new novels and why they suck and whatever

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.

plax try reading jelinek, she's the business

hmmm Cloud Atlas sounds really up my alley, will have to find a copy thx for the rec!

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

― Hans-Jörg Butt (harbl), Friday, June 25, 2010 1:26 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i don't think there's anything wrong with that fwiw. personally, i feel like i used to have a near-superstitious fear about getting sucked into reading something "bad" because omg all the good books out there, i don't have any time, fear of death stuff. lately, relaxing that "standard" (which meant in practice that i just reread the same five novels over and over) has been liberating. but yeah, i like to get recommendations, too.

"so you kids want a formally experimental literally magazine where every story is good and that's also totally off the wall and swarming with magic robots."
"also, you should be able to win stuff by reading."

yall have given me so many not answers

that's why it would possibly have been helpful if you had posed the question in the thread instead of the impress me/i'm bored thing you went for.

but you could look at The Quarterly Conversation:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/

and the associated blog Conversational Reading:

http://conversationalreading.com/

but their focus is quite heavily slanted towards work in translation.

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

― Hans-Jörg Butt (harbl), Friday, June 25, 2010 1:26 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

nothing wrong with it! theres just a difference between "all modern novels suck" and "im sure a lot of good stuff is out there i just dont have the time to track it down" you know

if there IS a 'crisis' in literary fiction it probably has more to do with the business of publishing and the culture of reading in this country, two things that i remain pretty well convinced arent related, in particular, to the artistic/literary merit of the produced works

I think this is pretty much otm. The cutlture of reading is a big topic and I can't claim to have any real insights, but the number of adults I see reading Twilight on the subway really gets me down. Books are marketed as entertainment (ie as one part of a larger bundle of entertainment offerings), and I think are increasingly consumed as such.

There is plenty of good fiction being written and published these days; I don't keep up on 'new novels' as much as I'd like to but off the top of my head I read and loved 'Netherland' (Joseph O'Neill) and 'The Slap' (Christos Tsialkos) and 'Schopenhauer's Telescope' (Gerard Donovan) in the past year. All amazing literary fiction. That's in addition to the heavyweights, most of whom I've enjoyed at least a bit. And I bloody love Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians is amazing, probably my favourite novel). I tend to get my recommendations from blogs and reviews (and ILB) these days, since I don't have many real life friends who are as into fiction as I am. BUT I need to read more contemporary female writers since I haven't found any to love lately - recommendations welcome.

speaking of which, scott seward, if you stop by this thread, i read a book of joy williams short stories because of you and they were crazy amazing so thank you!

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