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.
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 for 99 cents.
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Interviews from Conversational Reading  See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.
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No Friday Column Today
In the meantime, if you haven’t already seen the redesigned site for The Quarterly Conversation, have a look.
And if you’re looking for weekend reading, remember we published two new reviews this week.
I’ve also reviewed one of Georges Simenon’s 400-some books in the new issue of Boldtype.
For more to read, there’s the full archive of previous Friday Columns, my W.G. Sebald posts, and the numerous posts here dedicated to Infinite Jest.
On Monday we’re going to publish an excellent interview in The Quarterly Conversation.
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More from Conversational Reading: - Boldtype I see that the March issue of Boldtype is now online. Check out my very enthusiastic review of Wizard of the Crow. And I’ll say...
- Friday Column Friday Column is out for the Thanksgiving holiday. ...
- Friday Column Friday Column is on holiday break. Happy New Year. ...
- Friday Column: Best Books I Read This Year Arranged by somewhat whimsical categories, here are my best reads for 2006. Best Post-9/11 Novels: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers and Triangle by Katharine...
- Friday Column: DFW, Reissued Alert: This is Barrett posting, not Scott. The following embarrassments are completely my own. The word on the street is that David Foster Wallace’s mega-novel...
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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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Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
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)
Good to have those Infinite Jest links handy for next week when I finish it.
For the first 200 pages I felt like I was wrestling with it rather than reading it–feeling like it was without a doubt not really for me–but in the past sixty or so it’s finally begun to assume a shape and offer some more carefully drawn characters; it’s begun to hold my attention closely enough that DFW’s prose tics rankle much less. Seven hundred pages or so to go, plus footnotes . . .