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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Something called the Ohio Irish American News has stolen large parts of my posting on Anakana Schofield’s novel Malarky.
This is the post that the OIAN stole from. And here is a JPEG of the offending review from their print edition:
As you can see, this is not a case of a few phrases sounding familiar. This is pretty clearly a cut and paste of large portions of my original post.
I imagine the OIAN figured they could scrape my blog and I’d never hear about it. Oops.
I’ve emailed editor John O’Brien, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Right here, on Melancholy of Resistance.
The story is somewhat complex, but not as crucial as it may seem, the characters, the scene, and Krasnahorkai’s tumbling sentences mattering far more than plot. Indeed, throughout it is the language that seems to be the subject of this book, the black ink broodingly charging across the page (Krasznahorkai resists periods almost as he might the plague) like an army, as opposed to the slightly stumbling amble of its loveable hero Valuska, who makes his way through the town, head-down, dreaming of the planets and stars.
Incidentally, I’m in the . . . continue reading, and add your comments
A great answer to the question of “why do you write long sentences?” The respondent is László Krasznahorkai, the author of Satantango.
If I go on to consider my “ecstatically long sentences,” at first nothing particular comes to mind. Then, on reconsideration, I suspect that these long ecstatic sentences have no relation to theory or to any idea I might have about the Hungarian language, or indeed any language, but are the direct products of the “ecstatic” heroes of my books, that they proceed directly from them. It is not me but they who serve as narrators . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Cynthia Ozick is an incredible writer and a smart critic, but she should really stop talking about Amazon reviews. She’s clearly just making things up:
But, Ozick noted, Amazon reviewers hold two principles in common: “First, a book, whether nonfiction or fiction, must supply ‘uplift.’ Who wants to spend hours on a downer? And even more demandingly, the characters in a novel must be likable. Uplift and pleasantness: is this an acceptable definition of what we mean by literature? If so, then King Lear and Hamlet aren’t literature, Sister Carrie isn’t literature, Middlemarch isn’t literature, nearly everything by . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Without comment.
As Meillassoux summarizes it, Un Coup de Dés centers on the aftermath of a shipwreck, which leaves a mysterious “Master” with one seemingly meaningless final choice: whether to throw a pair of dice. It is never revealed whether he actually does so, and he is pulled into a whirlpool. Along the way, we are treated to an enigmatic vision of a siren who destroys the rock that presumably led to the shipwreck, and various reflections on “the unique Number that cannot be // another.” The poem closes with the suggestion that a new stellar constellation . . . continue reading, and add your comments
With the James Wood review in this week’s New Yorker, it’s official: everyone has reviewed HHhH by Lauren Binet. And, well, the critics that I trust haven’t thought too much of it. Wood gives it a very mediocre review, pointing out sloppy prose and a facile meta-narrative structure.
Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal writes,
The Heydrich story is one of the war’s darkest, his murder a sensational coup; it would be hard not to turn the tale into an exciting book. Mr. Binet has tried. His rendering (translated from the French by Sam Taylor) . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The new book isn’t getting very good reviews. And this review even started out with a meta-critique of Franzen the media hound.
The problem reveals itself here, you see, because most of “Farther Away” takes Franzen himself as subject. Self-obsession is a hallmark of the essay. From Montaigne to Joseph Mitchell and beyond, sensibility, voice, and insightful idiosyncrasy offer the compelling arguments for publishing them. But Franzen isn’t Mitchell, and he’s surely not Montaigne. High standards, to be sure, but Franzen often invites himself into discussions of literary greatness, even though what we have to contend with . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Maybe this is why I’ve generally found Simon Critchley’s philosophy quite rewarding, whereas many others in his genre are dull reads and not worth the struggle. What he says is so true. I happen to believe there’s a sizable audience of people who are interested in literature and don’t loathe it, but do loathe the people who like to make it seem loathsome.
The discipline of the sentence is very important to me. It’s important to write well, and the way you learn to write well is by studying the English language and other languages too. I’m working . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Here is the schedule for the summer read of A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava. The dates correspond to the first day of the week in which we will be reading the indicated segment.
Discussion of each segment will occur during that week, probably with some looking back as we go further. And there will be four signed copies of the original POD edition to be given away at various points during the read.
Schedule
June 10: Chapter 1 to Chapter 3x2x1 (1 – 131) June 17: Chapter 3x2x1 to End of Part . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Douglas Messerli on Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard.
In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we perceive that the feeling of disgust by some writers for others is not just an American phenomenon, but if we are to take the voice of Bernhard’s narrator as an example, perhaps even more virulently experienced in Austria. And, unless we are somehow involved in that scene, the petty hatreds and disgust (amounting almost to nausea) felt by the central character makes for great fun, as he cattily attacks his fellow dinner partners gathered together in Vienna’s Gentgasse for what the . . . 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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Stealing from Conversational Reading
Latest Krasznahorkai Link
Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
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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