Features

From the Editors: On the Proliferation of Posthumous Publication

By The Editors of The Quarterly Conversation

The dead, we fear, will never have the last word on their unpublished works. So we turn our editorial energies to a bigger question: should they?

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Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession

Reaching One’s Promise: What Writers Need to Do to Last Ten Years

By Jeremy Hatch

In 1938, Cyril Connolly wrote a book about what writers needed to do to see their work last for 10 years. Jeremy Hatch determines if his predictions were accurate, and how contemporary writers might see their work continue to be read.

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Notes on Juan Villoro’s El Testigo

By Mauro Javier Cardenas

Bolaño said he is “opening up the path of the new Spanish novel of the millennium.” Alvaro Enrigue called his book the great Mexican novel. Mauro Javier Cardenas investigates Juan Villoro’s untranslated novel El Testigo.

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From El Testigo by Juan Villoro

Janet Frame Reframed

By Elizabeth Wadell

What is the difference between fiction and autobiography? Elizabeth Wadell looks at author Janet Frame’s new posthumous novel, too personal to publish in her lifetime, and considers how it compares to the source material as found in her celebrated autobiography.

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Mario Vargas Llosa’s Carnival: Caricature in The War of the End of the World

By Travis Godsoe

Though the word caricature is often used to disparage poor writing, caricature also has its uses. Travis Godsoe shows how Mario Vargas Llosa uses caricatured characters to create a rich portrait of a unique rebel colony in his novel The War of the End of the World.

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From The Museum of Eterna’s Novel

Beyond Neruda: Linking Three of Latin America’s Best Poets

By John Herbert Cunningham

John Herbert Cunningham charts the links between the careers and writings of three of Latin America’s best poets.

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Reviews

I’d Like by Amanda Michalopoulou

Review by George Fragopoulos
I’d Like, Amanda Michalopoulou (trans. Karen Emmerich). Dalkey Archive Press. 144pp, $12.50. For more on Michalopoulou, I’d Like, and the translation of her works, see George Fragopoulos’s interview with Amanda Michalopoulou and Karen Emmerich, also in Issue 16. I Wonderfully polymorphous—is it novel, fictional biography, short story collection, or other?—and incredibly promiscuous in its tones [...]

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Secret Son by Laila Lalami

Review by John Lingan
Books covered in this dual review: • Secret Son, Laila Lalami. Algonquin Books. 304pp, $23.95. • Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih (Denys Johnson-Davies trans.). NYRB Classics. 139pp, $14.00. One modest silver lining in the War on Terror has been the increased Western interest in literature from and about the Islamic, Hindi, and [...]

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Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

Review by John Lingan
Books covered in this dual review: • Secret Son, Laila Lalami. Algonquin Books. 304pp, $23.95. • Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih (Denys Johnson-Davies trans.). NYRB Classics. 139pp, $14.00. (continued from page 1) It’s not as if Lalami is unaware of how to artfully dramatize and describe these cultural and political issues: just [...]

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The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov

Review by Karen Vanuska
The Foundation Pit, Andrey Platonov (trans. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson). NYRB Classics. 208pp, $14.95. A good Sovietologist has shelves packed with books like Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism 1917-1923, Science and Industrialization in the USSR, and Soviet Economic Structure and Performance. However, Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit confronts us [...]

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Tokyo Fiancée by Amélie Nothomb

Review by Matthew Jakubowski
Tokyo Fiancée, Amélie Nothomb (trans. Alison Anderson). Europa Editions. 152pp, $15.00. Tokyo Fiancée is best-selling Belgian author Amélie Nothomb’s brief, detailed novel about two years she spent in Tokyo while in her early twenties. Ostensibly a story of unrequited love, it is also a love letter to Japanese culture, and a revealing—nearly confessional—self-portrait of the [...]

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Gods and Soldiers by Rob Spillman (editor)

Review by Geoff Wisner
Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, edited by Rob Spillman. Penguin. 368pp, $16.00. African literature has been enjoying a boom, or at least a boomlet, in recent years. In his new anthology, Gods and Soldiers, Rob Spillman seeks to capture that phenomenon between two covers. The boomlet has been dominated—at least [...]

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Brothers by Yu Hua

Review by Gregory McCormick
Books covered in this dual review: • Brothers, Yu Hua (Eileen Chen-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas, trans.). Pantheon. 656pp, $29.95. • English, Wang Gang (Martin Merz and Jane Weizhen Pan, trans.). Viking Adult. 320pp, $24.95. It’s a common belief in modern China that the Cultural Revolution ruined society forever. Many argue that before this tumultuous [...]

