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.
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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 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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Saw this in a bookstore not too long ago and would have bought it, except I’d already bought five books that day. Reviewed at the New Statesman.
But in an age of specialisation it is easy to defend versatility to the point of fetishism. A great deal of journalism is ill-served by being reprinted in anthologies neither portable nor navigable. And although we may wish to have four or five such books to represent not the range of Macdonald’s strengths but the glory of his output, a cohesive collection is preferable to a comprehensive selection.
. . . continue reading, and add your comments
Another fun list of ten difficult-to-translate words. It makes one wonder—how exactly do words like this get adopted into discourse. Surely English-speaking people have a lot of these same situations and dilemmas, even if we don’t have the single words that denote them.
Ilunga From the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, this word has been chosen by numerous translators as the world’s most untranslatable word. Ilunga indicates a person who is ready to forgive any abuse the first time it occurs, to tolerate it the second time, but to neither forgive nor . . . continue reading, and add your comments
In March the Dalkey Archive will be publishing the second of Suicide-author Edouard Leve’s four novels to be translated: Autoportrait. The cover is rather awesome.
Just wound up an interview with AP translator and Paris Review editor Lorin Stein.
Dalkey Archive, which has acquired William Gaddis’ major books, is also publishing Fire the Bastards! a famous screed against the critics who failed to appreciate The Recognitions’ greatness upon its release.
The Paris Review discusses:
The text to which green refers, Fire the Bastards!, an excoriation of the Recognitions’ original reviewers, came out in the pages of a paper called newspaper, typewritten, mimeographed, and stapled on beige, legal-size paper beginning in 1957. At the beginning of February Fire the Bastards! will be reissued in book form by Dalkey Archive Press, which first collected . . . continue reading, and add your comments
The latest book in the Walser renaissance has just been published: Berlin Stories, translated by Susan Bernofsky, published by NYRB Classics.
The NYRB blog offers a story from the book, in its entirety (it’s short).
More on Walser from The Quarterly Conversation:
The Microscripts Interview with Susan Bernofsky The Tanners The Assistant
We’ll have a review of the Berlin Stories in an upcoming issue.
Nice interview here with Tariq Goddard, who runs Zero Books with his wife. Zero is doing some very interesting stuff with cultural criticism these days. They’re the publisher of, for instance, Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism, which I’ve raved previously here. (I’ll have a review of this book in Bookforum in the not-too-distant future.)
Mark Thwaite: Tariq, please tell us how zer0 books came about and why you started it?
Tariq Goddard: Launching the imprint meant persuading a publisher, John Hunt, to provide the the practical infrastructure and capital necessary to move into an . . . continue reading, and add your comments
William Gaddis edition:
I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which The Recognitions’ debt to Ulysses was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read Ulysses.
(March 1972 letter to Jean [?] Howes)
I’ve about reached the end of the line on questions about what I did or didn’t read of Joyce’s 30 years ago. All I read of Ulysses was Molly Bloom at the end which was being circulated for salacious rather than literary merits; No . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Tim Parks on the importance of not reading internationally:
One of the functions of a canon or a national tradition has been to provide a familiar group of texts, stretching from past to present, constitutive of one’s own community and within which a writer could establish his position, signalling his similarity and difference from authors around and before him. Nuance is more telling than absolute novelty; the more the similarities, the more what difference there is will count. Hence, it might be more useful for a young English writer to be building up a knowledge of, say, . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Seriously?
As it happens, prose-flatness is not atypical of Bolaño (whose story “Labyrinth” appears in this week’s issue of the magazine). He was something of an anachronism: a great novelist who was not a great writer. You have to go back to Balzac and Dostoyevsky to find masters of the novel form who showed so little interest in the sentence.
I refer this misguided soul to James Wood:
The best way to offer a sense of this writer might be to take a scene, and a sentence, from “By Night in Chile,” still his greatest work. . . . continue reading, and add your comments
It’s important to remember that the way we conceive of the activity of “creating art” now isn’t necessarily how people who created art in past times conceived of it. In other words, a lot of the stuff that we go look at in museums now wasn’t considered art by its creator in the same way that we’d look at it.
Counter-activity can have value even if the original goal is discarded entirely, he said: his friend Mike Harte, who at one time aspired to be an artist but always seemed to find something else to do (sitting about, . . . 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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Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
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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