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The End of Oulipo?

The End of Oulipo? My book (co-authored with Lauren Elkin), published by Zero Books. Available everywhere. Order it from Amazon, or find it in bookstores nationwide. The End of Oulipo

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series, Lady Chatterley's Brothercalled “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.
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Book Lists

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The Quarterly Convers-
ation's Favorite Reads of 2012


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Interesting New Books — 2013


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Interesting New Books — 2012


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Interesting New Books — 2011


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The Between Paren-theses Reading List


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36
Out-
standing Novellas


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Essential Oulipo Works


Airships

20 Must-Read Poetry Books


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One-Paragraph and/or One-Sentence Books


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My Favorite Reads of 2010


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


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Damion Searls’ Top Ten NYRB Classics


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Ten Essential Southern Novels


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What I've Read So Far in 2010


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Top 20 Spanish-Language Novels Written Since 1982


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The Greatest Fiction from Argentina


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Great Books of Austria-Hungary


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Interesting New Books — 2010


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Group Reads

The Tunnel

Fall Read: The Tunnel by William H. Gass

A group read of the book that either "engenders awe and despair" or "[goads] the reader with obscenity and bigotry," or both. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.
Naked Singularity

Summer Read: A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava

Fans of Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo: A group read of the book that went from Xlibris to the University of Chicago Press. Info here. Buy the book here and support this site.
Life Perec

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.
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

Shop though these links = Support this site

Ten Memorable Quotes from William Gaddis’ Letters

New Books
Here are ten of my favorite moments from these hugely interesting letters.

Interviews from Conversational Reading

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

RSS New Articles

  • The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov March 6, 2013
    Pevear and Volokhonsky’s ambition in bringing Leskov and all his stylistic peculiarities into English is impressive, and all the more so for how it contrasts with their previous role as translators of Russian. The pair are justly famous for their renditions of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists; their editions of Anna Karenina and Crime and Punis […]
  • Middle C by William H. Gass March 3, 2013
    What distinguishes Middle C from his other fiction, then, is not the that Gass’ protagonist, Joseph Skizzen, spends nearly a lifetime deflecting the dangers and horrors of life itself, but the ways in which the novel’s narrative voice buffers him from the responsibilities of being a protagonist at all. In this, the tale of his life, stretching from the Blitz […]
  • The Field Is Lethal by Suzanne Doppelt March 3, 2013
    This is a strange, engaging book that does not offer up its material to the reader without a struggle. Much of its strength comes from its juxtapositions, not only of idea with idea, word with word, phrase with phrase, but also text with image, image or text with white space, and in a larger sense, the abstract with the concrete. Doppelt is interested in how […]
  • 70% Acrylic 30% Wool by Viola di Grado March 3, 2013
    You can tell that Viola di Grado has a unique voice from the first line of her novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool: “One day it was still December.” If this line seems a little puzzling, the next one puts things in (ironic) perspective: “Especially in Leeds, where winter has been underway for such a long time that nobody is old enough to have seen what came before.” […]
  • Promising Young Women by Suzanne Scalon March 3, 2013
    Plath’s ghost haunts the pages of Scanlon’s book, a non-linear narrative that hinges around Lizzie, a bright liberal arts student from Barnard and aspiring actress who has much in common with Plath’s protagonist. We’ve fast-forwarded forty years to New York in the early 90’s’; like Esther before her, Lizzie has come from the provinces to make a name for hers […]
  • The Available World by Ander Monson March 3, 2013
    What happens to all the old, new things after two or three new, new things replace them? And what of the ideas and memories of which they are ultimately extensions and souvenirs? This is one of the larger questions, really, that Ander Monson poses in his most recent collection of poems, The Available World, though he does so in varying shades of subtly and e […]
  • The Whispering Muse by Sjón March 3, 2013
    There is something immediately seductive about Sjón’s The Whispering Muse. The narrator, a peculiar old Icelander named Valdimar Haraldsson, receives a letter from an old acquaintance, inviting him on a sea voyage aboard the newly launched merchant ship, the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen. Haraldsson, who has long been cooped up in his shabby Copenhagen apartment, r […]
  • Wolf and Pilot by Farrah Field March 3, 2013
    When Farah Field announced the opening of Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop (Field and Jared White’s pop-up shop the only all-poetry bookshop in New York City) two Februarys ago on her blog Adultish, she wrote this: It is kind of an anti-capitalistic act because no one could ever pay what poetry is worth. This sentiment is exactly true ofher new book, Wolf and Pil […]
  • The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht March 3, 2013
    Unless he is John Keats, a poet’s letters seldom stand alone as literature. They might hold our attention as gossip (Lord Byron), psychiatric case study (Robert Lowell) or the after-hours thoughts of a combative poet-critic (Yvor Winters), but few could be pleasurably read without the additional scaffolding provided by the poetry. Even Marianne Moore, one of […]
  • Kind One by Laird Hunt March 3, 2013
    Readers who go into Laird Hunt's Kind One looking for kindly characters are presented with an array of unlikely candidates. It simply cannot be Linus Lancaster, a farmer with delusions of grandeur (his farm is named Paradise) who beats his wife Ginny, rapes his young female slaves Cleome and Zinnia, and whips Alcofibras, the slave who tends his garden, […]

