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.
Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from this site:
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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Review of My Little War by Louis Paul Boon @ TQC
The latest review at The Quarterly Conversation is My Little War by Louis Paul Boon, published by the Dalkey Archive. Here’s a bit of what our reviewer Billy Thompson thought of it:
Stylistically, My Little War feels more like a journal than a novel. It is a series of short entries (not even stories) that recount things like having a conversation with a meat inspector, remembering a kid who got picked on, and talking to a kid who can’t speak very well. The accounts, all titled and told in the first person, are brief, none longer than 3 or 4 pages, and they read as much like things Boon read or overheard as they do things he experienced. No one story builds upon another. No plotlines unfold. And no characters feel knowable. In fact, many of the characters are simply referred to as What’s-his-name. Without a discernible arc or strong characters, My Little War confounds expectations. . . .
I was halfway through this slim volume after one sitting, and I could not say I was enjoying it—but then a funny thing started happening . . .
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More from Conversational Reading: - Laird Hunt Review at TQC I’m sure a lot of people are still digesting Issue 17, but we’re now publishing new in-between-issue reviews at The Quarterly Conversation. First up is...
- TQC in Powell’s Review We're happy to see that The Quarterly Conversation has made the Powell's Review. Our review of Castle by J Robert Lennon was reprinted in the...
- New Review @ TQC: Shadowplay by Norman Lock Just in time for Thanksgiving, read our review of Shadowplay by Norman Lock, from the estimable Ellipsis Press: With his short novel Shadowplay, Norman Lock...
- World War II Lit World War II remains very contentious in Japan: Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe has won a major court battle over a book he wrote more than...
- War Poetry A very interesting post over at The Millions about a poet who spent several years in the army, including a tour in Iraq, and who...
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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)
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