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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So this plus Joyce leaving copyright means you can attempt to produce your own edition of Finnegans Wake?
The National Library of Ireland has brought forward plans to publish a major collection of James Joyce manuscripts free on the web after a Joycean scholar published the material in editions priced at up to €250.
A solid essay on Julian Barnes at the Boston Review. For some reason, I get the idea Flaubert’s Parrot is underappreciated.
Flaubert’s Parrot was the first of his books to be on the Booker shortlist (England, England and Arthur & George followed, in 1998 and 2005 respectively). It was, and remains, one of my favorite modern novels, and should have been a shoo-in for the prize. I re-read it once every couple of years with undiminished pleasure, mildly obsessed with it much as Geoffrey, a retired doctor and Flaubert expert, is mildly obsessed with an assortment . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Vila-Matas, whose penultimate novel, 2010′s Dublinesque, will be published by New Directions later this year, just published a new novel in Spain: Aire de Dylan (that would be Bob). You can see more about it at the book’s page on Vila-Matas’s rather robust personal website.
You can see him discuss the book (in Spanish) here:
. . . continue reading, and add your comments
At The New Yorker’s book blog, Teju Cole offers a solid review of the new book of Sebald’s selected poetry, Across the Land and the Water.
He had a feeling for the inanimate, too, for ruins and comminuted landscapes, places that have been reduced to their smallest units by the forces of nature and history. He is, in many of these poems, an adept of what Nabokov calls, in “Transparent Things,” “the dream life of debris.” And he understood especially well the private life of objects. As he wrote in an essay in “Unrecounted”: “Things outlast . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Chad, who has been doing a great job walking the fine line between Amazon and publishers, makes an interesting counter-argument to one of Amazon’s biggest purported abuses of its power: removing the “Buy” button from the books of publishers who cross it:
In criticizing Amazon, Alexander Zaitchik includes this line, “[Critics] claim that Amazon bullies small publishers into signing price and promotional contracts that threaten their already slim margins, and doesn’t hesitate to unplug the “Buy” buttons of those who resist.” What you can’t see here is that “resist” is a hyperlink . . . to an . . . continue reading, and add your comments
At the Wall Street Journal, James Hall makes one of the great specious arguments surrounding great literature. Telling us that it’s okay to read bestsellers, he writes:
That’s the beauty of reading for pleasure. When you turn the final page and shut the book, that heady blend of sadness and joy you feel can quickly ripen into a hunger for more. I like to think of bestsellers as a gateway drug. Once you’ve found one you love, books will forever hold a special allure. All comers welcome. No special education required.
OK, that’s actually two specious arguments. . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Bilbioasis is publishing some pretty awesome material at their new translation website (including a wee stray review by yours truly).
You should have a look at Douglas Glover on what may be the Mexican classic, Pedro Paramo, which was one described to me as “Mexico’s Joyce.” (The essay appears in Glover’s recent Attack of the Copula Spiders, which looks to be a great book of literary essays.)
Note how skillfully Rulfo leads the reader by degrees into a metaphysical complacency. At the start of Pedro Páramo, Juan Preciado, like the reader, depends for . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Almost Never, publishing tomorrow from Graywolf. I’m about 100 pages in and it’s as good as I have been led to believe.
Here’s Francisco Goldman’s fulsome praise for Sada:
Roberto Bolaño considered Daniel Sada to be without rival among Mexican writers of their generation. Both were born in 1953. Bolaño spent his adolescence in Mexico, and even though some of his greatest novels and stories have Mexican settings, he never set foot there again after moving to Spain in his early twenties. I imagine that Bolaño must have relied, at least to some extent, on Sada’s . . . continue reading, and add your comments
There you go:
THANK YOU FOR YOUR NOTE. I HAVE NOT YET READ THE GADDIS, BUT I’M IN CONTACT WITH FRANZEN, WHO’S APPARENTLY BEEN CHARGED THE TASK OF A COMPREHENSIVE GADDIS PIECE BY THE NYer, AND IS ‘STRUGGLING’ WITH IT.
I actually thought Franzen exceeded his usual when writing about The Recognitions, but, alas, not a great piece of criticism on the whole.
Thank you LRB archives.
The conservative sympathies of the ‘what if?’ volumes become clear as soon as you look at their contents pages. The topics tend to concern how much better history would have been if some revolutionary or ‘radical’ event had been avoided (if Charles I had won the Civil War; if the English had won the war against the American colonies; if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War; if Germany had won the Great War) or, less often, how much worse history would have been if it had taken a more progressive turn. . . . 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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Someone Save Criticism from The Atlantic
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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