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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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Literary Nonfiction
A couple weeks ago, I did a Friday Column about 3 writers of literary nonfiction whose work I enjoy. It was my little way of trying to drum up a little attention for a genre that I love, but that I think often gets lost somewhere between literary fiction and "hard" nonfiction, like journalism and biography.
The authors I wrote about have written some of the most memorable, interesting–and even beautiful–books that I’ve read in past years. In the post I did not link to this list over at The Millions, but it would have been a good addition to the column. Anyone who likes this genre as much as I do will find many, many more good books to read on that list.
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More from Conversational Reading: - Literary Realism Wow. James Woods quotes actual blog-related people in his new article "The Blue River of Truth" up at The New Republic. Here are two recent...
- Literary Los Angeles At the LA Times, a sort of fun list of books (fiction and non) that cover Los Angeles in its many manifestations. ...
- Most Anticipated Literary Adaptations of 2007 Well, now that we’re talking about what we’re anticipating for 2007, Max has a list of most anticipated books-into-movies. Where’s Brief Interviews? ...
- Literary Partnerships Interesting article in The Guardian on how authors befriend, use, and sometimes feud with each other–and what this means for the creation of literature: When...
- Not Literary But still interesting. From the blog of Alex Ross, The New Yorker’s excellent music critic, the Milwaukee Symphony is offering recordings of its live performances...
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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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The Novels of Kim Young-ha
Graphs, Maps, Trees
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)
Eventhough I just finished a year in a bookstore I have a basic question about this. Would “In Cold Blood” qualify for this distinction of “literary non-fiction”?
Capote’s “non-fiction novel” has long been a model of “literary non-fiction,” but hardly the first. James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” is another and so are the journalism of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. “Literary non-fiction” basically means recording true events with a personal style that has artistic merit.
“In Cold Blood” most definitely may be called literary nonfiction. An analogous term is literary journalism. The use of writerly techniques to portray actual events is, to me, a nice description of the genre. Another good example is “Hiroshima” by John Hersey. To go back to roots is a delightful exercise. Defoe, for example. Or Boswell. My copy of “The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism” features Dickens, Whitman and Jack London. Then there’s Orwell and Martha Gelhorn. Going back to the renaissance there’s Thomas Nashe and Montaigne.