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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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
I obviously don’t have any sort of inside information about what Amazon thinks it’s going to do publishing-wise, but given the company’s public statements on its future as a publisher, I doubt that sucking up all the popular, crappy genre authors is their end goal. If that, in fact, is their goal as a publishing entity, then they’re much dumber than I’ve been giving them credit for. But I doubt it is, since anyone can see how well the pay-huge-advances-to-celebrity-authors model has been working for the big six publishers.
Publishers like to pretend that we make our . . . continue reading, and add your comments
From Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces:
I have several times tried to think of an apartment in which here would be a useless room, absolutely and intentionally useless. . . .
For all my efforts, I found it impossible to follow this idea through to the end. Language itself, seemingly, proved unsuited to describing this nothing, this void, as if we could only speak of what is full, useful and functional. . . .
I sometimes manage to think of nothing, not even, like Raymond Queneau’s Ami Pierrot, of the death of Louis XVI. All of a . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Interesting dual review of their letters, which have been published as separate volumes by the Cambridge University Press. The Beckett is the second volume, the Hemingway is the first.
Young Hemingway sounds like an unbearable correspondent:
It is likewise difficult to find evidence in these letters of the literary understatement for which Hemingway was to become famous. His favored style as a very young man is in fact an elaborate facetiousness, the sort of thing that turns a simple concept like “the last two days” into “the last brace of diurnals.” This is most particularly . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Yale University Press is publishing new editions of Gertrude Stein’s novel Ida and poem Stanzas in Meditation. Publishers Weekly:
In the two new Yale University Press editions of Gertrude Stein’s works, the novel Ida and the experimental poem Stanzas in Meditation (both out January 17), readers will find comprehensive criticism and working drafts of the works, the latter of which reveals the fraught and jealous relationship Stein had with her lover and editor Alice B. Toklas.
Back when we were group reading Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marias, one of the salient topics was an actual campaign executed by Britain during World War II to avoid loose talk. The idea was that you should stay as quiet as possible, because 1) you never knew who just might be a fascist spy; and 2) even things that you might think were completely unrelated to the war could be useful by Nazi agents. Needless to say, this campaign was a frightening example of the kind of governing by fear that has been used throughout . . . continue reading, and add your comments
I just finished his War & War, next up will be Satantango. Interview here.
Many of your works deal allegorically with the end of the world or the demise of civilization. In what other era do you think people might have felt similarly: “that’s it, one kind of civilization has failed?”
I thought you’d ask at the end of which era people did not feel that way. There have been many eras like ours when people not only thought an era was over but that the whole world had come to an end. We know . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Looks the the latest Javier Marias novel, Los enamoramientos, will be available in English in 2013:
An odd piece of work at IberoSphere, where Nick Lyne argues that Spain’s literary giants are lost in English translation [via].
He begins by reporting the exciting news that Javier Marías’ Los enamoramientos is to be published by Penguin in 2013.
That timeline would seem to make sense, given the details of the deal with which Penguin snatched most of the Marias rights from New Directions.
Great article here about how independent bookstores should compete with Amazon, which is essentially by not competing with Amazon. The fact is that indie bookstores will never out-Amazon Amazon, because they got into their business because they love books, and Jeff Bezos invented Amazon because he loves technology.
So, indies should emphasize their strengths, which tend to be Amazon’s weaknesses:
Here in the Boston area, two bookstores have managed to not only survive but thrive: the Harvard Bookstore (not affiliated with Harvard University) in Cambridge and Brookline Booksmith in Brookline. These two stores have a few elements . . . 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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Infinity Nets
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)
You Say