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.
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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 for 99 cents.
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Interviews from Conversational Reading  See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.
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Wallace Shawn and White Privilege
At The Quarterly Conversation, Andrew Ervin ponders a writer’s responsibility to his privileged place in our society. And he does it in light of reading Wallace Shawn’s new play and book of essays:
Reading these Essays a couple times reminded me of the pressing need for white, male, middle- and upper-class authors like Shawn to think and write about race and class and all the issues our rich parents were too fucking polite to talk about in public. I can’t think of another American author more worthy of the Nobel Prize. He’s that good and that incendiary. In short, with this collection he has caused me to think, yet again, about the responsibilities of the privileged artist—that is, about my responsibilities.
As a writer myself, these privileges put me in a position of some dubious, discomforting authority . . .
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- New Wallace Book (Sort Of) Despite the fact that it’s widely available online, the commencement speech David Foster Wallace presented at Kenyon College in 2005 will be published as a...
- Culturally Insular This has to be the dumbest thing to come out of the Swedish Academy since Knut got all up in arms about giving Elfriede Jelinek...
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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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Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
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)
The question of an artist’s “responsibility” is old and thorny and fraught with all kinds of paradoxes. “Responsible” art morphs too easily into melodrama, sentimentality, overt politics and, let’s face it, boredom. Think of all those explicitly political/activist authors from the past — Algren, Steinbeck, Lewis, Sinclair — and consider how many of them are widely read today…how much of their work is considered relevant?
Personally, I don’t think a writer has any responsibility to his society, nor to critiquing or dismantling the status quo. It’s great if that happens as a consequence of his or her fiction, but to mandate it is to vastly restrict the kinds of narratives we can tell. Moreover, Ervin clearly goes overboard when he writes:
“For a white male author to ignore race in his fiction is to willingly accept the most insidious privilege we have: the ability to ignore race.”
See what I mean? White male writers are now vilified for choosing to write about subjects/issues other than race…this narrow, totalitarian notion of art’s “mission” is stultifying.
Let writers write about what intrigues, inspires, angers, bewilders and challenges them. Leave prescriptive manifestos, crusades and propaganda for the birds.