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Shop at Amazon though these links and this site gets a kickback.
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The Quarterly Conversation
Now available is the first "issue" of The Quarterly Conversation. It includes book reviews (Devil Talk, The Breaking Point, Hardboiled & Hard Luck, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost), an interview with Banana Yoshimoto’s English translator, and an essay by none other than Dan Wickett.
Several people have graciously dedicated some of their time toward writing material for The Quarterly Conversation and I thank them all for their contribution.
Basically, I’m going to try to put one of these out every three months. This is meant to be an adjunct to this blog, a place perhaps slightly more suited to interviews, book reviews, and such than in this space. It’s meant to be read and viewed like a web magazine (as opposed to a blog), although there is space for comments, if anyone is so inclined.
If anyone would like to contribute in some capacity for the next installment, my e-mail is in the left-hand column.
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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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Congratulations, Scott. I took a quick look — I will have to examine it in more depth later — but The Quarterly Conversation looks provocative. I was especially pleased to read the review of Stephen Koch’s new book on Hemingway and Dos Passos, as Koch’s other work, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop — is being dissected rather severely over at Slushpile.
A New Conversation
Scott Esposito has unveiled his latest project,The Quarterly Conversation. Looks really interesting, definitely more litmag than litblog in intent. In Scott’s words: I fire off blog entries without much revision or second thoughts–which can be a good …