new novels and why they suck and whatever

i really liked fortress of solitude

have you read much david mitchell?

and which victor pelevin novel is good to start with?

ok now i have more thoughts--

1) i am pretty sympathetic to the complaint that a lot of new fiction that gets published is just not very interesting. but im not particularly sympathetic to the idea that the majority of critically-acclaimed stuff is uninteresting, depending on which critics were talking about.

2) how do you know these books are unadventurous garbage, if you havent read them--no snark but "bored New England housewives or abused children in the South" can be subjects of extremely adventurous books; ask william faulkner.

3) theres nothing wrong with "safe" books anyway but if we really have to feel like were freaking out the squares or whatever, theres still plenty of it.

4) its v possible to just ignore most book critics the same way you ignore most music critics and most movie critics. i mean, if this is a thing that is making it difficult for you to enjoy book culture.

5) do you guys go to bookstores ever? serious question. i get my recommendations from friends and some from publicists and some from "real life" critics. but it can be really fun to go to a bookstore and just spend twenty minutes looking around at their 'new arrivals' or 'new in paperback' tables! good bookstores have good buyers who recommend good books. ime.

Joyce, Borges, Faulkner, Burroughs, Cortazar, Calvino, Moorcock, Bester, Cabrera-Infante, Brandao, Morrison, PKD

btw this is a list of, you know, mostly all-time heavy hitters. kind of unfair to put them up against the average writers of any period of writing.

just saying, if you head to the library and are like, "where is all the stuff thats as good as joyce and borges" youre gonna be headed for disappointment

and which victor pelevin novel is good to start with?

this was my intro
http://img.infibeam.com/img/4e4341ea/76120/BE/EPB/P-M-B-9781101175262-BEEPB.jpg

I go to the local bookstore all the time & for the past year or so if I read about an interesting book on a blog or wherever I'll order it from them instead of alibris or powells. perusing the new arrivals is a highlight of my week pretty much every week, there are always more books than I'm ever going to get to but holding them in my hands & checking them out still feels to me like actually knowing something about them (as against reading about them online, which I'll forget having done inside of ten minutes or so).

I'm dying to read Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist" but it was £££ in hardback here and had a hideous cover so i couldn't - will have to wait for the pb. Anyway, that sounds exciting.

And the ilx top novels thread has plenty of recommendations on it, I picked up Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" off the back of that but I'm yet to get round to it.

serious question, shakey mo do you hate women

i don't go to bookstores because i end up buying books there!

also shakey it seems pretty strawmanish to list "those" authors and then talk about the fucking kite runner and lethem. i mean have you read anything recently "in that tradition"?

that's not a serious q unless you want to tell him/us why you are asking it.

xxp

yeah was gonna say, why are you even picking up the kite runner, seriously

also, what makes the kite runner suck is not its lack of experimentation, its the fact that its a poorly-written, poorly-plotted, paper-thin excuse for a tv movie masquerading as a book

i woulda been more acker, leyner? i admit i'm a bit of a loser wrt freaking out the squares. I never really got over reading brett easton ellis in secondary school and i kindof tend to like books that feel a bit more aggressive or whatever, and that are really stylish or stylised, that draw attention to themselves as books but not in a precious way (go f urself safran foer)

also shakey it seems pretty strawmanish to list "those" authors and then talk about the fucking kite runner and lethem. i mean have you read anything recently "in that tradition"?

― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, June 25, 2010 5:09 PM (1 minute ago)

i kinda genuinely want to know: who is now "in that tradition" i would like a good place to start reading new stuff that i will like from bc i am gen. clueless

have you read much david mitchell?

never heard of him. where to start?

2) how do you know these books are unadventurous garbage, if you havent read them--no snark but "bored New England housewives or abused children in the South" can be subjects of extremely adventurous books; ask william faulkner.

hey I can't read everything, I can get a sense of what things are from reviews (or from reading the first 20 pages or so) if I need to. but this is par for the course with any creative medium. and it's not the subject matter I was objecting to in those particular cases, it's more the relatively straightforward way in which those things are addressed. There's nothing inherently boring about the subject of the Kite Runner or White Teeth, I just didn't like how they were presented - the subject matter on it's own is not enough to recommend it. (And you just KNOW that particularly in the case of something like the Kite Runner, the purportedly "transgressive" nature of the subject matter was used as a selling point).

