The End of Oulipo? The End of Oulipo? My book (co-authored with Lauren Elkin), published by Zero Books. Available everywhere. Order it from Amazon, or find it in bookstores nationwide. 
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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Madeleine LaRue reviewed Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin in the Winter 2013 issue of The Quarterly Conversaiton.
The bleak, poetic universe of László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango absorbed me completely. I am continually in awe of the sense of urgency in Krasznahorkai’s books, and of the harsh beauty of his unstoppable sentences.
I was also hugely impressed with Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair. Such an ambitious tangle of stories might easily have become unwieldy or simply irritating in the hands of a less masterful storyteller, but Shishkin proves himself a worthy heir to the best of his Russian predecessors.
Ivan . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Francois Monti is the European Editor of The Quarterly Conversation.
2012 was the year life caught up with literature, but I’m still happy I managed to force some commitments to make way for a few great books. Here is a short selection, in chronological order of reading:
Yuri Herrera – Los Trabajos del Reino & Señales que precederan el fin del mundo: two fantastic short novels about two phenomenon that have a huge impact on both Mexico and the United States : the former deals with drug overlords, the latter with illegal immigration. Novel length prose narco-corrido and the . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Malcolm Forbes reviewed Greg Baxter’s The Apartment in Issue 30.
The first real stand-out read of the year was The Little Russian by Susan Sherman (Counterpoint), a debut novel which was so accomplished it felt like a mid-career high. Authors like Hilary Mantel and Emma Donoghue are doing wonders to re-galvanize interest in the historical novel, but Sherman’s contribution deserves merit for focusing on less well-trodden terrain, namely the Ukraine and its bloody suffering at the beginning of the last century. There are no real stylistic tricks on offer, simply good old-fashioned storytelling.
On the . . . continue reading, and add your comments
John Lingan wrote on concert films for the Fall 2012 issue of The Quarterly Conversation.
Little, Big by John Crowley and The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer: The former is an epic, almost gothic contemporary fantasy set mostly in a shape-shifting New England mansion that’s inhabited by fairies. The latter is a dark, two-character parable set in 17th-century rural Poland. But in their final pages, Little, Big and The Slave both ultimately expand into powerful metaphors for how myths arise and endure. Crowley’s prose is lush while Singer’s is hard and sparse, but both of these . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Taylor Davis-Van Atta contributed an essay on Stig Sæterbakken to the Winter 2013 issue of The Quarterly Conversation.
1. Barley Patch & A History of Books by Gerald Murnane I’ll package these two books as a single recommendation because Murnane wrote them more or less concurrently and they read as companion volumes or as a sort of hall of mirrors. Nobody I know of writes even remotely like Murnane, an author who is forever obsessed with the way in which his mind forms and re-forms (and re-forms over and over again) memories as patterns of images, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Daniel Medin is the Senior Editor of The Quarterly Conversation.
Novels
1. László Krasznahorkai: Satantango (New Directions) I love Krasznahorkai’s dark discerning humor, and was delighted to discover that this novel retains its power – and savage funniness – after rereading. It also contains scenes of uncommon beauty. Refracted glory to George Szirtes for his translation: sentence for sentence, Satantango has to be one of the most striking books published in English in 2012.
2. Mahmoud Dowlatabadi: The Colonel (Melville House) Unspeakably dark history of a revolution that devoured – and continues to devour – its children. . . . continue reading, and add your comments
K.T. Kahn reviewed Inland by Gerald Murnane in our fall 2012 issue.
1. Ice by Anna Kavan Kavan creates a world that is the stuff of nightmares, blending reality, dreams, and fantasy in an uncanny, unsettling way. Kavan certainly deserves a much wider audience.
2. Zazen by Vanessa Veselka A truly prescient novel that taps into many political, social, and personal anxieties prevalent in America today. Veselka’s prose is raw, unflinching, poetic: Zazen is a truly remarkable debut novel. Veselka has said that Zazen arose from her inability to process the 2004 school hostage crisis . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Scott Bryan Wilson is a contributing editor to The Quarterly Conversation.
*Death of a Hero (1929) – Richard Aldington – Penguin Classics is issuing a new edition of this next year; think Stoner-level bleak/intense about war
*The Keys to Tulsa (1991) – Brian Fair Berkey – the author completed this one novel before dying of a brain tumor; it’s incredibly funny and sharply written
*Crime and Punishment (1866) – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – you see, this guy commits a senseless murder OKAY I KNOW I KNOW I should have read this years ago
*Fathers and Sons . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Jeff Bursey’s most recent review for The Quarterly Conversation was of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard in the Winter 2013 issue.
#1: My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. This hit me where I write and in what I think of family relations. To the first: the play of ideas mixed with the recitation of events is powerful. Too few writers think that ideas can be exciting, and they belabour plot and character instead. To the second: the re-appraisal of family relations means more to me now than it might have five years go, for example, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Here are the 5 picks from TQC Poetry Editor Erica Mena.
1. The Keep by Emily Wilson This book demands to be consumed slowly, word by word. Each poem a dense wordscape that must be read and reread, immersed in and languished over. Its rich and lush and slow. Luxurious.
2. Voyager by Srikanth Reddy An immense work. Haunting, lyric, and perhaps the most successful erasure I’ve ever read. The three erasures construct three different takes on the horrors and strangeness of the twentieth century. The third, the bulk of the book, moves the fastest for me . . . 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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The Rachel Shihor Interview
Graphs, Maps, Trees
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