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English by Wang Gang

Review by Gregory McCormick
Books covered in this dual review: • Brothers, Yu Hua (Eileen Chen-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas, trans.). Pantheon Press. 656pp, $29.95. • English, Wang Gang (Martin Merz and Jane Weizhen Pan, trans.). Viking. 320pp, $24.95. (continued from page 1) Like Brothers, Wang Gang’s novel, English, also tells the story of a child growing up during [...]

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And Let the Earth Tremble at Its Centers by Gonzalo Celorio

Review by Robert Silva
A walking tour of Mexico City’s historic center provides the scaffolding for And Let the Earth Tremble at its Centers, an impressive first novel from Mexican writer Gonzalo Celorio. We begin with a hangover. Dr. Juan Manuel Barrientos, a supercilious architecture professor, struggles through the morning. Recovering from a retirement party the night before, he faces the day with a flagging spirit and an aching skull, and when Juan Manuel manages to make it into the world, the metropolis’s occluded sky—”composed of toxic ingredients, haze, and desolation”—seems the physical embodiment of his state.

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The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

Review by Meg Sefton
The Vagrants, Yiyun Li. Random House. 352pp, $25.00. I have to admit I have recently become addicted to memoirs documenting the harrowing experiences of immigrants fleeing China’s late 20th century political maelstrom. Starting with Zhang Boli’s Escape from China, I went on to read Zhu Xiao Di’s Thirty Years in a Red House, and Kang [...]

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The Spare Room by Helen Garner

Review by Monica McFawn
The Spare Room, Helen Garner. Henry Holt and Company. 175pp, $22.00. Helen Garner’s The Spare Room opens with the narrator, also named Helen, preparing a room for an impending guest. She puts fresh sheets on the bed, fluffs the pillows, fans out an array of books on a table, clips some greenery to put in [...]

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The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla

Review by Ryan Call
The Withdrawal Method, Pasha Malla. Soft Skull. 308pp, $14.95. Pasha Malla is fond of the deke, and the promise of many head-fakes is implicit in the title of his short story collection, The Withdrawal Method. The title both showcases Malla’s odd sense of humor (contraception never actually appears in the text) and gives readers a [...]

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The Bridge of the Golden Horn by Emine Sevgi Ozdamar

Review by John Madera
The Bridge of the Golden Horn, Emine Sevgi Özdamar (trans. Martin Chalmers). Serpent’s Tail. 320pp, $15.95. Consider Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn a kind of bildungsroman, a portrait of the artist as a young migrant worker as it were. The plot threads are familiar: discontented young woman leaves home to seek [...]

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Tinkers by Paul Harding

Review by Michele Filgate
Published in Issue 16 Tinkers, Paul Harding. Bellevue Literary Press. 192pp, $14.95. Paul Harding’s Tinkers meticulously examines life and death, its precision often mirroring that of the protagonist as he performs his vocation of repairing clocks. The novel, although slim, packs much detail into its tightly wound prose: three generations of a hard-scrabbled New England [...]

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A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

Review by Andrew Seal
A Mind at Peace, published in 1949 and set in 1938 and 1939, has long been a cornerstone of Turkish literature, a symbol of the nation’s conflict between the modernizing forces of the West and the traditional Ottoman and Turkish cultures. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s novel is a readily confessed major influence on Orhan Pamuk, the 2004 Nobel Laureate, and it was also in the news recently, as the Turkish government bestowed an English copy upon President Barack Obama during an official visit.

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My Floating Mother, City by Kazuko Shiraishi

Review by Levi Stahl

Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Campbell McGrath

Review by Michael A. Elliott

This Nest, Swift Passerine by Dan Beachy-Quick

Review by Andrew Wessels

King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne

Review by Ron Slate

Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud by Robert Pinsky (editor)

Review by Patrick Kurp

Kenneth Koch: Selected Poems by Ron Padgett (editor)

Review by John Herbert Cunningham

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest by Hadley Haden Guest (editor)

Review by John Herbert Cunningham

Interviews

The Amanda Michalopoulou Interview

Interview by George Fragopoulos
Amanda Michalopoulou is a prolific author of novels, short stories, and children’s books; it is rather difficult, therefore, to locate only one thing that categorizes her work, other than the quality of it, of course. English-only readers are lucky as they can now experience the joy of reading a Michalopoulou work in its entirety: Dalkey [...]

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