Now Is The Winter Of Our Dusty-dusty 2015/2016, What Are You Reading Now?

I found this over on Twitter. I RTed off Helen Dewitt who seemed chuffed by the mention of The Last Samurai

When on earth was Muriel Spark out of print? the mind boggles.

aw fuck they're ALL s t joshi. gughghghgh

Do all the introductions say how (x) is pretty good but not quite up to the level of lovecraft?

xp
I think quite a lot of her stuff was oop till quite recently - like The Bachelors has just come back out, but I can't remember seeing it in bookshops ever (outside those odd 90s omnibus volumes), ditto The Public Image. Don't know if I've ever seen a new copy of Robinson on shelves. Usually, Girls/Prime/Ballad and a changing cast of three or four others were all I'd see new (2nd hand totally different, obviously).

rivka galchen is great

reading the Penguin edition of Thomas Ligotti stories -- I started last night with "The Last Feast of the Harlequin", which was gripping (if ultimately disappointing)

Perhaps my experience is slightly skewed by living in Scotland, but I see quite a lot of secondhand Spark out and about (tho' yes, Public Image and Robinson are nowhere near as common as her best-known trio - Prime in partic is everywhere)

i bought a lot of new trade paperback spark editions in the late 80's. they had a bunch with similar covers/designs back then. had to dig in 2nd hand stores for some of the more oddball 70's ones.

in the u.s. obviously.

speaking of the new yorker, i tried to read a recent don delillo story in there and zzzzzzzzzzzzzz....didn't make it.

i have to remember to never ever do this again:

"and their odd obscurity, seemed to cluster around . . . something."

it's fine, really. just remind me not to do that if i do that.

it is a little weird that a 25 year old writer in 2001 would be "clumsily seeking out books by women". like it was hard to find good ones?

i wish that thing had been about muriel spark. i could read about her all day long.

No, it isn't hard once you get started, but when you have 'lofty' ideas of literature, it can seem as though the world of Proper Literature and High Art and Experiment solely belongs to men, with perhaps the exception of Woolf, though she's not as good as Joyce anyway (am reframing my thoughts as a teen here, feel free to mock that attitude but it was what I was socialised into). I don't think I discovered Quin and Lispector and Sarraute &c &c until I was around 25ish.

that makes sense. it's terrible though! women rule.

i would also never mock anyone's teenage attitude. i feel like i've been preaching the gospel about my fave women writers for so long i forget sometimes that they are not household names.

i think katherine anne porter was a real teen epiphany for me. and willa cather. and katherine mansfield. i am glad i found them early. most of my reading back then was olde tyme american dude stuff like sinclair lewis and thomas wolfe and stuff like that. dreiser. stuff i would never read now but i would totally read porter, mansfield, and cather in a heartbeat now! they live with me. dreiser not so much.

But the way Dreiser wrote about women, Sister Carrie and Jenny Gerhardt based in part on the lives of his older sisters I think, making their ways through A Man's World, in rough new-money Chicago and New York--that's as far as I've gotten, but sure am glad I read those.
Yeah, Ferrante's said that 19th Century male authors were her first literary heroes, took her a while to check out Eliot etc. Not at all like The Neapolitan Novels' little Lenu and Lila getting into Little Women so early.
The first female writers I can remember being impressed by: some of the few then extant in science fiction mags/collections, like Margaret St. Clair, and, a few years later, the poet Denise Levertov, in the crucially good-and-available mass paperback literary mag, New American Review---which also sometimes incl. Ellen Willis on political events/issues, like the head-clearing "Lessons of Chicago," though of course I knew her more as a rock critic, one of the first, still in the New Yorker then.

are there any good books by men but

i also could not finish that recent delillo story

okay, i'm totally remembering now that i did a book report in front of my english class in high school on ayn rand and i'm cringing a little.

and i'm also remembering that 99% of the books we read for class in school were by men.

need to know more about this book report tbh

ugh, it's embarrassing. a youthful infatuation with the fountainhead. the really embarrassing part was my teacher had to correct me when i said ayn wrong. i pronounced it Ann. still not as embarrassing as the report on heroin that i gave in my american studies class where i turned off all the lights and played "heroin" by the velvet underground on a boombox. the 80's were rough.

