new novels and why they suck and whatever

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!

bought gravity's rainbow last week on foot of ilx recommendations in a joyce thread, does pynchon fit in here? (I've not started it yet tbh)

i mean come on guys yr basically asking for an avant-garde oprah

I think Shakey should read Paul Magrs.

specifically this book: http://www.drwhoguide.com/whobbc27.htm

Yes it's a Doctor Who book, but it is also entirely surreal and beautifully written, using the idea of parallel universes in a really fantastic way both in terms of plot and of novel structure.

btw i dont really have a lot of recommendations for like "where to find out about the cool new novels" because unless i hear from friends or ppl i work with mostly i just hear about them from big middlebrow places like the nyt book review or the nyer critics section

i am under the impression that there are several websites out there that "book-themed" though

also I want an avant-garde Oprah, too! Although I'm afraid it would actually end up being Lady Gaga.

but the number of adults I see reading Twilight on the subway really gets me down

I'm reading The Girl Who Played With Fire (pretty overrated imo and I like crime fiction and thrillers, dunno if I'll bother to read the third one in the series) but anyway I ended up in the same subway car with two other people also reading and thought "omg I'm reading the new Da Vinci Code here"

Excellent book blog with A+ recommendations: The Elegant Variation http://marksarvas.blogs.com/

xpost

I just finished Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow, which, as I wrote on the latest reading thread, shows the peril of depending on pages and pages of dialogue to no end.

I don't know if there's any "crisis" in contemporary fiction -- some alarmist is always quick to point to one when technological innovations seem insuperable. For myself, I tend to avoid new fiction that calls attention to itself: a novelist pleased with his erudition (Chabon), or plays a lot of tired narrative and POV games (Foer). Two of the best novels I read last year were written by "traditionalists": William Trevor's Love and Summer and Colm Toibin's Brooklyn. The latter really scored a minor triumph: he took a worn story whose sentimental elements peeked around the edges and purged them.

I think Bolano's The Savage Detectives and 2666 fit the modern and ambitious requirements perfectly.

DMR I know what you mean, but I have to disagree on the overrated bit, I couldn't put it down...

xpost

Yes it's a Doctor Who book, but

lol love ya Dan

Coetzee and McEwan also write novels that are almost always worth reading.

liked the first one better, the second had some things that annoyed me but they're too spoilerish to talk abt (xposts)

a novelist pleased with his erudition (Chabon)

omg I hate this fucking guy. someone else who was recommended to me and then when I actually slogged through it made me want to kill myself

the elephant in the room here is named bill vollmann

bolano's wikipedia page is pretty weird

The old-fashioned ways of picking up interesting novels (and books generally) still works for me: reading the NY Review of Books, New Yorker, and Guaridan; recommendations from friends; footnotes in books I'm reading now.

i am under the impression that there are several websites out there that "book-themed" though

I was on this "Shelfari" site for awhile but got sick of people constantly e-mailing me about whether they should read "The Master and Margarita"