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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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Sam Mendes Adapting Butcher's Crossing for Film
 Recent readers to this site know that I’ve been evangelizing for John Williams since I read his novel Stoner .
This year I’m planning to read his novel Butcher’s Crossing (which I’ve been told is even better than Stoner, though I hardly believe that’s possible), and now I see that Revolutionary Road director Sam Mendes is adapting it for film. Say what you will about Revolutionary Road (I thought it worked fairly well as a film, though it approached the material with with too much of a now-we-know-better smugness), this can only be a good thing for fans of John Williams. With an assist from Leo and Kate, Revolutionary Road experienced a huge bump in sales and Richard Yates was briefly a spot of attention for the chattering classes.
One potential problem with the flick, though, is that Joe Penhall, who adapted The Road for film, is working on the script for Butcher. I know that it takes a lot of people to make a movie, but the end result of the cinematizing of The Road indicated that somewhere along the line they lost sight entirely of what the book was about and what made it so uniquely affecting and effective.
More from Conversational Reading: - Two by John Williams / Butcher’s Crossing (1960) / Stoner (1965) Given that my literary tastes run towards big, ambitious, hyperactive novels, it wouldn’t seem that Butcher's Crossing and Stoner, the second and third novels...
- Film and Writing In the Guardian, David Hare opines that a film’s visual impact flows from a good script. To jump back into the world of Pinter’s movies...
- The International Film Guide I don’t post too much on film on this blog, but I am something of a film buff and many of the movies currently getting...
- Celebrating Stoner by John Williams For a long time now I’ve meant to read the mid-century American novel Stoner by John Williams. NYRB Classics publishes two of Williams’ books (Stoner...
- Brief Interviews Film Review Jon Krasinski’s film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men has finally premiered at Sundance. Much of the coverage...
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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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So Much for the Granta
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)
I just read a review Stoner earlier today and was intrigued. I will have to check out Butcher’s Crossing as well. on another note, I have been patiently waiting for The Road to come to DVD, so I’m a little discouraged to hear it doesn’t do the book justice.
When will Sam Mendes stop hanging on the coattails of artists superior to him?