Conversational Reading

Since 2004. The blog of the critic, writer, and editor, Scott Esposito

Some Thoughts on Ferrante
I've been working my way through Elena Ferrante's three translated Neapolitan novels for an interview with editor Michael... »
Me Elsewhere
A few things of mine that have run lately. 1. An interview with Jeremy Davies, author of the new novel Fancy and editor with... »
Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, translated and with an introduction by Joel Agee
I love the classics, so it's fantastic to see NYRB releasing a new translation of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, translated and... »
Adventures In Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher
I wanted to throw a little attention toward Adventures In Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher. I haven't had time to read this... »
On My Shelves: W.G. Sebald
The first Sebald that I read was The Rings of Saturn. This was in the spring of 2006. Back then I didn't like... »
What Book Would You Read 100 Times?
I'm a little bit intrigued by Stephen Marche's idea that some books can hold up to being read 100 times or more. This seems... »
My Documents by Alejandro Zambra
Here's my review of Alejandro Zambra's latest book, which, depending on how you want to look at things, is either his first... »
translation, not as autobiography but autography
It's hard to choose, but this may be my favorite quote from Michael Hofmann's translation essay "Sharp Biscuit," found in... »
Eight Questions for Chris Andrews on The Musical Brain
It's early, but The Musical Brain and Other Stories—the first story collection by César Aira to appear in English—is... »
The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura
Minae Mizumura was a runner-up for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award. That year Seiobo There Below was the winner (and... »

John Domini: Scott, this is clearly more terrific work -- but alas, I had
aFag: Don't know about the anthropological quality of the novels.
Gert Loveday: I've just read "Father and Son" and loved it. I think it'll
DCNahm: I meant to comment on this when you posted it, but the week
Sudha Shastri: I have read _Midnight's Children_ several times but only jus
P.T. Smith: Was Ring of Saturn nearly everyone's first Sebald? I was ass
l: Saturn's Moons, W.G. Sebald - A Handbook, edited by Jo Catli

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.

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 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.

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.

The Summer of Genji

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

Your Face This Spring

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

[[there.]] by Lance Olsen December 15, 2014
Lance Olsen is the author of two recent works, [[there.]] and Theories of Forgetting (FC2). The second presents three narratives in a clearly fictional mode while the first offers day-to-day thoughts on living in another country. We rightly suspect that any artist’s memoir or diary ought to be viewed as written with a prospective public in mind, no matter ho […]
Noir and Nihilism in True Detective December 15, 2014
"It’s just one story. The oldest. . . . Light versus dark." Spanning 8 episodes between January and March of 2014, HBO’s runaway hit True Detective challenged the status quo of contemporary crime drama. The show has been widely celebrated for its philosophy, complexity, and visual aesthetic. Co-starring actors Matthew McConaughey as Rustin "Ru […]
The Colonel’s World December 15, 2014
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (born 1940) is considered by many the living Iranian novelist, a perennial Nobel Prize candidate. Dowlatabadi wrote The Colonel some thirty years ago, because in his own words he had been “afflicted.” The subject forced him to sit at the desk and write nonstop for two years. “Writing The Colonel I felt a strong sense of indignation and pa […]
Mr Gwyn and Three Times at Dawn by Alessandro Baricco December 15, 2014
Alessandro Baricco’s well-crafted, elegant prose seems as though it should create the impression of distance, or of abstraction; instead, the reader of Mr. Gwyn and Three Times at Dawn becomes wholly implicated and immersed, drawn into a dreamy and idiosyncratic world that blurs the division between reader, character and writer. As readers, we expect that th […]
The Walls of Delhi by Uday Prakash December 15, 2014
"The paan shop leads to the opening of a tunnel, full of the creatures of the city, and the tears and spit of a fakir." In a single opening line, Uday Prakash sets the scene for the politically incisive, yet intimately human stories of The Walls of Delhi (translated brilliantly from the Hindi by Jason Grunebaum). Lest the fakir suggest otherwise, t […]
The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim and a Life in Translation December 15, 2014
In a speech reprinted in the book, Heim makes a self-deprecating joke about whether the life of a translator is worth reading: “What does a translator do? He sits and translates!” The Man Between serves as a book-length retort by laying bare all the things Heim did: these include persuading the academy that translation is a scholarly (in addition to a creati […]
The Prabda Yoon Interview December 15, 2014
Yes, I think people are not comfortable anymore to write in this straightforward, traditional way, especially the younger, more progressive writers. So it’s interesting—you have social commentary, and you also get a little bit of structural experiment. You have themes that are very, very Thai. I’m actually very interested to see what new writers will come up […]
The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck December 15, 2014
For Jenny Erpenbeck, no life is lived in an indisputable straight line. Which is why, in her new novel (new in English, though published in 2012 as Aller Tage Abend) she approaches the narrative as a series of potential emotional earthquakes, some which take place, some which might have taken place, all of which reveal something of how political turbulence p […]
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass December 15, 2014
Once, at a writers symposium, William Howard Gass remarked that to substitute the page for the world is a form of revenge for the recognition that "you are, in terms of the so-called world, an impotent nobody." There is inarguably no contemporary writer of American stock in whose work one might locate a more ambitious war of attrition between innov […]
Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli December 15, 2014
Luiselli’s first novel, Faces in the Crowd, translated into fluid English by Christina MacSweeney, is the perfect illustration of this attitude toward fiction writing. Narrated in short sections spanning multiple storylines and the better part of one hundred years, it uses "[d]eep excavations" to expose the empty spaces in two lives, those of a you […]

Wallace Marginalia

The writing on this is horrifyingly bad, but there is some interesting information here about the things David Foster Wallace wrote in books he read.

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The Whole Equation by David Thomson

Film criticism as prophesy: a unified field theory of cinema, an attempt to explain how film and America fused to create a new form of consciousness geared to the realities of the 20th century. Thomson's massive, inspired, unwieldy, poetic, and compelling account of how moving pictures became the dominant form of mass communication in our world, and how it created all of us, a creature we might now call homo cinematis.

Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty

Part economics book, part revisionist history of capitalism. A new story of the 20th century. An essential book for understanding our world and where it is headed, and a powerful broadside against income inequality. I compare it to Don DeLillo's Underworld right here, and I do think this is a book that cultural critics and literature-lovers can benefit greatly from.

Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant was one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century. Full stop. Her understanding of narrative structure was also highly original. This book is edited by Russel Banks and collects much of her very best work. Read it, be amazed, see the world anew.

Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasz-
nahorkai

I have never enjoyed Laszlo Krasznahorkai's prose more than in Seiobo There Below. Here he is at his clearest, his most taut, his most imaginative, and his deepest. One of the world's great contemporary writers at the apogee of his art, and a truly important novel of ideas about spirituality, art, and just what is our purpose here on Earth.

Blinding by Mircea Cartarescu

The first volume of an epic trilogy by one of Eastern Europe's most renowned writers. Pychonesque, baroque, mad, the prose here must be read to be believed. Some of Cartarescu's images will never leave my mind. Read the interview with the author in The Quarterly Conversation.

The End of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente

The arrival of a major talent into English. As I write in the San Francisco Chroncile, thee four long stories "chart the lifelong effects of courtship, the months and years in which it turns from desire to heartbreak to nostalgia. Brilliantly translated by the gifted Katherine Silver, Torrente's remarkably precise sentences are as tightly wound as violin strings, his brutal stories coiled like pythons."

The Box Man by Kobo Abe

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.

Head in Flames by Lance Olsen

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.

The End of Oulipo?

Lady Chatterley’s Brother

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