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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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Sebald in Harper’s
Harpers has a lengthy essay on Sebald in the April issue, but if you want to read, you gotta pay. It’s discussing this new book of interviews with W.G. Sebald.
The essay’s not bad, but in my opinion it suffers from a general lack of focus that seems endemic to glossy magazine book coverage. Although it’s not uncommon to find glossy essays that make an argument about a book or author and use this argument to organize the flow of the essay, it’s also not uncommon to find essays that just feel like a general collection of thoughts.
I’d say this Sebald essay is of the latter variety. It’s true that it’s an erudite piece with a number of interesting thoughts on Sebald, but without a real, provocative argument I feel like it’s just duplicating the work already done in numerous book reviews and general-interest essays on the man.
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- Essays This piece by Paul Graham is a bit long (and if you’re like me, reading real long articles online is like poking little pins into...
- Gladwell The inevitable has happened. Gladwell fatigue has set in. Although my tone might not be as passionate, I can’t disagree with the general thrust of...
- Calvino on Borges Some thoughts from one of the 20th century’s masters of the short story to another. The last great invention of a new literary genre in...
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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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Enrique Vila-Matas Interview
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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