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The Quarterly Conversation, Issue 13, Fall 2008

As we enter our fourth year . . .

Here’s your TOC.

Latin America’s Kafka: What a Sly Argentine Has in Common with a Tubercular Czech

Some of the 20th century’s most innovative fiction came out of Prague and Buenos Aires. Scott Esposito argues that there’s a potent link between the plots being written in each. [more]

Reading Claude Cahun

French gender-bending artist Claude Cahun is generally known as a photographer. She also left behind an impressive body of literature. Lauren Elkin argues should it be read, especially by adherents of challenging Surrealist works.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place: Hard Situations and Easy Morals in Tobias Wolff’s Short Fiction

John Lingan considers Tobias Wolff’s new, career-spanning collection of short fiction. He finds a writer in great debt to Hemingway and unable go embrace the grotesque.

Reviews

All One Horse by Breyten Breytenbach
Review by Ryan Call

Boxwood by Camilo José Cela
Review by Sacha Arnold

Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart
Review by Elizabeth Wadell

The Implacable Order of Things by José Luis Peixoto
Review by Robert Silva

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Review by Scott Bryan Wilson

Winners Have Yet to Be Announced by Ed Pavlic
Review by Levi Stahl

Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek
Review by Kate Evans

Basrayatha by Muhammad Khudayyir
Review by M. Lynx Qualey

Thing of Beauty by Jackson Mac Low
Review by John Cunningham


It’s go in horizontal by Leslie Scalapino
Review by John Cunningham

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
Review by Barrett Hathcock

Interviews

The Horacio Castellanos Moya Interview
Interview by Mauro Javier Cardenas


Fourteen Questions for Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Interview by Martin Riker

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  1. The Quarterly Conversation, Issue 12, Summer 2008 Here’s your TOC. Features The Man Who Invented Borges Essay byMarcelo Ballvé All writers are influenced by someone, but Borges is often seen as wholly...
  2. The Quarterly Conversation: Issue 11 Over and Under Our opionated contributers pick 11 overrated books and 11 underrated books. [more] Where the Readers AreEssay bySam J. Miller Stephen King may...
  3. Fall 2006 Quarterly Conversation Murakami RoundtableContributors: Scott Esposito, Matthew Tiffany, Elizabeth Wadell, and Katie WadellEssaysReviews of Blind Woman, Sleeping WillowA Short Guide to Murakami’s Short FictionThe Murakam Dictionary Elegy...
  4. Quarterly Conversation, Issue 13: Call for Submissions We are reading book reviews, essays, and interviews for Issue 13. We’re got a number of reviews already set and are especially looking for features...
  5. The Quarterly Conversation in Best of the Web 2008 I’m very pleased to say that an essay from The Quarterly Conversation will appear in the inaugural edition of the Best of the Web...

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September 2nd, 2008 | Category: the quarterly conversation

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