor to The Quarterly Conversation. He most recently reviewed boring boring boring boring boring boring boring by Zach Plague.)
See all of TQC’s Reading Resolutions here.
Usually my reading list is determined by what projects I’m currently working on: fiction, reviews, course planning, and so on. In the past, I’ve tried to have several kinds of books going at once: a classic, a contemporary, and a book of nonfiction. Now, for example, I’m slowly reading Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler (forthcoming Featherproof Books), and continue reading, and add your comments
(Sacha Arnold is a senior editor of The Quarterly Conversation. His most recent piece was on the novelist Carter Scholz.)
See all of TQC’s Reading Resolutions here.
I don’t formally plan my reading very much, preferring to get pulled serendipitously in directions suggested by whatever I’m reading currently. Right now I’m just trying to keep current with what we’re covering in The Quarterly Conversation, and am in the middle of 2666 (which I’m finding both more tightly constructed and more humorous than most of the reviews led me to expect). Next up is Tranquility, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
(Lauren Elkin most recently wrote for The Quarterly Conversation on the French artist and writer Claude Cahun.)
See all of TQC’s Reading Resolutions here.
First up is Samuel Pepys’ diary; later in the year I hope to get to George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and Flush, Virginia Woolf’s book about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog.
And on the French front– I have a growing stack of George Sand that I want to read–Elle et lui, Indiana, her correspondence with Alfred de Musset. Colette: Sido and Le Blé en herbe.
I’ve been working . . . continue reading, and add your comments
(John Lingan is a frequent contributor to The Quarterly Conversation. In the Winter issue, he reconsidered William Gaddis’s novels The Recognitions and J R through the lens of work.)
See all of TQC’s Reading Resolutions here.
A number of my most rewarding reads of 2008 were total surprises, but I plan to follow their lead into ’09. First, my inaugural encounters with Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem (A Scanner Darkly and Solaris, respectively) led me to work backwards and revisit some of H.G. Wells’ early novels, which I loved as a kid. These were . . . continue reading, and add your comments
(Scott Bryan Wilson is a contributing editor to The Quarterly Conversation. He most recently reviewed Tranquility by Attila Bartis.)
See all of TQC’s Reading Resolutions here.
According to my stats on Goodreads, by mid-December 2008, I read 132 books for the year. Granted, probably 30 of those were poetry chapbooks, but there were enough 2666s & Easy Chains & Omega Minors & Executioner’s Songs & Darkmans to balance that out. So I am setting out a pretty bold list of stuff to get to in 2009.
Aside from next year’s big . . . 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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So Much for the Granta
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)
You Say