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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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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More on the Best Translated Book
The Guardian has a nice article on this year's longlist for the Best Translated Book Award.
Michael Orthofer also has a typically detailed rundown of the longlist, including some titles he's most surprised didn't make the cut. Among them are Running Away by John-Philippe Toussaint , which I'm also a little surprised to see didn't make the list. (Maybe this reflects a bias in the jury, as Toussaint's Camera was a surprising oversight from last year's shortlist (though not the longlist).
I might as well chime in with a few books that I was surprised to see didn't make the longlist. The most surprising omission was The She-Devil in the Mirror by Horacio Castellanos Moya, who almost walked away with the award for last year's Senselessness. You can make a case that She-Devil isn't as strong as Senselessness, but I'm very surprised to see that the book didn't rank in our top 25.
I wasn't totally surprised that The Last Reader by David Toscana didn't make the list, but I very much think this was a suitable book for the longlist. There's not a whole lot available about it on the Web, but it's worth a look if you're into contemporary Mexican fiction.
I was also surprised that The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada didn't make it since she's a fairly major author, it was translated by a major translator (Susan Bernofsky), and the book got pretty good traction and favorable reviews.
Lastly, while not surprising that it was left off (for reasons I'll get into in a second) Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 3 is by most (though not all) accounts a smashing success of a novel. Unfortunately, though, the Your Face Tomorrow "trilogy" is really more of a single novel published in 3 parts, and it's hard to make a case for longlisting a book that simply isn't a stand-along work. It's hard to fault New Directions for publishing it this way, though, since the trilogy would have been about a 1,500-page standalone work. Moreover, in going t he tripartite route they've been faithful to how Tu Rostro Manana was originally published in Spanish (even going so far as to keep the cover art from the Spanish editions).
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More from Conversational Reading: - Best Translated Book of 2008: Fiction Longlist We’ve just released the longlist for Three Percent/Open Letter’s "Best Translated Book of 2008." The Quarterly Conversation has a number of these under review: The...
- Attila Bartis Winner of First Best Translated Book Award For those who didn't attend the award ceremony in NYC yesterday, Tranquility by Attila Bartis was named our Best Translated Book of 2008. I think...
- Best Translated Book Award Longlist 2009 Chad over at Three Percent has just published the BTB 2009 longlist. You can also see the list below. I don't want to say too...
- Best Translated Book 2008 Shortlist The BTB 2008 shortlist is available now at Three Percent. I don’t want to comment too much on the titles that made the shortlist, although...
- Prize Games The Literary Saloon on why more openness would benefit literature prizes. As we’ve mentioned many, many times (most recently when the 2006 longlist was announced),...
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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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