5) do you guys go to bookstores ever? serious question. i get my recommendations from friends and some from publicists and some from "real life" critics. but it can be really fun to go to a bookstore and just spend twenty minutes looking around at their 'new arrivals' or 'new in paperback' tables! good bookstores have good buyers who recommend good books. ime.

the big one I used to go to closed recently, unfortunately. City Lights is now a bit of a trek but I did enjoy perusing their staff picks (which introduced me to Link, maybe a couple others iirc). Unfortunately most of my friends have stopped reading fiction altogether, with a few exceptions. I do have a gay former lit-major friend who reads a TON, but his taste can be kind of indiscriminate and lately he's been super-into 19th century stuff like Thomas Hardy and the Brontes (which bores me to tears lol)

xp

JM Coetzee is one of the newer cannonized heavy hitters right

like i seriously doubt the middlebrow trade rags of the day were all "if you love fiction, you MUST read 'the ticket that exploded'!"

anyone who is recommending you the kite runner is just flat-out not to be trusted when it comes to book recommendations, end of story

i kinda genuinely want to know: who is now "in that tradition" i would like a good place to start

I echo this question

serious question, shakey mo do you hate women

I'm assuming this is a joke but I don't get it

mitchell is pretty awesome as far as mixing in sci-fi elements with literary fiction in a natural and interesting way, imo. 'cloud atlas' is his biggie, but i think his debut 'ghostwritten' is underrated. ('number9dream' is the only one i haven't read yet).

well i mean what range of years are we talking here? 1980 onward? '90 onward? last decade onward?

it was a joke, I didn't see morrison on your list tho so I guess it didn't even make sense!

btw this is a list of, you know, mostly all-time heavy hitters. kind of unfair to put them up against the average writers of any period of writing.

this is a fair point but just moves the goalposts to well, where are the heavy hitters of today then? Is Coatzee really considered on that level? My gay lit major buddy has a ton of his stuff, I could borrow some

xp

lets say 90 onward

coetzee writes about abused south africans so

i suppose Bolano is supposedly but i genuinely hated what i read of 2666

xxxp

shakey read waiting for the barbarians

the real problem is that yr talking about a clutch of artists who were *already vetted* by the lit establishment before any of us on this thread were reading grownup novels. so when you talk about "places to start" and worrying about "hating them," yr essentially complaining about not wanting to do yr own work. i am sure there were people plowing through the grove and olympia backlists back then because they were turned onto one of the heavy-hitters and had to slog through a bunch of late-modernist/early-postmodernist garbage to find them gems.

all I know about bolano is that thank god for new directions that he died

i guess mark z danielewski, i gave up on house of leaves in school but i've been eyeing it up on amazon again.

the real problem is that yr talking about a clutch of artists who were *already vetted* by the lit establishment before any of us on this thread were reading grownup novels. so when you talk about "places to start" and worrying about "hating them," yr essentially complaining about not wanting to do yr own work. i am sure there were people plowing through the grove and olympia backlists back then because they were turned onto one of the heavy-hitters and had to slog through a bunch of late-modernist/early-postmodernist garbage to find them gems.

― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, June 25, 2010 1:19 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

this feels like someone stumbling into an ILM thread and demanding to know where all the adventurous pop music is

so as not to miss the obvious, have you read 'infinite jest'? i mean, as long as we're talking about experimental structures and sci-fi tropes etc.

shakey read waiting for the barbarians

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, June 25, 2010 1:19 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that is a great novel!

this feels like someone stumbling into an ILM thread and demanding to know where all the adventurous pop music is

― max, Friday, June 25, 2010 5:21 PM (11 seconds ag

I guess, except that really the q. i'm asking is "where can i read abt modern fiction that has a boner for 'experimental' storytelling" which is more specific and the music equiv. would actually be answerable, yall have given me so many not answers that it makes me think there ISN'T an equiv. for books

the real problem is that yr talking about a clutch of artists who were *already vetted* by the lit establishment before any of us on this thread were reading grownup novels

I dunno about that - I feel like I've lived through PKD's critical resuscitation (certainly his commercial one), and Brandao and Cabrera-Infante were basically unavailable in this country for decades. Moorcock is basically persona non grata in the US.

xp

I think Shakey should read Paul Magrs.

I couldn't get through Infinite Jest, something about DFW really puts me off (couldn't make it through his essay collection either)

i don't know what's wrong with not wanting to do my own work? i just wanna like what i read.

i can't deal with DFW either.

the answer is LIT MAGS, people. jesus.

agni
conjunctions
black clock
etc etc etc.

shakey read waiting for the barbarians

the wiki entry on this looks interesting, I'll see if I can borrow it from my buddy

shakey read correction by thomas bernhard

i really liked infinite jest. a lot.

lit mags require a whole other level of work, come on...