Getting to listen to "Heroin" in high school >>>>>>>>> reading Rand

only 25 people heard that heroin report, but they all bought boomboxes

I feel like your teacher didn't really have to correct you. That was on them.

on the pressing issue of the in-print status of Muriel Spark: a quick GIS gives what at a glance are 70s, 80s, and 00s penguin editions; possibly there was an interval in the 90s when her fifth or sixth best novel was criminally unavailable, sure

but this is entirely beside the point of the article, really, and I apologize for the derail

Sorry the above GIS was for woof's test case of 'the bachelors'. results more ambiguous for 'public image'.

still not as embarrassing as the report on heroin that i gave in my american studies class where i turned off all the lights and played "heroin" by the velvet underground on a boombox.

This is not embarrassing, this is awesome. Ayn Rand, however...

these are the ones i bought originally:

http://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780380715701-us-300.jpg

same artist did all the covers, i think.

pride of place in my bedroom.

https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfl1/v/t1.0-9/12803315_1568892746757705_4756028177267247855_n.jpg?oh=47b608246bc67176345e60eb47879375&oe=5752DB69

i have more but they don't fit on my antique elephant spark shelf.

https://scontent-atl3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xft1/v/t1.0-9/12802845_1568892823424364_717876855892152915_n.jpg?oh=2dc21fc57ae2c7eac61d51f812a21e67&oe=578F5573

still haven't read the mary shelley book but i will someday.

Is Don Quixote worth a read? Im intimidated by the size of it

Yes, yes, definitely yes.

It is frequently fun, though at times the sadness wracked me, and it GETS META.

You know you like an author when you have multiple copies of the same book, just because you can't stop yourself from buying another one. I saw two copies each of Symposium, Loitering with Intent, The Comforters, Collected Stories, and Mandelbaum Gate in that line-up.

Spark is amazing -- when she's good she feels like the most quietly assured novelist of the postwar period.

As for "women" wriers, it's no surprise that Willa Cather is never given the same emphasis as Faulkner-Hemingway-Fitzgerald when she's them most skilled novelist of the bunch.

I get it: Fitzgerald and Hemingway are men, and they wrote good stories, and I learned a lot from them, but A Lost Lady and The Professor's House are better executed than anything they published longform.

Spark's shelley book is really good, and really focuses onher 2 SF novels in particular, which I enjoyed alot. Its divided in2 halves, one the life and one the litcrit

the really embarrassing part was my teacher had to correct me when i said ayn wrong. i pronounced it Ann.

what's embarrassing here is that you've since bothered to learn

willa cather really, really great, yeah. the best thing the nerd-competition extracurricular i did senior year of high school gave me was impetus to read death comes for the archbishop twice in a day.

was in my hometown's single remaining bookstore the other day and the girl who works there said someone had just been in yelling at her about not having ayn rand, and i was like uh you have too much ayn rand, you literally have four copies of anthem alone, not to mention the collected letters i already bought from you for safekeeping and the biography i want to read but which you've priced at $17 presumably to repel unworthies like me, and she said yeah but he was looking in the philosophy section, and we loled and loled

And now I am lolling hard at this.

did she give you a discount on the biography

so far on my late-victorian 'weird' penguin classics set i'd say: man, arthur machen is a much better writer than clark ashton smith. surprising no one

Mairtin O Cadhain - The Dirty Dust. Maybe the first time in a long while I've read something where the culture of talk is rendered like this (the equivalent might be in passages of Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives, and there is a film of this). It has quite a few tidbits (and everything is fragmented by this multitude of voice) on Hitler and a fervent nationalism (O Cadhain was a former member of the IRA). I wanted to quote a partic bit that was so Celine-like but I had to return the bk back to the library. Also every chapter does have a page or two of 'literature', which I can see as both pisstake but also really good.

Something tells me that English isn't able to cope with the mass of insults in this book. I think a 'free' translation might've worked better. Glad its around even if it hasn't worked.

xp And then read The Female Quixote

just bought my first muriel spark, actually. driver's seat. i'm doing a writing class at the moment and the teacher picked an excerpt. i really liked the repeated "she is neither good-looking nor bad-looking". pretty hard-hitting even as it is subtle.

i don't even remember that! so much in those books.