Lady Chatterley’s Brother

Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series, Life Pereccalled “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 Life Perecread" 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.

Spring 2011 Group Read

Life Perec

Spring Read: Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec

Starting March 2011, read the greatest novel from an experimental master. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

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Interviews from Conversational Reading

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See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.


Group Reads

Last Samurai

Fall Read: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

A group read of one of the '00s most-lauded postmodern novels. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.

Tale of Genji

The Summer of Genji

Two great online lit magazines team up to read a mammoth court drama, the world's first novel.

Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face This Spring

A 3-month read of Javier Marias' mammoth book Your Face Tomorrow

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    With his second novel, The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus has diverged from the path he trod while becoming one of America’s best-known experimental fiction writers. He’s written a plague fantasy told in first-person by a middle-aged, Jewish husband and father living in the suburbs. It is cold and coherent in its execution, with one narrator and a clear plot, an […]
  • War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann March 5, 2012
    Bachmann famously described the entry of Hitler's troops into Klagenfurt as the end of her childhood. From these pages, though, it isn't clear what immediately followed. Here she seems to exist in a liminal zone between self-determination and powerlessness: she has worked out tactics of flight, but not full resistance or solidarity with others. Thi […]
  • Us by Michael Kimball March 5, 2012
    Michael Kimball’s novella Us originally appeared in the U.K. under the title How Much of Us There Was. Tyrant Books has now brought it out in the United States, where Kimball was born and lives, and his website lists the widespread praise that the book has received. Here are but two of the many accolades: “disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as ac […]
  • The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb March 5, 2012
    Since embracing economic reforms in the early 1990s, India has undergone swift and wrenching changes that are remaking the country from the ground up. As village and farmland give way to tech companies, call centers, factories, and malls, these new landscapes are increasingly peopled by new archetypal characters, much as the similarly radical transformation […]
  • The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky March 5, 2012
    The first English-language publication of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction would not follow until 2006, three quarters of a century after its conception. His extensive repertory consists principally of short stories, of which there are more than one hundred, as well as five novels. The first of these novels selected for English translation (by Joanne Turnbull) and p […]
  • Zona by Geoff Dyer March 5, 2012
    Now we have Zona, Dyer’s book-length explication of the film that he has been mulling over in print for more than a decade. Like the film’s journeying hero, who devises his route by randomly tossing bolt nuts and trudging after them, he’s taken his time getting to the point. But the end result is revealing; despite its critical trappings, Zona reads like a p […]
  • Remaking the Short Story: Four Untranslated Authors from Spain March 5, 2012
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Favorite Hip Hop Albums 2011

Section.80 by Kendrick Lamar — this is Lamar’s first album. Some massive talent here . . .

Greatest Story Never Told by Saigon — this album is incredibly solid and diverse all the way through

Cats and Dogs by Evidence — a solid album. What else can I say? The track below samples Philip Glass.

The Family Sign by Atmosphere — this is hip hop at its most “spoken word”

Undun by The Roots — one of my favorite Roots albums in a while

The Abandoned Lullaby by Icebird (Rjd2 & Aaron Livingston) — solid stuff

Shaolin vs Wu Tang by Raekwon (and Ghostface) — pretty solid album by the only arts of the Wu Tang still making music worth checking for.

The Martyr by Immortal Technique — about as solid a mixtape as you’re going to find. Plus, Immortal Technique’s politics are generally pretty right.

Honkey Kong by Apathy — not the most creative subject-matter in the world, but Apathy is a wordsmith

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3 comments to Favorite Hip Hop Albums 2011

  • Ronald

    lol. Of course from a hip hop fan’s perspective this list is as ridiculously unimaginative and unimpressive as a predominantly hip hop fan’s list of favorite books would be to a person who predominantly read books. But it’s titled ‘favorite’ and the writer’s intentions were probably well-meaning, but it’s just so lol because this is a critical site and the writer clearly doesn’t have critical insight into the choices. I imagine this article is meant to convey roundedness or worldliness or … god, I really don’t know why this is here. For variety’s own sake? To project some image? Anyway. keep on at it, no prob.

  • JBrown

    Not underground enough for you, Ronald? Haha. 1) I think Lamar needs to stop copping Kanye and do his thing. 2) Cats&Dogs is great – how can you argue with the production on that album? and 3) I’d definitely recommend Black Up; Shabazz Palaces…………http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnoBIQWS5bs

  • admin

    Hi Ronald:

    I don’t know how old you are, so I’m just guessing, but I think it’s more than likely that I’ve been listening to hip hop longer than you’ve been alive. If you’ve got albums you’d like to recommend to me, go for it.

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