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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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You Say

  • SirJack: Yeah but Coetzee and Auster aren't raving Marxists, and so t
  • P.: One could play that game with respect to any of these little
  • Gary H: "Calvino, Italo. (Cuba, 1923--Italy, 1985) Elected to the Ou
  • Steve: "Under the auspices of writers that aren’t really all that g
  • P.: No he was not. The point of that article was that Calvino di
  • nickelelr: I dunno, a lot of people get old. I agree that maybe his hea
  • Padraic: What a joke. Eagleton picks a very odd moment to argue for t

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

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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.


  • All That Is by James Salter June 10, 2013
    Salter has been described as a master of sentences, but what might be more accurate is his mastery of word choice and metaphor. His sentences aren’t the sinuous architectural behemoths of James or William H. Gass. Many are terse, quick jabs: “The kiss was light and ardent,” or, describing a writer’s opulent house, “It was like a small family hotel, a hotel i […]
  • Birds of the Air by David Yezzi June 10, 2013
    Yezzi’s poems often hint at oblique narratives. Like a detective, he asks a lot of questions. He’s like a mathematician working an inverse problem, deducing inner dramas from externals. His spirit, however, is sympathetic, not forensic. A friend used to say when someone started complaining about another’s failing, “Be gentle. He’s just a human.” Yezzi’s poem […]
  • The Films of Sangsoo Hong June 10, 2013
    Say you watch Korean movies. Often, outside the peninsula itself, this means you’ve gotten into the murderous grotesquerie of Chan-wook Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” or Joon-ho Bong’s simultaneously goofy and solemn political allegory of a monster mash The Host, or any amount of Ki-duk Kim’s vast, high-profile (and as some fans admit, uneven) output. But menti […]
  • The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim June 10, 2013
    The Iraqi Christ is topical only in the sense of the earliest known newsflashes: the cracked screeds, battlefield reports, and shipwreck stories by the likes of Archilochus, for instance, which remain with us in the form of fragments. These were news before they were ever classical references—indigestible gobbets of event, borne on and on by the flow of tell […]
  • Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin June 10, 2013
    Leonard Tsypkin's short and frenetic Summer in Baden-Baden is a meditation on the morphic and self-defining nature of memory. Tsypkin portrays the sometimes charming but mostly distressing European travels of Fyodor (Fedya) Dostoyevsky and his second wife, Anna Grigor’yevna, and their descent into a woeful situation brought about by the famous author’s […]
  • Silent House by Orhan Pamuk June 10, 2013
    Faulkner’s literary spirit haunts the dusty, cobweb-covered rooms in Pamuk’s eponymous silent house. When the wind blows through the chinks in the masonry, we can even hear the skeletons of the Bundrens', Compsons', Snopes', and Sartoris’ Turkish cousins rattling in the Darvinoğlu’s closets in their decrepit ancestral villa. Cennethisar, once […]
  • A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal June 10, 2013
    “Tulsa is heaven, Tulsa is Italy,” says Chandler on Friends to a boss who has just assigned him to their office there. “Please don’t make me go there.” Lytal, an Oklahoman talking to New Yorkers like a person in Prague persuading tourists to pay top dollar for cheap pilsner, does little to elaborate upon this vision of his native city. Jim recalls “[t]he day […]
  • Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro June 10, 2013
    Mario Santiago Papasquiaro was no stranger to this kind of manifesto, and his announced the coming of the Infrarealists. “The way in to matter,” they proclaim, “is ultimately the way in to adventure: the poem is a journey and the poet is a hero revealing heroes.” And so, in Papasquiaro’s long poem, “Advice From 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic,” we […]
  • A Brief History of Yes by Micheline Aharonian Marcom June 10, 2013
    Marcom’s new novel, A Brief History of Yes, is less overtly transgressive than its predecessor—less centered on sex than on solitude; on the loneliness left after love is over. Previously, Marcom scaled the peak of what two people can do together, whereas now she digs into what drives them apart. So if Mirror expressed ecstasy, Yes explores ecstasy’s ebbing. […]
  • What Comes Next June 10, 2013
    If you were to ask me what comes next, the best answer is that I do not know. But if I try to reason through the question, I tend to divide the problem into parts. On the one hand, one of these parts, the personal facet, is what’s to come after my present literature. Or, rather, what will I be writing, what will the next books be like, or even more important […]

Winter Issue of The Quarterly Conversation

Features

From the Editors: On Lessons Learned and Not Learned From the Nobel

Translate This Book!

We’ve talked to some of the top translators into English working today; we’ve talked to publishers big and small; we’ve talked to agents, journalists, and foreign-language authors. We’ve asked them all for the best books that still aren’t in English. And have they responded. They’ve told us TRANSLATE THIS BOOK!, and now we pass that on to you.

