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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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.
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Interviews from Conversational Reading  See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.
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The Earthquake
Louis Menand likes the new Jay McInerney.
The chief reason September 11th is a challenge to novelists is that although every New Yorker feels that the attacks made a difference in the way life is lived, it is not clear that the difference is the stuff of novels. McInerney’s premise is that after September 11th anything seemed possible to the survivors. They had walked away from the train wreck, been pulled from the riptide, granted a reprieve, and, for a moment, the world was new again. They could start over, and have the life that they had always felt too scared or dependent or guilt-ridden to have. It’s true that New York briefly—well, it wasn’t so brief, that was the amazing thing about it—turned into a small town after September 11th. The enormous asymmetries that ordinarily organize metropolitan life disappeared. People made eye contact. But the mood was not the spirit of adventure, or escape from the past. It was the opposite. New Yorkers wanted, quietly and desperately, to hang on to the past, and to cherish whatever in the way of normalcy they had had on September 10th. They didn’t fight off their old lives; they made peace with them. September 11th was more likely to end an extramarital affair than to enable one. But: “All happy families are the same.” Novels, notoriously, are not about making peace or cultivating domesticity. Novels are about the demons that wreck happiness inside the bubble by whispering that there is something better for us outside it. In New York on September 12th, those demons were silent.
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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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Biblioklept on Patience (After Sebald)
Stealing from Conversational Reading
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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