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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Poll Results
You guys don’t like Michiko. 55% of you called her the NYTimes’s worst critic. 33% went with Janet Maslin (the correct answer) and only 13% fingered the milquetoast William Grimes. Sometimes it pays to be colorless and odorless.
I’ll grant that Michiko is more radioactive than Maslin, but no way is she a worse critic. Janet’s terrible. Look for a new poll soon.
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More from Conversational Reading: - A Tale of Two Reviews William Grimes and P.J. O’Rourke agree that Leslie Savan’s Slam Dunks and No Brainers is a self-righteous rant that isn’t worth your time. So why...
- Review Shorter Michiko Kakutani: Updike doesn’t really know what the hell he’s talking about and as an art critic is pretty much on par with that...
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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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On Joining Oulipo by Accident
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)
Reviews in The New York Times, as distinct from its weekly Book Review, are better thought of as columns, at least when the regulars write them. Janet Maslin gets the “smart popular” books, and she’s a very astute judge of what a certain metropolitan, sophisticated but mildly hedonistic market is going to like. She affirms not so much the value of books as the attitudes of her readers.
Michiko Kakutani, on the other hand, is the tough-guy intellectual who doesn’t like anything. This is as much a posture (if not a pose) as Maureen Dowd’s girly feminism or Russell Baker’s wry modesty. Kakutani can be wildly wrong and not very bright (see her review of “Never Let Me Go”), but her persona is adamant.
Whether its worth while to read these “reviews” is an open question, but they’re abour their writers, not the books.