Conversational Reading	Comments By Email Posts

The Quarterly Conversation Issue 21
FEATURES From Updike to Baker to Wallace: Under the Brief Shade of the Tuxedo Shop Awning By Barrett Hathcock Nicholson... »
A Note on Links
I think I might have confused some readers, as I've started placing links to articles mentioned in my posts at the bottom of... »
More Essays by Milan
Encounter, reviewed in the SF Chronicle by Philip Lopate: A tentative answer would be: extremely good, when he makes the... »
Bernhard’s Prose
I have a review of Prose by Thomas Bernhard at The National. Hard to believe this is the first English publication of... »
A Good Book Trailer
That's Art of McSweeney's.... »
Speaking of Distraction
Guess this distracted reading thing isn't all that new: In Marxism and Form (1971), Jameson was already on to the idea that... »
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
Last weekend I read Nicholas Carr's book on how the Internet is rotting your brain, The Shallows. The book is at times very... »
Another Review of The Novel: An Alternative History
Scott Bryan Wilson in Rain Taxi on The Novel: An Alternative History. This gives new meaning to in-depth: You might expect a... »
The Orange Eats Creeps
Publishing tomorrow: The Orange Eats Creeps, w/intro by Steve Erickson. Here's a quote from a short review. Krilanovich is... »
The Unconsoled and the Annihilation of Plot
I do not side with James Wood, who once wrote that Kazuo Ishiguro's 1995 novel The Unconsoled "invented its own category of... »

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, well, he may go ahead and write poetry anyway. September 8, 2010
If there’s one thing that surely hasn’t changed much over the centuries, it’s the response of parents to the first poetic stirrings in their child. “Perhaps you could be a doctor, and write poetry on the side?” they might gently suggest. “Like Keats?” “Um, yes, but perhaps you could actually practice medicine. […]
Levi Stahl
Another County Heard From September 8, 2010
Another editorial/blog about the need for independent bookstores from Somerset Books. Nothing new, but maybe you hadn't heard: "There are many reasons why we still (and always will) need independent bookstores, but it really boils down to two basic reasons: economic and social." […]
Jeff Waxman
Ron Charlesâ€™ Hip Franzen Review September 8, 2010
This much-linked videoÂ review of “Freedom” showsÂ Ron Charles in fine form, beingÂ about as level-headed as oneÂ can be about Franzen, aÂ talented authorÂ with boundless ego. Charles’ text review, which begins withÂ a look at Franzen’s use of poo in fiction,Â is also very good. And for those who haven’t yet seen Charles’ […]
Matt Jakubowski
If you canâ€™t sell books, sell teddy bears September 8, 2010
Or that seems to be Borders’ solution to its constant financial problems, at least for the time being until the next quarter with lower than expected sales.Â Really, the problem with Borders is that it lost its identity about eight or so years ago when it decided to become a shadow of Barnes & Noble.Â Â [...] […]
Soo Jin Oh
Reflections on Rockwell September 8, 2010
In recent years, fans of Norman Rockwell, with the assistance of some art historians, have attempted to lift him into the canon of high art. As a fan of midcentury American illustration, I don’t really care how he is assessed on that scale: like the recurring fantasy that underlies so much of our politics of [...] […]
Levi Stahl

Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky
In some ways, Alina Bronsky's Broken Glass Park is exactly what one might expect from a debut novel whose narrator and heroine is a seventeen-year-old girl. The book is fast-paced, engaging, and not exactly challenging in terms of form or style. What makes the book worth reading, however, is the fact that the story is a unique one, and one which is told […]
A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier ChÃ¢teaureynaud
The man on the cover of A Life on Paper is Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, not his double Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Châteaureynaud—who has written nine novels and scores of stories in French, won major literary prizes, and been translated into a dozen other languages—now comes to English-language readers for the first time thanks to translator […]
The King of Trees by Ah Cheng
The stories collected in The King of Trees are all concerned with the zhiqing who have been sent down to a remote corner of Yunnan province. Ah Cheng himself spent much of the Cultural Revolution doing farm work in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, and this border area is clearly the inspiration and basis for the setting of these three tales. All of the stories were wr […]
The Three Fates by Linda LÃª
A well-known figure on the French literary scene, Linda Lê has had very little exposure to readers in the United States. A new translation of her 1997 novel The Three Fates may begin to change that situation. The novel is the first of three that Lê wrote following the death of her Vietnamese father, and like many of her works, it portrays individua […]

Friday Photos

Above is a part of a 24-foot-long papercut made by Han Xiuqin of China. The entire papercut depicts 108 characters from All Men Are Brothers, held to be one of China’s greatest novels.

Poland is ruled by twins. The left is president Lech Kaczynski, elected in 2005, and the right is prime minister Jaroslaw, elected 9 months later. The two are highly polarizing. From a recent LA Times article:

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the ruling Law and Justice Party and
widely regarded as the shrewd strategist and heavyweight political
power behind the duo, lives at home with his mother and famously
refused to open a bank account for fear that he could be framed by a
saboteur surreptitiously depositing funds in it.

Lech Kaczynski
generated international headlines in February during a state visit to
Ireland when he declared that the human race "would disappear if
homosexuality was freely promoted."

Pass it on:

Leave a Reply

The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)

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 Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)

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.

Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)

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.

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)

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.

The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)

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.

Copyright © 2010 Conversational Reading - All Rights Reserved
Powered by WordPress & the Atahualpa Theme by BytesForAll. Discuss on our WP Forum