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/NewAnswersControllerServlet?boardid=55

lol @ lit mags, I love 'em but it's like if I find one or three good stories in one I am like holy shit they've really done their job

btw this is a list of, you know, mostly all-time heavy hitters. kind of unfair to put them up against the average writers of any period of writing.

― max, Friday, June 25, 2010 1:03 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the real problem is that yr talking about a clutch of artists who were *already vetted* by the lit establishment before any of us on this thread were reading grownup novels. so when you talk about "places to start" and worrying about "hating them," yr essentially complaining about not wanting to do yr own work. i am sure there were people plowing through the grove and olympia backlists back then because they were turned onto one of the heavy-hitters and had to slog through a bunch of late-modernist/early-postmodernist garbage to find them gems.

― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, June 25, 2010 1:19 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, both these things. modern fiction is bewildering in that by definition we don't have much distance from it. i get intimidated by the sheer bulk of it all the time and i am also scared to recommend novels itt for fear of revealing my middlebrow taste. lately i've just been reading a bunch of stuff and i don't know, maybe i'm just really tractable but i've enjoyed most of it.

it's like ib singer's line about yiddish: It was dying two hundred years ago, and will continue to die for another thousand years

i like this. you could even apply it to the "bourgeois subject" which is the corollary for the "ideal reader" im trying to talk about (poorly). forgive the lapse into crit-speak.

would harry potter be considered a weak hit in the novel's heyday, the same way 30 rock's finale's numbers are miniscule compared to mash's?

xp Same can be said for madrigals, or tapestries, right? No artform ever dies. Every artform has been equally popular throughout history, and it's only chicken littles who say otherwise. The novel was thriving in the 14th century and will continue to do so for eternity.

Many good epic poems are still being composed every year.

I harp on this a lot because I feel like too many people overlook it or ignore it, as though art gets made in a vacuum regardless of financial support.

this is a good point, but i think it's only applicable to a small time frame? how many novelists of previous centuries wrote because they didn't have to work? there's a kind of bourdieu-ian social outbidding that was going on that's as important as economics as far "initial conditions" go for creating good literature--though neither are necessary/sufficient, perhaps.

I think a lot of novelists of previous centuries wrote because they didn't have to work, which would exactly be my point. An advance means you don't have to work. Not sure if that's what you meant or not.

I just sort of take the cliche that 'no novel can be judged in its own time' to be true, let's wait 20 more years until we read Emily Gould

lol, I am in no hurry to read Emily Gould's novel, I just enjoyed her description of what a $200,000 advance actually means to a normal, flawed, not particularly frugal but not absurdly excessive young person.

that's what i meant, Hurting. i suppose you could designate an era of the "publishing industry" which made it possible to make a living by laboring as a writer of novels.

and yeah 龜 otm of course about historical perspective.

the amount of time it takes to write a novel kind of sets a novel back in a previous era once it comes out though, no?

Takes like a few days, maybe a week at most ime

my buddy has been working on a novel forever, and i just envision him now hastily revising it to account for america's new middling interest in soccer and what that exactly means.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--ZfjOWxE0--/1320199782204730216.jpg

http://review.gawker.com/25-unedited-excerpts-from-joshua-cohen-s-the-book-of-nu-1714663755

im coincidentally reading it rn, maybe 100 pages in -it's ok to good, too much and show-offy def, i feel like i skip like one of every 8th word and maybe im supposed to glaze thru it & its abt how we read ~online~ deep thots

this one 1 just read & is gold btw for "Words are garb." even tho he means it differently lol

Language itself is a burqa, an abaya—so many new words!...The garments that blacken even the tarmac, that blacken the lobby (irreligiously lavish). Words are garb. They’re cloaks. They conceal the body beneath. Lift up the hems of verbiage, peek below its frillies—what’s exposed? The hairy truth?

the excerpts i read seemed fucked up but not that bad. didn't notice all the nerdcore punchlines about beating his dick like it's leukemia i guess and the parts about arab women??

Naming your lead character after yourself and making it a thinly veiled slightly more despicable version of yourself is so basic. Literary fiction hack move.

It's supposed to be edgy but just signifies being too lazy to name your characters.

lol this thread

xxp