post itt writers you think are bad

Lovecraft does absolutely nothing for me, either. Silly, tedious stuff. Maybe most horror isn’t for me, though. I think Stephen King’s short stories are generally moronic

Re: Ishiguro. He never surpassed the quality of his first two published novels, Pale View of the Hills and An Artist of the Floating World. When We Were Orphans is an overwritten mess that forgets what its plot is

I put down the last novel after about 70 pages.

I'd add The Remains of the Day as essential.

There's something so attenuated about Ishiguro the last 20 years. It's as if Stevens the butler were writing them.

Lovecraft can be amazing. "The Colour Out of Space" is genuinely creepy, imo.

Lovecraft hate bizarre

I guess maybe I appreciate him more for his (sorry mark s) INFLUENCE

Oy those Vuong quotes:

Vuong is a bad writer, nothing anyone says will convince me otherwise. When students say their favorite poet is Vuong, I cringe (inside) as much as when students say their favorite writer is Mary Oliver or fucking Rupi Kaur.

It's like the mainstream white literary world discovered that queer Asians with complex family backstories exist, and tokenized the first person who presented this identity toward them via his awful prose and abysmal poetry.

Mary Oliver! Every goddamn Barnes & Noble poetry section stocks at least two copies of each of her volumes. Corporate America decided whom they'll promote, I guess.

Lovecraft hate bizarre

― brimstead

summarize lovecraft in three words

I doubt corporate America is very invested in poetry. B&N puts out Mary Oliver volumes bc they sell, and they sell bc she writes in a plainspoken way that resonates with people who don't read much poetry. Same with Billy Collins.

It's like the mainstream white literary world discovered that queer Asians with complex family backstories exist, and tokenized the first person who presented this identity toward them via his awful prose and abysmal poetry.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Thursday, April 11, 2024 10:53 AM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

RIP anthony veasna so

I doubt corporate America is very invested in poetry. B&N puts out Mary Oliver volumes bc they sell, and they sell bc she writes in a plainspoken way that resonates with people who don't read much poetry. Same with Billy Collins.

― jaymc,

Of course.

in the spirit of good faith research I read the first few sections of oyler’s goop cruise article. I don’t mind her style, but I kept waiting to learn something, to be challenged in the slightest…

i don't hate Lovecraft. its more like i keep the paperbacks around and whenever i think i'm going to dig in i end up going uhhhhhhhhh....and i last like five pages. i have that problem with a lot of early horror/weird/supernatural people. clark ashton smith, etc. i don't even get far with someone like wilkie collins. maybe i am missing the spooky gene. i liked stephen king when i was a kid. LOVED some of his books. clive barker. but i don't ever want to read them now.
i do like the idea of the ineffable unnameable ultimate horror or whatever. i'm fine with it in movies. i thought mandy was awesome. i loved hellraiser years ago. i am all for the spooky forest horror all the rage now. that kind of thing is made for the movies. i really liked The Mist recently! i had somehow never seen it. that ending is so awesome.
i did enjoy that area x trilogy as noted in the thread i started on ILB.

Mountains of Madness is a classic, the rest of it is have little use for.

Ishiguro drives me nuts. He’s compelling enough for me to read several of his novels, and more often than not I end up wondering if I’m missing something brilliant he’s doing, because the novels end up seeming empty and stupid? I thought the sketchiness of Never Let Me Go worked to its advantage in a way, it at least worked on an emotional level even if it made no sense if you thought about it, but The Buried Giant is just…nothing, as far as I can tell? And then he won the Nobel! When We Were Orphans has a pretty great premise and decides to use the most annoying style of unreliable narrator to explore it.

i could only get through 50 or so pages of lauren groff's Matrix. for a book supposed to be set in a convent way back in time none of the scenes really rendered or stuck with me--a lot of them were summary, and it was written in the present tense if I'm not mistaken. really bad writing and then i read a profile of her in the NYT for her new one that came out last year and she claims with a straight face that she reads over 300 books a year

Groff's Florida was a whole lot of okay. So much of this so-called local writing reads like it got workshopped to death.

not talking about Groff but sometimes i think those workshop-y short story collections that seem to multipy like rabbits by people with REALLY killer author photos and MFA creds are the new status symbol for rich folks. they are all kinda okay and these people have learned how to write but they all blend together until i'm not sure which quirky white person is which anymore. in general, i am all for lots of women and non-binary and trans writers on the shelves at local bookstores. and lots more people of color showing up on the shelves. it is really a good time for different voices. and this abundance of fiction by asian writers that just never existed in my world before! it's amazing. writers from all over being translated. i think trust fund kids should make that their priority in life. becoming excellent literary translators. there is ZERO money in doing it so it would be perfect for them. they can figure out a way to make it sexy. "oh yes i'm working on some vintage Korean horror right now..." they would love that in Brooklyn.

