post itt writers you think are bad

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...

otm. it really turned me off of Dostoevsky initially. luckily a friend tipped me off to Magarshack, who is a joy to read

Groff's Florida had some very moving stories (and some forgettable stuff). A hit rate of 50% in a short story collection (that's not some kind of life-spanning omnibus) is pretty damn good IMO.

has anyone actually bothered with Nick Cave's books? I've had the Ass Saw the Angel on my shelf for over 30 years.

Wait I thought Pevear-Volkhonsky were the consensus choice for Russian literature? I've never heard of Magarschack.

maybe we should take this to ILB my feeling is that P-V are good if you're reading D in an academic context. like if you're a Russian lit major or something. but like C_T says, it can be very spiky and hard to read. the excerpts here show a good difference between the translations (and a few other versions):

https://welovetranslations.com/2020/04/25/whats-the-best-translation-of-crime-and-punishment/

oh yeah magarschack. magarschack is the top dog these days. got a problem with your gogol? you just call magarschack.

i have yet to read a lydia davis translation. i've already read madame bovary and i've already read swann's way. (i only read the first two proust if i remember correctly...its been awhile.)

I listened to an audiobook of Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies. I didn't love it, but it was unmistakably ambitious, with abrupt fragmented narration, flowery language, changing perspectives, and a slightly cringey romanticization of a weird relationship between two straight people

Re: Pevear & Volokhonsky, this makes a pretty good case against them, was probably discussed on another thread: https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

Janet Malcom also hated them

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/

i have yet to read a lydia davis translation. i've already read madame bovary and i've already read swann's way. (i only read the first two proust if i remember correctly...its been awhile.)

― scott seward,

The Davis translation of Proust vs Moncrieff made an impression on me.

Magarschack was the go-to English translation of Russian for years, no? My older Chekhov story collections he translated.

I read Fates and Furies and didn't hate it but had honestly forgotten all about it until just now. So I guess that's a statement unto itself.

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'm so old I remember when the way to shit on MFA programs was to accuse them of producing endless UNmagical realism about divorce and such

I seem to recall some famous nabisco post from twenty years ago defending those programs

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

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina🕸/

tabes u don’t like anything anyone else has ever heard of Venus

Before

My first response is : this is an internet message board that I joined because of conversations around minimal techno and obscure outsider music I am into, sorry I am not one of the Pop Conference posters but maybe realize that some of us are here for different reasons.

Then I thought about the fact that several of my top tens made it into the 77 last year, but I also believe I listed the most stuff that was unavailable on Spotify.

Then I thought about how I engage in cheering novels and writers with other posters on here all the time.

In other words, I thought about how your point is inaccurate.

“you only like obscure weird stuff” Reddit is that way

I think that was less about what you boost and more about the haterade

this is where we post writers we think are bad

haterade is the drink of choice

good point

Defend the Indefensible: Bad Writers

Why are they so bad and hated?

only on ILX is Miranda July considered not 'obscure'

I like her, she is good

do you guys have a fave bad writer? like in that way that people always say that theodore dreiser is one of the best bad writers. i guess there is a lot of science fiction where i have overlooked the badness because the overall story was fun/interesting. maybe genre writing in general gets a pass. sometimes SF writers are just great idea people. but what about non-genre bad writers you love? i'm trying to think of someone...i mean i have read bad novels by writers i like but that's different. i feel bad that i didn't like A Gate at the Stairs so much that i didn't even consider buying Lorrie Moore's new novel last year! and i, in general, love her. sad!

miranda july's not obscure! she's a bestseller and a marquee name at literary festivals!

Compared to Moore's last novel A Gate at the Stairs is Flaubert.

oh jeez that bad huh?

Shockingly so. Until this moment I thought Moore incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence; even her so-so stuff has a few!

oh how the mighty have fallen. it gets harder for people the older they get. that's a lot of years of writing great stuff. same thing happened to all those 70s titans like ann beattie and anne tyler. just not as inspired.

oh man i couldn't get 50 pages into that new one

I actually bought the hardcover, which I never do unless I love the novelist.

it got good reviews too.

do you guys have a fave bad writer? like in that way that people always say that theodore dreiser is one of the best bad writers. i guess there is a lot of science fiction where i have overlooked the badness because the overall story was fun/interesting. maybe genre writing in general gets a pass. sometimes SF writers are just great idea people. but what about non-genre bad writers you love? i'm trying to think of someone...i mean i have read bad novels by writers i like but that's different. i feel bad that i didn't like A Gate at the Stairs so much that i didn't even consider buying Lorrie Moore's new novel last year! and i, in general, love her. sad!

― scott seward

i don't do a lot of reading, particularly not when it comes to lit. that said like the one writer i like who gets talked about in those circles is richard brautigan, who i'm given to understand is poorly thought of by lit critics. i think the thing i like about him most is that he's very sad. i have the LP where he reads his work, the one that was supposed to come out on Apple but came out on Harvest instead. he has this amazing soft, sad voice. on the pictures of all his book covers, too, he has this haunted, hangdog look. he's standing next to some gorgeous hippie chick in a miniskirt and boots and he's out there dressed like a prospector from the 1880s or so. even when he's writing creepy poems about how pretty girls are, which he is, often, he sounds sad about it. i appreciate that quality in a man.

i don't actually have a favorite _good_ writer! i don't know what good writing looks like, how people determine whether a writer is good. i feel like a lot of good writing is stuff that i don't really understand.

who i'm given to understand is poorly thought of by lit critics.

probably also based critics. i think the poggers critics like him, though.