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Lady Chatterley’s Brother 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. Read an excerpt.
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Worst Lede Ever
I submit this without comment. The author is Virginia Heffernan.
A deep fantasy of most readers is that their books will one day come to life. Of course there’s the college-reader hope that reality itself will come to shimmer with the intense meaningfulness of books. But you get over that. The wish that remains is less romantic: the longing for a byte of audio here and there, among the pages of text, so you could hear what Uriah Heep really sounds like when he says, “ ’Umble to this person, and ’umble to that” in “David Copperfield,” or a video clip so you could get a sense of Jack Ryan’s appearance in “Patriot Games.” What if you could give your imagination a break and watch a clip of Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan and be done with it?
Full article here. Chad Post’s acerbic commentary here.
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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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So Much for the Granta
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 line about “the material distractions of an overdesigned book” must also be up there among the worst. sentences. ever.
Not the worst lede – there were some typos. Here is the correct and logical version:
A deep fantasy of most readers is that their books will one day come to life. Of course there’s the pubescent porn mag-reading boy’s hope that the pictures they are looking at will step out of the page and embrace them. But you get over that. The wish that remains is less romantic: the longing for a byte of audio here and there, among the pages of text, so you could hear what the naught babysitter really sounds like when she says, “oohhh” in “Naughty Babysitter pt.12,” or a video clip so you could get a sense of Samantha Ryan’s appearance in “War of the Girls.” What if you could give your imagination a break and watch after similar clip and be done with it?
You know that classic head tilt that dogs do when confused? That was me pretty soon into this, and all the rest of the way through.