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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Here is the schedule for the summer read of A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava. The dates correspond to the first day of the week in which we will be reading the indicated segment.
Discussion of each segment will occur during that week, probably with some looking back as we go further. And there will be four signed copies of the original POD edition to be given away at various points during the read.
Schedule
June 10: Chapter 1 to Chapter 3x2x1 (1 – 131) June 17: Chapter 3x2x1 to End of . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Douglas Messerli on Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard.
In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we perceive that the feeling of disgust by some writers for others is not just an American phenomenon, but if we are to take the voice of Bernhard’s narrator as an example, perhaps even more virulently experienced in Austria. And, unless we are somehow involved in that scene, the petty hatreds and disgust (amounting almost to nausea) felt by the central character makes for great fun, as he cattily attacks his fellow dinner partners gathered together in Vienna’s Gentgasse for what . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The next installment in the great Aira invasion of the North American continent is upon us: Varamo. My review has just published at The National:
Perhaps it is because Aira stays so close to Varamo’s daily routine that this is one of the most carefully observed of his novels. Due credit must be paid to the translator, Chris Andrews, for putting Aira’s quietly comic locutions into a well-tended English that maintains the compactness and freshness of the original. Each element Aira draws our attention to is placed into sharp focus before being discussed in short, entertaining . . . continue reading, and add your comments
AO Scott on Patience (After Sebald):
So “Patience (After Sebald)” may not, in the end, offer much in the way of explanation. It does not solve the puzzle of an oeuvre that, as it made its way from German to English, established its creator as a major and unique force in world literature. Once you read him, you may discern traces of his influence everywhere (in a book like Teju Cole’s “Open City,” for example) and may find yourself collecting thoughts and perceptions that qualify as Sebaldian. Whatever that might mean.
Harry Mathews, on confusion, as quoted . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Lev Grossman talking about reviewing books is a little like that 50 Shades of Grey person talking about bring an author. Here, Grossman talks about how he picks books for review:
But then there’s the signal – that delicious, delicious signal. People often ask me how I choose books to review. There’s no simple answer; also no especially interesting answer. I review books if they do something I’ve never seen done before; or if I fall in love with them; or if they shock me or piss me off or otherwise won’t leave me alone; if they . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The LARB has a sharp review of The Femicide Machine, plus an interview with author Sergio González Rodríguez.
This caught my eye:
But González Rodríguez agreed to meet us and (winkingly, I thought) chose the patio of the Four Seasons hotel, with its menu of fancy cocktails and uniformed wait staff, as the place. You couldn’t miss the contrast between the setting and the subject matter when González Rodríguez called over the waiter for another round of drinks and then, smiling, pulled out a black-and-white picture to pass around the table. It was going to . . . continue reading, and add your comments
It’s amazing that in 2012 The Atlantic can still publish something so clueless as this. Titled “Could the Internet Save Book Reviews?” the posting purports to be an investigation into just that. So, what vital new review sources does intrepid Atlantic reporter Sarah Fay turn up? After the obligatory smack at Amazon reviews, we learn,
But there are also signs of hope from pioneers like Nancy Pearl, the Seattle librarian behind “Book Lust.” Pearl tends to recommend rather than review but does so with the expertise that only a librarian or someone who works in an independent . . . continue reading, and add your comments
This month, Open Letter is publishing Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets, originally released in Spanish in 2008. Chejfec has also just published a new novel in Spanish, The Dramatic Experience. Heather Cleary, Planets’ translator, offers an intriguing write-up of it.
As was the case with My Two Worlds, the premise of La experiencia dramática can be summarized in a few sentences, though there’s obviously much more to it than that. Felix and Rose are old friends with a standing coffee date; the novel ostensibly takes place during the hour or two their meetings tend to last, though . . . continue reading, and add your comments
David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years:
David Graeber: David Harvey, not the British Marxist geographer-type guy, but David Harvey, the British Marxist economist, actually calculated how much time people in the U.K. spend on labor to get money, versus labor on something not oriented towards money and it comes out at about fifty-fifty. So even in the most market-obsessed society, we’re still spending half of our time on something other than just getting cash. It is really important to emphasize that, because we have a tendency to take this totalizing view that by . . . continue reading, and add your comments
My essay on the experimental film Russian Ark appears today in the new issue of The White Review. This essay comes from a book-length project of such essays I’m currently at work on, revolving around personal reactions to non-canonical films. More, I hope, will be appearing elsewhere in the future.
The full essay is here.
I have often fallen asleep in small theatres. It is an embarrassing thing to have happen during one-man shows, and I am certain that at least one actor, a man whose work I have enjoyed on many occasions and whom I admire, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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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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Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
See Attacks, Vicious
More on Bolano’s Journalist
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)
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