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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I think anyone who follows this blog with any regularity knows that A Naked Singularity, just released by the University of Chicago Press, began its trip from self-published book to local bestseller thanks to Scott Bryan Wilson’s TQC review.
Local bestseller? you say. Correct. I’ve now learned that the novel has debuted as the sixth bestselling title at Chicago independent bookstore The Book Table. And given that it takes sixth place behind soft-core pornography for suburban housewives and two prestige titles from large New York presses—i.e. titles it’ll be all-but-impossible to beat—I’m essentially calling this the . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Over the weekend on Swiss radio, Javier Marias praised Lady Chatterley’s Brother, the ebook that Barrett Hathcock and I wrote about sex int he literature of Nicholson Baker and Marias. (You can read excerpts and buy it direct from this site for $2.99 here, or an Amazon here.)
The interview was in German and Spanish (Marias spoke in Spanish, the host in German) and you can listen to it here. They discuss Lady Chatterley’s Brother right around minute 36.
The second book in this series is finished and will be a collaboration between myself and . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Can’t write too much at the moment because it’s been a busy few days, but. I’ve read a lot of Walser. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what Walser was capable of. And then, The Walk. Very, very much like Walser on acid. I’m calling it a fever dream right now. It is baroque and hilarious and ironic as fuck, although also as profoundly whimsical and melancholy as anything I’ve read of Walser. Any way you split it, it’s an amazing little book. Definitely read this.
Reading it is kind of like walking through this:
. . . continue reading, and add your comments
Chad already blogged this, but it’s worth reiterating.
And I’m putting this out there because, in this case, the books read as good as they look.
More on Lispector:
The Clarice Lispector Roundtable
A Passion for the Void: The Hour of the Star
Words Are Living Tissue
A reminder, I’ll be at the Blue Metropolis Festival later this week. If you’re in Montreal, it looks like the thing to be doing. Here are mine:
Friday, 4/20, 2:30 pm. Cracking the U.S. Market Chad Post and I will be talking about how non-English books make their way into the U.S. market, how publishers pick them, the role of critics and others in the process. You should come to this if only because I’m about 99% sure Chad will tell the story of a very strange incident that relates to copyright, etc, that we endured in a . . . continue reading, and add your comments
This sounds . . . kinda made up.
The exclamation point is singular among all punctuation because it has no true grammatical function in English except to amplify a feeling—excitement, enthusiasm, or shock—presumably not adequately conveyed by the words selected. It wasn’t even a standard feature on typewriters until the 1970s. Before then, you had to be judicious about that exclamation point because assembling it required that you type a period, backspace, and type an apostrophe above it. Today the exclamation point is used with unprecedented, hyperventilating frequency in correspondence, deployed to soften underlying hostilities or to gin . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Some Oulipo links.
Bookforum’s Oulipo syllabus.
Writings for the Oulipo by Ian Monk
In this concise but rich collection, Ian Monk ingeniously introduces and analyzes various Oulipian forms while also taking them to task. Of particular import is his lipogrammatic critique of Gilbert Adair’s translation of Georges Perec’s La Disparition (as A Void), an insightful meditation on the problems of translation. These pieces serve not only as an explanation of the Oulipo but also as an introduction to Monk, a wonderful writer and translator in his own right (after reading Writings, check out his 2004 book of poetry, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
So this plus Joyce leaving copyright means you can attempt to produce your own edition of Finnegans Wake?
The National Library of Ireland has brought forward plans to publish a major collection of James Joyce manuscripts free on the web after a Joycean scholar published the material in editions priced at up to €250.
A solid essay on Julian Barnes at the Boston Review. For some reason, I get the idea Flaubert’s Parrot is underappreciated.
Flaubert’s Parrot was the first of his books to be on the Booker shortlist (England, England and Arthur & George followed, in 1998 and 2005 respectively). It was, and remains, one of my favorite modern novels, and should have been a shoo-in for the prize. I re-read it once every couple of years with undiminished pleasure, mildly obsessed with it much as Geoffrey, a retired doctor and Flaubert expert, is mildly obsessed with an assortment of . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Vila-Matas, whose penultimate novel, 2010′s Dublinesque, will be published by New Directions later this year, just published a new novel in Spain: Aire de Dylan (that would be Bob). You can see more about it at the book’s page on Vila-Matas’s rather robust personal website.
You can see him discuss the book (in Spanish) here:
. . . 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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