Quarterly Conversation Issue 16

We’ve just published Issue 16 of The Quarterly Conversation. The table of contents is below.

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Now, onto the TOC:

From the Editors: On the Proliferation of Posthumous Publication

The dead, we fear, will never have the last word on their unpublished works. So we turn our editorial energies to a bigger question: should they?

Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession

Scott Esposito evaluates the complete works of one of America’s most highly regarded authors. In Cormac McCarthy, he finds an author obsessed with questions of free will and identity.

Reaching One’s Promise: What Writers Need to Do to Last Ten Years

In 1938, Cyril Connolly wrote a book about what writers needed to do to see their work last for 10 years. Jeremy Hatch determines if his predictions were accurate, and how contemporary writers might see their work continue to be read.

Notes on Juan Villoro’s El Testigo

Bolaño said he is “opening up the path of the new Spanish novel of the millennium.” Alvaro Enrigue called his book the great Mexican novel. Mauro Javier Cardenas investigates Juan Villoro’s untranslated novel El Testigo.

From El Testigo by Juan Villoro

El Testigo, currently unavailable in English, has been lauded as the “great Mexican novel.” Here chapter three of this book is translated by Chris Andrews.

Janet Frame Reframed

What is the difference between fiction and autobiography? Elizabeth Wadell looks at author Janet Frame’s new posthumous novel, too personal to publish in her lifetime, and considers how it compares to the source material as found in her celebrated autobiography.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s Carnival: Caricature in The War of the End of the World

Though the word caricature is often used to disparage poor writing, caricature also has its uses. Travis Godsoe shows how Mario Vargas Llosa uses caricatured characters to create a rich portrait of a unique rebel colony in his novel The War of the End of the World.

From The Museum of Eterna’s Novel

Long hailed as an avant-garde classic and precursor to Borges, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel will finally be available in English next January from Open Letter Books. We offer a preview of what’s to come.

Beyond Neruda: Linking Three of Latin America’s Best Poets

John Herbert Cunningham charts the links between the careers and writings of three of Latin America’s best poets.

Reviews

I’d Like by Amanda Michalopoulou
Review by George Fragopoulos

Secret Son by Laila Lalami
Review by John Lingan

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
Review by John Lingan

The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov
Review by Karen Vanuska

My Floating Mother, City by Kazuko Shiraishi
Review by Levi Stahl

Tokyo Fiancée by Amélie Nothomb
Review by Matthew Jakubowski

Gods and Soldiers by Rob Spillman
Review by Geoff Wisner

Brothers by Yu Hua
Review by Gregory McCormick

English by Wang Gang
Review by Gregory McCormick

Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Campbell McGrath
Review by Michael A. Elliott

And Let the Earth Tremble at Its Centers by Gonzalo Celorio
Review by Robert Silva

This Nest, Swift Passerine by Dan Beachy-Quick
Review by Andrew Wessels

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
Review by Meg Sefton

The Spare Room by Helen Garner
Review by Monica McFawn

King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne
Review by Ron Slate

Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud by Robert Pinsky
Review by Patrick Kurp

The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla
Review by Ryan Call

Kenneth Koch: Selected Poems by Kenneth Koch
Review by John Herbert Cunningham

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest by Barbara Guest
Review by John Herbert Cunningham

The Bridge of the Golden Horn by Emine Sevgi Özdamar
Review by John Madera

Tinkers by Paul Harding
Review by Michele Filgate

Interviews

The Amanda Michalopoulou Interview
Interview by George Fragopoulos

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