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.
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My review of The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky runs today in The National.
Krzhizhanovsky falls under the rubric of the “discovered in translation” authors, as he wrote in the early 20th century, wasn’t published till the ’80s, and is only getting translated into English now. This is the second of his books to be translated, following Memories of the Future.
Letter Killers was a strong book, although one I had some real reservations over. More on that in the review. Here’s a quote:
The notion of how authors dissolve into their creations forms the backbone . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Harper’s serializes a little of John D’Agata’s latest book, Lifespan of a Fact. Though I had some serious reservations about D’Agata’s previous, About a Mountain, that book was nonetheless one of the freshest, most interesting things I’d read in a while, back then I read it. Among nonfiction authors he’s clearly a guy to watch, and I look forward to reading this latest one.
From The Lifespan of a Fact, by writer John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, published in February 2012 by W. W. Norton. In 2005, as an intern at The Believer, Fingal began . . . continue reading, and add your comments
A ton of Gaddis links right here on the eve of the republication of The Recognitions and JR by the Dalkey Archive.
They include Gaddis’ Paris Review interview and the below video interview between Gaddis and Malcolm Bradbury.
Ahh for the days American authors would smoke on-stage
Because I’m very curious about this film
The always cranky (and just as often on-target) Steve Donoghue takes apart the word salad that is Katie Roiphe’s latest attempt at literary criticism.
Our old nemesis Katie Roiphe fires off a piece wailing about the dimming of John Updike’s literary reputation in the three years since his death – at least, I think that’s what she’s wailing about (the essay is more eager to push all the buttons than a kid in a department store elevator). She begins:
Exactly three years after his death, it’s sad to see that John Updike has subtly fallen out . . . continue reading, and add your comments
From his interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The difference between approaching themes in art and in genre is a matter of comfort. And I think that it’s a matter of intellect. For example, what happens in The Fly would be very hard to take in a normal drama. Basically an attractive guy meets an attractive girl and then contracts a terrible wasting disease and the girl watches as he deteriorates and ultimately she helps to kill him. That’s really the plot of The Fly on an emotional level and that would be very hard to . . . continue reading, and add your comments
From Charles Baxter’s review of The Angel Esmeralda:
This omission of any markers of the narrator’s desire is one of the signs that we are inside a posthumanist fiction. In an earlier style—a style still very much on the menu in American creative writing programs—the narrator would register his attraction to the German woman, then mull over the possibilities of sleeping with her, worry over his possible guilt and potential betrayal, then write about his approach to her as he shares with us, his readers, his complicated personal feelings (if he has any), all in preparation for . . . continue reading, and add your comments
It gets a rather tiny and inconsequential review in The Guardian.
Nice to see this piece on Raymond Roussel over at the Poetry Foundation (and Chad’s enthusiastic response to it). Both Impressions of Africa and New Impressions of Africa were re-released last year by quality presses in fine new translations, but the books were largely ignored.
In his lifetime, the French poet, playwright, and novelist never did find a mainstream audience, or any audience really. He remained buoyant, though, paying Lemerre—the then-stylish French publishing house known for its pale yellow covers—to print his books. And Roussel always worked with devilish focus: New Impressions of Africa, his . . . continue reading, and add your comments
LA Review of Books on Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama:
Discussions of Yayoi Kusama must inevitably reckon with the state of the artist’s mental health. The 82-year-old Japanese icon, who deftly inserted herself into the epicenter of Minimalism, Pop, and performance art in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, continues to produce eye-popping, whimsical, surreal works. She also lives — by choice — in a mental institution.
An art-world provocateur turned living legend, Kusama is, despite her stature in the art world, also something of an “outsider artist.” Although she was schooled in . . . 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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Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
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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