post itt writers you think are bad

I liked There There, and see that Tommy Orange has a new book Wandering Stars

Speaking of Mieville and science fiction, what books of speculative fiction would you guys recommend? I'm curious because I would like to recommend something to my book club. I was thinking of Kindred by Octavia Butler

she is not

Just saying, but the first post explicitly says: "no need to explain yourself, thread is for catharsis not debate"

Kindred is good but (obviously) bleak as fuck. Try Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor. It's a sci-fi adventure set in Nigeria — aliens land in the water on the outskirts of Lagos and the whole city goes wild. It's a lot of fun and a quick read.

I like the Fractured Europe quadrilogy, a bit of a mix between Gibson and Le Carre (leaning toward the former).

I meant to read those a few years ago. Thanks for the reminder.

also qntm - There Is No Antimemetics Division

interconnected weird fiction stories, so much better than something built on the structure of a copypasta wiki thing should be

Steven Markley, The Deluge, much talked-about novel from last year, I looked through it in the bookstore and the writing was v v bad

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troop_(book)

One of the worst Amazon recommendations I’ve followed

Chu is a bad thinker, imho. My friend Nora sums it up quite nicely in her review of Chu's last book:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/ontology-for-edgelords🕸

Lol I forgot i had posted way upthread about disliking something else she wrote as well!

Maybe ALC is the literary equivalent of LCD Soundsystem for me

re: tommy orange & Wonder what you are not liking about it?

i don't want to be a dick b/c a lot of people seem to get a lot from the novel but, for example, a character with fetal alcohol syndrome keeps referring to FAS as "the Drome" and it feels very dorky and MFA-ish, like something a david foster wallace character would do, except embedded in an otherwise very serious (almost po-faced) novel

No titans walk among us anymore, wtf

Perfect thread to see at the top of sna when im trying to find something. who is the modern british writer who has a thread dedicated to his really inane, long winded sentences?

John lanchester

thx bbz

adam, I can see that. I think the issue is that there are literally so few depictions of contemporary indigenous people living in urban environments that some of the more MFA-ish or unlikely stylistic and tonal choices are overlooked. I think that’s fine, personally, but could see how it could irk

I read them all for college, so I feel like I can comfortably say Alice Walker is bad, very bad.

The early stuff is bad but you at least get the sense of what she's refining and working through to get to The Color Purple. Everything after TCP is just irredeemly indulgent.

Obviously she's an important figure for brining FGM to public awareness, but unfortunately her FGM books are also very bad.

reading that sebald thing. the first paragraph, which is, i guess, supposed to be somewhat sebaldian, although she mentions bernhard, is really boring and this is what people who do sebald perhaps don't understand. he wasn't boring. in fact, he was a page-turner for someone who wrote the kind of thing that he wrote.

this made me laugh. "Anytime you encounter a text that involves what the novelist Sam Pink calls “the dreaded tidbit”—“the recently popular thing of doing like, little book reports in the book”—you have Sebald to thank."

duh, you have Google to thank! how someone could not mention that is just silly.

i agree with this though:

"The most beautiful aspects of Sebald’s work have little to do with his enigmatic scene-stealing alter ego and the tricks he plays on anyone searching for autobiography; his great strength lies in the conventional narrative pleasures he offers with sensitivity, texture, and emotion, allowing subtle details to accrue so patiently that the realization, when it comes, feels like memory."

yes, I liked that bit. but the other thing about "little book reports in the book" -- this is a writer who either has not read, or is not calling to mind, a whole ton of last-forty-years Spanish literature. Vila-Matas, Pitol for starters. But also throughout European literature there's an allusive thread that's very appealing to me. feature not bug

"I thought of an essay by Patricia Lockwood about the work of Rachel Cusk, whose writing is so influenced by Sebald that you could swap their sentences without anyone noticing"

no...

Pitol's trilogy was more like a diary of what he was reading while on various diplomatic missions. It's great but I wouldn't say it's quite like Sebald.

I quite liked Sebald in parts but looking back Oyler pins him down on what it's lacking.

i also feel like there are people who think that "autofiction" is some new development in writing. and now its all the rage. its always been a way for someone young to write a novel. forever.

will also add the "little book reports in the book" is a fairly inescapable part of the novel form before 1850

JCLC otm.

"Lockwood writes of Cusk’s similarly despondent aversion to contemporary life: “Why must we live in these places? Why must these be our concerns? Why do I have to know what McDonald’s is?”"

because there is only one way to write a novel. also, ever heard of poetry? poems don't always mention McDonalds either. i'm all for not mentioning McDonalds. we know they are there.

