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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Packaging
I don't quite agree that it's such a terrible thing that Penguin has figured out how package books so they can sell a ton of copies of important, classic books. I suppose in a perfect world we'd only purchase books based on which are the best, but then we'd all start arguing about what best meant, and after that it would only be a matter of time before someone realized that they could get a leg-up on this whole "best" debate if they came up with a clever gimmick.
Honestly, it's somewhat humbling that Penguin can be selling so many copies of books that are in the public domain and are largely available legally and for free with little effort on the part of the consumer. I suppose that's a way of saying that if we do have to live in a world where bourgeois values rule, it's a tiny bit comforting to see that these values aren't inconsistent with paying six bucks for a challenging classic book that could have just been downloaded to your iPhone.
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- A Bona Fide Capitalist Enterprise Dan nails it: Of course, the whole effort to bring books into the "contexts within which people live" might not be about encouraging reading at...
- Backlists Frankly, I find certain publishers’ infatuations with frontlist blockbusters just plain stupid. It’s just good business sense to diversify your product. For instance, you wouldn’t...
- Record Your Own Book and Amazonia A couple good links from TEV. First off, Mark gives some quick praise to Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. If...
- Values Over at Unbridled’s blog, publisher Fred Ramsey has an interesting reaction to the recent talk of literary values on this and other blogs. The LitBloggers’...
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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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A tiny bit comforting? Oh, it’s HUGELY comforting that something as great and unlikely as Penguin Classics is still a going concern in this day and age! And besides, who on Earth would want to DOWNLOAD Turgenev or Njal’s Saga or, gawd help us, Homer?
Thank Heaven for Penguin!
I’m not as enthused about the fact that some marketing suit sold them on this particular gimmick, but even so …