Lovecraft is a classic idea man - some good stories but better broad concepts that a handful of writers have improved.

I love short story collections and tend to impulse buy them, but my god some of the shit come out of these MFA program writers is just unbearable. So much stupid, deadpan magical realism with no plot structure

I like how Kazuo Ishiguro had the gall to criticize Harold Pinter’s unproduced Remains of the Day script. I still wish we lived in a world where Mike Nichols directed that version with John Cleese in the lead

. i think trust fund kids should make that their priority in life. becoming excellent literary translators. there is ZERO money in doing it so it would be perfect for them.

Unfortunately learning a second language is probably too much like real work.

Trust money kids speak their own language.

What literary translations could do with is a second translator to turn the text into something approximating readable prose (although I guess this aspect has improved in recent decades). Perfect for technically proficient yet talentless writers, i.e. 95% of everyone with a creative writing qualification.

You want to know who a shitty author is? Tom Hanks.

Actors who actually did write great novels:

David Thewlis

Tom Tyron

Takeshi Kitano

Carrie Fisher!

That’s right! I can think of a few filmmakers who wrote good novels, like Bryan Forbes

Ethan Hawke

j/k

Actually, Hawke got very strong reviews for his last book. I have not read any of them

And he just directed (and co-wrote) a film about Flannery O'Connor that looks like it might actually be good!

I would chill with Ethan Hawke over beers to discuss Flannery O'Connor.

I wouldn't read a book by Hawke in the style of Flannery O'Connor.

i’ve only read remains of the day but it’s excellent

Wait, Ethan Hawke wrote THE REMAINS OF THE DAY?

he wrote it before sunrise

Heh

That's what he was writing in his secret REALITY BITES notebook.

if you think that not really knowing a second language is a barrier to being a literary translator, i've got news for you

It's not?

Union Dues, Pride of the Bimbos, and The Anarchist's Convention and Other Stories by John Sayles are three fine books.

Woody Allen wrote some witty short stories. He may also belong in the category of bad people who have made good art.

i always felt like one of the coen brothers would have made a good crime writer in another life. in an elmore leonard style. or, come to think of it, in a donald e. westlake kinda style. westlake kind of the coen brothers before the coen brothers plot-wise. i loved those books when i was a kid. and i loved those 70s movies made out of the books. the Coen Brothers could totally remake Cops and Robbers. i must have seen that a dozen times. same with The Hot Rock. Bank Shot! that was another good one.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/13/Bank_shot.jpg

Ethan Coen does have a book of short stories out. I haven’t read it.

oh right i think i remember that coming out. i never read it either.

Miranda July another film maker who is also a good writer, or vice versa.

Ethan Hawke

j/k

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, April 11, 2024 4:01 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Actually, Hawke got very strong reviews for his last book. I have not read any of them

― beamish13, Thursday, April 11, 2024 4:04 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

And he just directed (and co-wrote) a film about Flannery O'Connor that looks like it might actually be good!

― Sometimes It POLLS in April (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, April 11, 2024 4:06 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I would chill with Ethan Hawke over beers to discuss Flannery O'Connor.

I wouldn't read a book by Hawke in the style of Flannery O'Connor.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, April 11, 2024 4:08 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I already outed myself as a former teenage Hawke fangirl I will say that I read his first book more than once many years ago and it was actually p damn good or at least I thought so at the time. I haven't read anything else he's written.

What literary translations could do with is a second translator to turn the text into something approximating readable prose

The only example I can think of is Pevear-Volokhonsky, except IMO Richard Pevear is a pretty bad writer. Compare how he treats Dumas, for example, to the translations by the incredible (late) Robin Buss.

For Pevear, textual felicity seems to be "make it spiky, repetetive, odd and hard to read" -- okay, okay, so maybe that holds for Dostovesky, but probably not also Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Dumas...