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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Tales of Freedom by Ben Okri Review
Jay Parini reviews Nigerian author Ben Okri's newest book, Tales of Freedom, which is as of now unlisted on Amazon's U.S. site. Okri has long been one of the continent's more interesting authors, and Parini confirms that he still is:
Ben Okri supposedly creates a new form in his latest book, a loose collection of folk tales. He explains: "The following tales are properly 'stokus'. A stoku is an amalgam of short story and haiku. It is a story as it inclines towards a flash of a moment, insight, vision or paradox." Needless to say, a writer should not have to tell us what has been attempted. These are vague sketches – ill-formed, framed in generalised symbolic language, with only occasional moments of genuine poetry and insight.
He has often drawn on African folk tales for stylistic effects, with good results. His last novel, Starbook, was set in Africa, yet I doubt any African would recognise the magical kingdom he evokes in those pages. The longest story in this new book, "The Comic Destiny", could also be set in Africa, but it's a primordial place, a kind of Eden, although Adam and Eve seem to have hung around a bit too long. They become Old Man and Old Woman. Much of their time is spent torturing or berating their hapless servant, Pinprop – a figure who combines elements of Lucky and Pozzo from Waiting for Godot
But this is Beckett on hallucinogens.
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The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
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Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
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