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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That would be my take on Roberto Bolano's new novel, The Skating Rink.
You can read my whole review right here. One quote:
The Skating Rink is detective fiction only in a very nominal sense, perhaps only insofar as it needs to be in order to subvert the genre’s conventions. The solution of the crime isn’t the thing in The Skating Rink, the novel doesn’t rationally tick off the competing explanations until only one remains. Logic and answers have nothing to do with it. Rather, The Skating Rink is concerned with the search, a search . . . continue reading, and add your comments
I can’t imagine too many novels by Iraqi authors are making their way into English, but we’ve just reviewed one. And unsurprisingly, the book is a dark comedy.
The novel proceeds to paint a picture of the Chuqor neighborhood in Kirkuk in the early 1950s. The characters are drawn on a grand comic scale, but they are also complex and ever-changing . . .
Full review at the link.
“If you don’t have a visa, send us a copy of your American passport and the name of the city where your consulate is located, and we’ll take care of everything,”—stated the email.
An “organizing committee” powerful enough to arrange a visa to Russia was to be taken seriously . . .
So begins Margarita Meklina's account of abusive customs agents, sex-crazed Georgian war-writers, and heading back to her native Russia to attend The Russian Prize ceremony, for which she was a finalist. Full article at The Quarterly Conversation.
And remember, we'll be . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Our newest review at TQC is Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. It’s a pre-post-apocalypse novel:
Ron Currie, Jr.’s second book, Everything Matters!, is an appropriate follow-up to his award-winning story collection God Is Dead. While the latter collects nine stories about a world fallen into chaos in the wake of God’s sudden death, the former is essentially pre-apocalyptic in nature. Rather than expanding from some disastrous origin point, the world of Everything Matters! contracts into a fiery and inevitable end, a conclusion punctuated by the Destroyer of Worlds, a giant comet that appears in . . . continue reading, and add your comments
We’ve just published Issue 16 of The Quarterly Conversation. The table of contents is below.
If you enjoy this issue and value what we do, please consider making a donation to the magazine. We’re dedicated to keeping the magazine free, but you may have noticed that we’ve grown a lot over the past year. Well, we hope to do even more in the future: more reviews and essays, definitely, and also more original reporting, more event write-ups, more interviews with authors and publishers. And we’re working on a few other things.
Any amount will help–even $1 or $2. . . . continue reading, and add your comments
We've just published my review of The Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas at The Quarterly Conversation.
It's an interesting book, one that I greatly enjoyed; one reason is because Striphas ably reinvigorates the handwriting vs typing vs computing debate:
Thus, while discussing the leap from printed to electronic reading, Striphas trots out Sven Birkerts—the closest thing we have to a go-to curmudgeon for print cheerleaders—in an oft-cited essay from his collection The Gutenberg Elegies:
"Nearly weightless though it is, the word printed on a page is a thing. . . . continue reading, and add your comments
We've just published our review of My and Kaminski by Daniel Kehlmann.
Kehlmann will be familiar to many, as he's also the author of the immensely successful novel Measuring the World. Kaminski is an earlier work, and in our review Ryan William looks at how it holds up in light of Kehlmann's later success.
Measuring the World became an international bestseller that propelled its author to European stardom. Critics received the book with tremendous enthusiasm, anointing Kehlmann an important new voice in German language literature, although, given the novel’s skepticism about . . . continue reading, and add your comments
We've just published Rebecca Hussey's review of The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, from the Dalkey Archive. The book is a bit of everything–psychological, daringly structured, period–and it has to do with the life of William Cowper, the poet responsible every time you say "God moves in a mysterious way." Read it at the link.
A reminder that you've still got 2 weeks to take home free store credit from Seminary Co-op's online store and mystery books. (They're good.) Enter the contest and see if you win.
Also, we've received a few queries about the contest. To wit:
Your recommended book doesn't have to be available in English (we're all about building an audience for worthy translations) "Best book" doesn't necessarily mean it's a good book. Make us want to read it, for whatever reason.
We've just published a review of Nam Le's The Boat at The Quarterly Conversation.
The book was published in 2008, and a lot of ink has been spilled over it, but we wanted to run this review for three reasons: 1) it's a great review; 2) it offers some perspectives on The Boat that we haven't seen elsewhere, and 3) it discusses the book in the context of some of the other reviews out there.
Here's a graf from our review:
On the one hand, Le, like his character Nam, finds himself pulled . . . 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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