By Scott Esposito and Annie Janusch

Tracing Mahmoud Darwish’s Map

Mahmoud Darwish was a poet essential to Palestinian concepts of identity an nationhood. Here, George Fragopoulos looks at four recently published book by the prolific writer, tracing an outline of the map Darwish left for his readers to follow.

By George Fragopoulos

Now Playing at Pynchon Cinemas: What’s Going on in Pynchon’s Three California Novels

Why does Pynchon keep coming back to California? His latest novel, Inherent Vice, is his third novel set in the state. Here, Donald Brown ponders what Pynchon has found in California . . . and what it has to do with film. [more]

By Donald Brown

Intentional Schizophrenia: J.M. Coetzee’s Autobiographical Trilogy and the Falling Authority of the Author

Throughout his career, Coetzee has relentlessly highlighted the instability of words and stories, perhaps never so much as in his novels after the Nobel prize. Here, Matt Cheney shows how his three autobiographical works belie an attempt to pin down who “JM Coetzee” is.

By Matthew Cheney

Blogging to Gorbachev: Stanislaw Borokowski’s Letters to a Latter Day Cold War Hero

Blog, farce, open letters, or all? Austrian-Polish author Stanislaw Borokowski has been writing a blog to the Soviet Union’s final General Secretary, touching on everything from glasnost to the former world leader’s romantic songs. [more]

By Chris Michalski

Let Me Make a Snowman: John Gardner, William Gass, and “The Pedersen Kid”

“The Pedersen Kid” is the genesis of William H. Gass’s canon. In it Nick Ripatrazone finds the roots of a battle between Gass and John Gardner for the future of fiction.

By Nick Ripatrazone

False Truths: How Fact Is Fiction in Machado de Assis

Widely considered Brazil’s greatest writer, Machado de Assis was a unique writer. Like a Laurence Stern across the Atlantic, this freed slave wrote postmodern literature long before the 20th century.

By Michael Moreci

Only Poems Can Translate Poems: On the Impossibility and Necessity of Translation

Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But what if it’s really not so black and white?

By Ellen Welcker

From The Mezzanine by Nikos Kachtitsis

Read this chapter from The Mezzanine by Nikos Kachtitsis, the first time it’s ever been published in English.

By George Fragopoulos and Lyssi Athanasiou Krikeli

Nikos Kachtitsis’s Dark Night of the Soul and The Mezzanine

George Fragopoulos explains why he wanted to translate The Mezzanine, a book that brings to mind Kafka, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and even Proust.

By George Fragopoulos

From Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities

An excerpt from Polish author Jerzy Pilch’s next novel, available next year.

By Jerzy Pilch (translated by David Frick)

Notes on Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities

Matt Jakubowski introduced Jerzy Pilch’s latest novel, available next year.

By Matt Jakubowski

From An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

An excerpt from Elise Blackwell’s newest novel, available next year.

By Elise Blackwell

Interviews

The Humphrey Davies Interview

Interview by M. Lynx Qualey

The Len Rix Interview

Interview by Paul Morrow

Reviews

Dick of the Dead by Rachel Loden

Review by Levi Stahl

The Sri Lankan Loxodrome by Will Alexander

Review by Andrew Wessels

Rising by Farrah Field

Review by Ron Slate

They Carry a Promise by Janusz Szuber

Review by Patrick Kurp

Tracer by Richard Greenfield

Review by Andy Frazee

Versed by Rae Armantrout and The Winter Sun by Fanny Howe

Review by John Herbert Cunningham

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

Review by Barrett Hathcock

The Tanners by Robert Walser

Review by Scott Esposito

I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett

Review by John Lingan

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain by

Review by Karen Vanuska

The Salt Smugglers by Gerard de Nerval

Review by Ahmad Saidullah

The Witness by Juan José Saer

Review by Andrew Seal

Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher

Review by M. Lynx Qualey

Nog by Rudolph Wurlitzer

Review by Jeremy Hatch

The Cave Man by Xiaoda Xiao

Review by Gregory McCormick

Brecht at Night by Mati Unt

Review by Karen Vanuska

Season of Ash by Jorge Volpi

Review by Paul Doyle

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

  1. Fall Issue of The Quarterly Conversation We’ve just published the 17th issue of The Quarterly Conversation. The TOC is below. If you appreciate what we do and are in a position...
  2. Quarterly Conversation Issue 16 We’ve just published Issue 16 of The Quarterly Conversation. The table of contents is below. If you enjoy this issue and value what we do,...
  3. The Quarterly Conversation Issue 15 We’ve published Issue 15 of The Quarterly Conversation. Full TOC: Features From the Editors: On the Demise of Publishing, Reading, and Everything Else Books are...
  4. Winter 2006 Quarterly Conversation Basking in Hell: Returning to The TunnelEssay by Stephen Schenkenberg When William H. Gass’s 650-page novel The Tunnel was finally published in 1995, following...
  5. 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...

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