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.
Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from this site:
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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When Non-Fiction Isn’t But Is
Really, there’s a bit of a difference between just making things up abot your life and writing a book of reportage that changes certain details, and acknowledges that fact. Also, what’s up with criticizing a book that’s clearly nonfiction for not being novelistic enough?
I guess the real unfortunate thing here is that you can expect a review or two of this quality in each issue of the SF Chron book review.
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More from Conversational Reading: - Chron Apparently, the Chronicle has lost 1/3 of its Sunday Review space. (It was looking shorter lately.) That’s unfortunate . . . compared to other papers...
- So Much Fiction? So the NYT is crowing that its Notable Books list is 50/50 fiction/nonfiction. The Literary Saloon suspects a little fuzzy logic: The divide is not,...
- Why is Non-Fiction More Popular than Fiction The Guardian checks in with an interesting article on how the rising tide of non-fiction books threatens to swamp fiction. Although fiction still sells in...
- True Fiction I’m nt sure what the point of this is. I’m guessing (hoping?) that it’s not an ironic defense of people who invent parts of their...
- The Difficulties of the Fiction Market Pt. II Dan Green delivers a nice post on the difficulties of getting your fiction published, even if you’re both brilliant and a veteran writer. Raymond Federman,...
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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)
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