Lady Chatterley’s Brother

Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series, Life Pereccalled “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.

Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from this site:

Translate This Book!

Ever wonder what English is missing? Called "a fascinating Life Perecread" 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.

Spring 2011 Group Read

Life Perec

Spring Read: Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec

Starting March 2011, read the greatest novel from an experimental master. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.
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Book Lists

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J.C. Hallman’s 10 Favorite Books of Creative Criticism


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Interviews from Conversational Reading

New Books
See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.

Group Reads

Last Samurai

Fall Read: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

A group read of one of the '00s most-lauded postmodern novels. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.
Tale of Genji

The Summer of Genji

Two great online lit magazines team up to read a mammoth court drama, the world's first novel.
Your Face Tomorrow

Your Face This Spring

A 3-month read of Javier Marias' mammoth book Your Face Tomorrow

RSS New Articles

  • The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus March 5, 2012
    With his second novel, The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus has diverged from the path he trod while becoming one of America’s best-known experimental fiction writers. He’s written a plague fantasy told in first-person by a middle-aged, Jewish husband and father living in the suburbs. It is cold and coherent in its execution, with one narrator and a clear plot, an […]
  • War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann March 5, 2012
    Bachmann famously described the entry of Hitler's troops into Klagenfurt as the end of her childhood. From these pages, though, it isn't clear what immediately followed. Here she seems to exist in a liminal zone between self-determination and powerlessness: she has worked out tactics of flight, but not full resistance or solidarity with others. Thi […]
  • Us by Michael Kimball March 5, 2012
    Michael Kimball’s novella Us originally appeared in the U.K. under the title How Much of Us There Was. Tyrant Books has now brought it out in the United States, where Kimball was born and lives, and his website lists the widespread praise that the book has received. Here are but two of the many accolades: “disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as ac […]
  • The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb March 5, 2012
    Since embracing economic reforms in the early 1990s, India has undergone swift and wrenching changes that are remaking the country from the ground up. As village and farmland give way to tech companies, call centers, factories, and malls, these new landscapes are increasingly peopled by new archetypal characters, much as the similarly radical transformation […]
  • The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky March 5, 2012
    The first English-language publication of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction would not follow until 2006, three quarters of a century after its conception. His extensive repertory consists principally of short stories, of which there are more than one hundred, as well as five novels. The first of these novels selected for English translation (by Joanne Turnbull) and p […]
  • Zona by Geoff Dyer March 5, 2012
    Now we have Zona, Dyer’s book-length explication of the film that he has been mulling over in print for more than a decade. Like the film’s journeying hero, who devises his route by randomly tossing bolt nuts and trudging after them, he’s taken his time getting to the point. But the end result is revealing; despite its critical trappings, Zona reads like a p […]
  • Remaking the Short Story: Four Untranslated Authors from Spain March 5, 2012
    Authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story have had a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inv […]
  • Dogma by Lars Iyer March 5, 2012
    A lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Iyer is the author of Spurious—which won The Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” last year—and, now, Dogma, a sequel to the previous work. Both books are novels in name only—bookstores require these convenient taxonomies. In reality Iyer has written scabrous philosophical comedies about two men […]
  • Mercè Rodoreda and the Style of Innocence March 5, 2012
    The Autonomous Republic of Catalonia now holds up Mercè Rodoreda as a national treasure. Barcelona offers commemorative sculptures, libraries, gardens in her name; government-supported institutes sponsor conferences and translations; a yearlong festival marked her 2008 centennial. Her international champions include Gabriel García Márquez. Apart from two rec […]
  • The Clarice Lispector Roundtable March 5, 2012
    Barbara Epler: The whole Lispector re-launching began innocently enough: our plan had been to bring out a new edition of The Hour of the Star in the old Pontiero translation with an ardent Colm Tóibín preface. (With a backlist of our size—about 1,100 titles from 75 years of publishing—we are always trying to repackage classic backlist to reach more readers.) […]

Reader Picks
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The Quarterly Conversation, Issue 12, Summer 2008

Here’s your TOC.

Features

The Man Who Invented Borges

Essay by
Marcelo Ballvé

All writers are influenced by someone, but Borges is often seen as wholly self-made. Marcelo Ballvé investigates an overlooked influence who himself is worth reading. [more]

Becoming Simone de Beauvoir

Essay by
Lauren Elkin

The second volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s journals has just been published in France. Lauren Elkin explains what they show about the 20th-century’s most famous feminist before she met Sarte and as she was developing her ideas on love and gender.
[more]

Anne Waldman, Anselm Hollo, and the Authentic Avant-Garde

Essay by
Ravi Shankar

Wondering what comes after postmodern writing? Ravi Shankar has found it in a couple of revolutionary poets.
[more]

The Book Art of Robert The, Cara Barer, and Jacqueline Rush Lee

Essay by
Elizabeth Wadell

Elizabeth Wadell talks to three artists about how they make art from objects already overloaded with significance, objects that can be extremely difficult to bake, cut, and paste. [more]

Why I Joined the POD People

Essay by
Richard Grayson

Print-on-demand publishing may not be right for all authors, but it is for Richard Grayson. He explains why he stopped publishing his work the usual way and just started doing it himself. [more]

Living Beyond the End

Essay by
Matthew Cheney

Matthew Cheney finds in Paolo Bacigalupi’s ecology-based, apocalyptic science fiction some of the best sci-fi stories of the last decade. [more]

Disassembling Donald Barthelme

Essay by
Dan Green

Donald Barthelme’s short stories are currently available to readers in three large volumes. Dan Green argues we could read Barthelme better if they were still available as they were originally published. [more]

Interview

The Christophe Claro Interview We speak to the man who brought Pynchon, Vollmann, Gaddis, and Gass into French

Reviews

Girl Factory by Jim Krusoe

review by Robert Silva

Human Smoke
by Nicholson Baker

review by Barrett Hathcock

Nazi Literature in the Americas
by Roberto Bolaño

review by Nigel Beale

Mortarville by Grant Bailie

review by Sacha Arnold

Armageddon in Retrospect
by Kurt Vonnegut

review by Levi Asher

Kissed By by Alexandra Chasin

review by Ryan Call

Knowledge of Hell by Antonio Lobo Antunes

review by John Issac Lingan

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June 2nd, 2008 | Category: the quarterly conversation

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