post itt writers you think are bad

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.

i wonder if it was HER stab at future Netflix money...what with the undead angle and all. everyone wants a nest egg.

x-post

i'm fond of him too, kate. he had some really great and funny lines! those little poems could have inspired a young Lorrie Moore. don't know if she would admit it. but he had some really good one-liners. even his fiction could be very entertaining and very funny. but he suffers from that shaggy dog hippie persona. probably why a lot of people wouldn't go to bat for Tom Robbins in 2024 either.

i hated brautigan when i fancied myself a young poet (all his stuff seemed so obvious to me) but i’ve come to appreciate him more

lorrie moore is like, a tragedy of a writer to me, her early stuff is so good, a gate at the stairs is like good in parts and abjectly terrible in others, and now she’s completely unreadable

At the California Institute of Technology
BY RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

I don’t care how God-damn smart
these guys are: I’m bored.

It’s been raining like hell all day long
and there’s nothing to do.

come on, anyone would be proud of that one.

see yeah i love that now. maybe i needed to live more

I liked half the stories in Bark; the one about the young woman who has an affair with a old dying man made me cry.

i put down bark and never picked it back up after (iirc) the first story ended with 9/11

brautigan would also do cutesy and sad sack in a way that was not always fun to read. he had his good and bad points.

i put down bark and never picked it back up after (iirc) the first story ended with 9/11

woof!

i don't even remember much about Bark. i should look at it again. i just saw it in a box in the attic.

I don't even remember that story!

anyway I'm sure Moore made a lot of money with Birds of America.

i almost bought that Everyman's Library Collected Stories - intro by Lauren Groff - even though i already own everything in it just to have some sort of official government document of her greatness.

and the stories are in alphabetical order!

brautigan would also do cutesy and sad sack in a way that was not always fun to read. he had his good and bad points.

― scott seward

"At the California Institute of Technology" is a good one!

yeah some of his stuff, like "machines of loving grace", i don't like that one at all. i found "in watermelon sugar" intolerable. "the rivets in ecclesiastes", i like that one a lot. because of course brautigan was going to be into ecclesiastes.

his later poetry doesn't get much of a look-in i've found, and i think that's a shame. i liked "june 30, june 30" (the collection) a lot.

a lot of writers i like the _idea_ of them more than their actual work. i'm in love with the _idea_ of robert walser.

Yeah, that's kind of Kafka for me. I think on the whole he has been a baleful influence on literature.

I've read at least five books by André Aciman and feel like I've basically lost interest in him.

He did lead me to some great writers though (Yourcenar, Djuna Barnes).

My dad was a big Brautigan fan, owned about a dozen of his books. I've never been able to figure it out, because other than his affection for Richard Brautigan my dad was a pure product of the 1950s California desert — bought and fixed up cars, listened to doo-wop and oldies (his favorite song was "The Ten Commandments of Love"), once told me a story about getting shot at for dancing with the wrong girl at a party in Mexico...but yeah, Brautigan really spoke to him somehow.

The sequel to Call Me By Your Name is so gruesome that I wanted to press a pillow against his face.

I enjoy Brautigan a lot. Aesthetically similar to Vonnegut, and there are some very rich insights and pathos in his works. The Tokyo-Montana Express is really heartbreaking in points, and The Hawkline Monster (which Hal Ashby and Tim Burton both tried to turn into a film) is nuts

i just checked and tom robbins is still alive and 91 years old. i guess i thought he wrote more but he only wrote 8 novels. from 1971 to 2003. does anyone still read him? there was the 90s Cowgirls boom thanks to Gus Van Sant and kd lang. he was madcap. kinda feel like he led to t. coraghessan boyle somehow. though that's just going by boyle titles and plots. i don't read his books. brautigan to robbins to boyle? the sons of mark twain.

also: what about william t. vollmann? is he a genius or terrible? his books repel me for some reason. or the thought of reading them does. but i haven't looked in one in years and years. is he big in germany? he must be.

I read the abridged book about violence last year and it was okay

I kind of dig his deadpan-ness

sorry, not the thread defending, sorry

I read Rainbow Stories and Whores For Gloria. Rainbow Stories was OK, but Whores For Gloria sucked. I bought Europe Central in hardcover but never read it and eventually got rid of it. I doubt I'll ever read anything by him again.

Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series and The Royal Family are incredible. You Bright and Risen Angels is nearly impossible for me to get through. There is no one else like him. His nonfiction is often fucking stunning

Vollmann was first published in Germany before an American publisher picked him up. Super nice guy, BTW. At a signing, he offered to take everyone out for drinks afterwards

My UK Picador copy of Trout Fishing in America has an endorsement from Auberon Waugh of all the unlikely ppl.

Another writer I would bracket with Robbins and Brautigan and seems even more discarded = William Kotzwinkle. His ET novelisation is p great!

I enjoyed Vollmann's non-fiction book on Imperial Valley, CA. It's of personal interest to me though since I grew up there, so YMMV.

Kotzwinkle is one of the great cult writers. It’s ridiculous that only one of his works has had a film adaptation, as they’re screaming for the big screen treatment (although Ralph Bakshi tried to make an animated The Fan Man in the 70’s)

If you like Kotzwinkle, Thomas Berger will appeal to you

I wasn't kidding about Kafka. Wherever I encounter that sort of funny/not-funny inscrutable portentous symbolism I curse his name. Give me HP Lovecraft or HG Wells over him any day of the week.

I tried reading Kafka in German but gave up because I don't know German.

Not all of his books are good, but Vollmann is excellent when he’s excellent. He is, indeed, a lovely person

I take ivys point that there should be less caping itt but a list of names with zero discussion is about the most boring thing imaginable, cf the posi thread going atm, cf also maybe the lamest thread on this website “things you don’t care about” just a series of there-I-said-it turds useless to anyone, you don’t want that for this thread

would just rather ppl not get defensive (i'm guilty re: sebald!!!). thread can be for sincere investigation and appreciation AND blunt dismissal. also thread policing is fun and stupid

the thread police : live inside my head / come to me in my bed / coming to arrest me!
oh no!!

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

She's also got a new novel coming out next month that I am eagerly anticipating.