Cusk's three books were a revelation to me. do i want EVERY novel to be just like them? no. of course not. is Lockwood afraid that an entire school of McDonalds-denying drifting nameless narrator autofiction will take over modern life?

when people mention the little book report thing they usually lazily just mention Borges and move on. but never Google! i smell a rat...

i also feel like there are people who think that "autofiction" is some new development in writing. and now its all the rage. its always been a way for someone young to write a novel. forever.

From my observation the ppl who think this are also generally Against It.

I find the label interesting in that it is so blatantly writer's inside baseball - whether something's autofiction or not is entirely irrelevant to the reader but it matters quite a bit to the writer.

Pitol's trilogy was more like a diary of what he was reading while on various diplomatic missions. It's great but I wouldn't say it's quite like Sebald.

mmm, it's an extended meditation about memory imo but ymmv, but Mephisto's Waltz is also deeply allusive, this is a real thing with him & with Vila-Matas, and, you know, Borges, this always-in-dialogue/never-not-in-dialogue thing.

i actually had to stop reading the little book report book by patricia lockwood. no one is talking about this. it got tedious. i stopped reading weather for the same reason. you don't even have to blame sebald for the recent little book report books. i will bet you a million dollars that most new writers are just influenced by department of speculation and not sebald. its way easier to read, funnier, and looks like something that people could rip off. unlike sebald's books. its already 11 years old which makes it ancient history to a gen z writer. sebald would be, like, paleolithic. also, that sad bored young writer who did all the ritalin. him and jenny offill. probably the two most important american writers of the 21st century as far as influence goes. lol.

the lockwood book is only a book report book until halfway through, and even then the book is just twitter

i was reading Rabelais the other day and now i know who to blame for all the damn lists on the internet.

"Afterwards I wiped my tail with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a calf’s skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney’s bag, with a montero, with a coif, with a falconer’s lure. But, to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temporate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest of the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains. And think not that the felicity of the heroes and demigods in the Elysian fields consisteth either in their asphodel, ambrosia, or nectar, as our old women here used to say; but in this, according to my judgment, that they wipe their tails with the neck of a goose, holding her head betwixt their legs, and such is the opinion of Master John of Scotland, alias Scotus."

now this is some real writing

what all these essays often fail to mention is that the most popular fiction right now looks nothing like sebald, cusk, or any of the autofiction people. its all epic fantasy or near-fantasy or doomsday or history spanning trilogies with colorful characters who do not resemble writers at all. or lurid and operatic crimes committed by beautiful people. in other words, these books look like future netflix shows. or the authors are crossing their fingers anyway. but the bounty of colorful covers on display in the new arrivals section of Barnes & Noble are fantasy in one way or another. and they often avoid mentioning McDonalds. even normal people get sick of McDonalds.

true! but litfic infighting is where the real battle is, the market is so squeezed

or there's a perception it is

Somehow we got 107 posts and no mention of Ayn Rand. Shocking!

Seriously, the bar is Rand. I can't think of another writer who so successfully combined execrable prose with repellent ideas, which, sadly, have gained considerable currency, largely because they appeal to the worst impulses of humans in general and males in particular.

i also feel like there are people who think that "autofiction" is some new development in writing. and now its all the rage. its always been a way for someone young to write a novel. forever.

I think jco's was needling the contemporary form they taks ("wan little husks with space between the paragraphs") rather than auto fiction as a concept

take*

someone should write an essay about how Sebaldian The Walking Dead was. Not a McDonalds to be seen in 10 seasons! or one Home Depot! its almost like a reverie of a memory of the past. in Dresden.

Rand isn't mentioned here often because no one on ILX likes her and this is a challops thread in everything but name

"Seriously, the bar is Rand. I can't think of another writer who so successfully combined execrable prose with repellent ideas, which, sadly, have gained considerable currency, largely because they appeal to the worst impulses of humans in general and males in particular."

which is why i read her in high school and then never spoke of her again!

i made it to college-age with bukowski and henry miller. then dropped them too. at least they were funny.

Maybe her local bookstore hid all the long trad novels that are still being churned out idk

the luminaries and ducks, newburyport staring at me threateningly from the shelf. one of these years

although isn't ducks, newburyport some sort of Autofiction Taken To New Levels shit tbf

actually let's make this the threemonth I finally complete Darkmans, nobody can complain there

Miller was capable of moments of brilliance, anyway, but yeah, an author most of us were able to leave behind in early adulthood.

When I was in grad school in the early 90s, the thing was "reflexive fiction." Is "autofiction" the same thing?

Ducks, Newburyport is Ulysses + Erma Bombeck.

i made it halfway through! i still have it if there is another pandemic.

i actually did a book report on ayn rand in high school and i pronounced her name "ann" and my teacher stopped me mid-sentence and said "isn't it Ine Rand...?" and i said "how the hell do i know the internet hasn't been invented yet!".