Quarterly Conversation #25

I mentioned the new issue of Quarterly Conversation a couple weeks back in relation to the long piece I have in there about Antonio Lobo Antunes, but never got around to making a post about all the other great stuff in this issue . . . So, here’s a list of excellent articles that are definitely worth checking out:

• In the Wake Per Petterson and the Notin of Contemporary Existentialism by Adam Gallari

Petterson is one of those special international authors who has “broken through” over the past few years, thanks in large part to Graywolf and their success with Out Stealing Horses.

• A Man Taking Pictures of a Man Taking Pictures: Theory of Mind, the Novel, and B. S. Johnson’s Subjective Objective by Michael Sheehan

I love B. S. Johnson, and have put off reading The Unfortunates for a while, just so I have one final Johnson book to read on some day when I’m snowed in my apartment . . . which, this being Rochester and all, might happen next Monday.

• The Year of Living Mildly by Edward Gauvin

Edward is a great translator (check out his Chateaureynaud collection), excellent (and wide) reader, great “guest blogger,” and all around fantastic person. Edward also has a translation From D’Outre-Belgique by Yves Wellens in this issue.

• Excerpt from Providence by Juan Francisco Ferre, translated by Kyle James Matthews

Here’s what QC has to say about this (a description that totally sold me):

Providence (2009) is Juan Francisco Ferré’s most ambitious novel, his longest and more complex fictional work to date. Written during one of his stays at Brown University, Providence, as much as Ferré’s previous books, is a deeply erotic, abrasively satirical, gargantuan fiction dealing with both contemporary American culture and Spanish literary tradition. But rather than focusing on cultural differences, Ferré investigates the common literary roots of the new global culture, producing a true “transatlantic” fiction—in some sense. Providence could be considered as much a Spanish novel about America as an American novel written in Spanish.

As always, there are a ton of great reviews in this issue, including Dan Green on Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence; Christiane Craig on Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann’s AnimalInside; Hugo Browne-Anderson on Cesar Aira’s The Seamstress and the Wind; and David Auerbach on Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident; among others.

Definitely worth spending some time with this issue . . .