Literary treats - recommend great reads

I may have misunderstood the assignment here but I can definitely second Yellowback Radio Brokedown.

A lot of the time for comfort and quick serotonin hits I revert to fun creative nonfiction (Joan Didion, John McPhee or whatever) or Annie Dillard way before I open a novel.

1 good short literary type book I read this year -- John Berger's The Red Tenda of Bologna. kind of a travelogue but mostly reminiscences and opinions on art and culture. short chapters and many are self-contained. available as a penguin mini, around 60 pages, 2007.

Jon Fosse - Morning and Evening

115 pages. Gets you emotionally very quickly.

really appreciate all the recommendations!

do not personally care for John Williams, but I agree that if you like his style a book like Stoner must be a treat

Two of my favorite pure treat books, just 100% delightful to read, are Brat Farrar and The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey. Both classic mystery novels but with much more emphasis on the novel part than the mystery part.

intrigued by this (and the Maigret recommendation) as mystery/crime is a genre I like but where I have a hard time finding enjoyable books

I would highly recommend the Maigret novels; the vibe is quite a change of pace from the typical crime novel. I love the ones where he's just sort of hanging out at the fringes of a scene where shit went down/is about to go down, but not actually acting in any sort of official capacity.

Yeah, "Hey chief, big shoot-out here 10 minutes ago, Suspect B is all over the place." And he, like his creator, knows that he can't do his job like he's committed to if he isn't tuned into that human stuff, w/o gettin' snowflake--it's just that M. and S. have seen sooo much of this over the many years: the series is built for that, w/o getting to soap opera heroine w 7 spouses, 10 comas, x number gettin' into trouble for breakin' all the rules, like so many crime series.

I mean usually there's more compartmentalization and repetition of big bravura SFX, none of that here.

But I came here to say that mention of the xpost bite-size Berger reminds me of recently noticing a stand-alone of Michael Herr's "Illumination Rounds," an advance excerpt from Dispatches: got me going in New American Review, the mostly (?) 60s-published mass market paperback lit mag.

seconding early ishmael reed & hard rain falling, will nom joseph mitchell joe gould's secret or even better the collection up in the old hotel - this is a whopper which is against the rules which are made to be broken, but it's a collection of smaller pieces tbf
(and skip the fiction probably)

another whopper the sot-weed factor is pure pleasure

muriel spark

i picked up 'at swim two birds' because of this thread

i lucked out and got this dalkey edition with this quote by dylan thomas on the cover

This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl!

https://entertainment.time.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2011/07/t100_novels_atswimtwobirds.jpg?w=258

Forgot about that quote.

Wanna get back into my middle school fave Saki, but library only has Complete Works in one smallish (Modern Library-style) volume: tiny type!! I may read it anyway, 'til eyeballs rebel.

xpost Muriel Spark: o hell yes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is great gateway, and just the right length for this thread.

up in the old hotel - this is a whopper which is against the rules which are made to be broken, but it's a collection of smaller pieces tbf
(and skip the fiction probably) Did Mitchell write fiction? Would like to check it if so.

There has been some controversy in certain quarters over how much fiction may have crept into Mitchell's nonfiction. IIRC a few of the pieces in "Up in the Old Hotel" are labeled as fiction. Some others may have been "embellished". They are definitely treats though. Of books I've read recently the one that might best meet the criteria laid out for this thread is "Price of Salt" by Patricia Highsmith, i.e. an effortless, engrossing read.

There are all sorts of shades of 'non-fiction', depending on the subject matter and how the author decides to present the material.

Embellishment is intrinsic to any kind of storytelling that pretends to convey a sense of life and action, no matter how strongly it is based in actuality. I guess the phone book (which soon will be completely obsolete as a thing known and familiar) would be a good example of minimally-embellished non-fiction, but even a phone book could be said to impose tiny amounts of imagination and coloration upon the bare facts.

Yeah, but I read (and skip the fiction probably) as distinguishing between two sets of publications, as if the author or someone since had straight-up designated, say, features over here, short storied over there.

justin3 recommended “The Gone World” upthread & i read it last week

holy shit. a horror/scifi that really pushes the boat out. the horror is legit scary af, the scifi is v ambitious, really well written.

it was described as true detective meets inception but inception is wrong. maybe edge of tomorrow?

anyway, get into it, genre-nerds

xp yeah I was referring to the handful of short stories collected in up in the old hotel which were explicitly published as fiction

Thanks! Didn't remember that distinction, will have to re-read with it in mind, though was pretty sure he at least massaged some of his material. (In Joe Gould's Teeth, Jill LePore says that some documents have come to light which Mitchell couldn't have known about, but also 0 indication among his copious papers that he ever responded to several people who offered to be interviewed etc re Gould.)
The Wikipedia article on Mitchell incl. several pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker this century (think it was the most recent one that I read and liked):
Wiki page has links for each, though they're behind account wall; dunno if you can just sign up and view w/o having to pay)
2000–2015
Takes Takes (May 28, 2000)
Street Life Personal History (February 3, 2013)
Days in the Branch Personal History (November 24, 2014)
A Place of Pasts Personal History (February 9, 2015)

xxp i also read 'the gone world' on justin3's recommendation and it was v. good

however

as someone who grew up in southwestern pennsylvania at the same time as the protagonist (I was born a year later), i feel compelled to point out that teenage girls there in 1985 who dressed like madonna or had michael jackson jackets absolutely did *not* listen to AC/DC (especially not powerage, which didn't even have a hit?!)

otoh the author might have simply been heightening the contradictions? get out of my head

I really wish someone would read Keith Maillard, perhaps only to disabuse me of the notion that he’s utterly fabulous. I and about a dozen other people think he’s a treasure - and his books are a treat. Anything, really, but I was knocked out by his latest novel, Twin Studies.

An English Murder, Cyril Hare - Cozy mystery, set at x-mas no less, but with real life 50's politics intruding - aristocratic family includes a cousin who is Chancellor of the Exchequer in the labour govt as well as a son leading a neo-fascist group; the Poirotesque outsider, a Hungarian Jewish academic, is a holocaust survivor. Breezed through it, great stuff.

Sigrid Nunez has been doing it for me lately, The Friend and What Are You Going Through? total gems

I got assigned a Sigrid Nunez book for my branch library’s reading group. I liked the beginning of it so much that I read a few other books first, saving the assigned one to read right before we met so it would be fresh in my mind. She is a new favorite, seems to do every single thing right.

Also the audiobook reader of almost all of her books, Hillary Huber, is just about perfect.

She also has read many of Elena Ferrante's books

i finished this just last week and i thought it was great! i loved the writing. so many evocative settings and sentences. i love when an author has so many avenues they can explore and they have the discipline to keep everything tight and controlled and never get lost in their own obviously fecund imagination. great characters both secondary and central. the writer did a lot of television and brit teleplays and you can't help but think about how great it would be on the screen. half the fun of the book though, for me, was picturing everything that was so lovingly described. i will look for more by him. published in 1986 but reprinted by McNally Editions recently.

https://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/cvr9781946022707/the-girls-9781946022707_hr.jpg

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/storage/1200_filter/images/9/9/8/9/4099899-1-eng-GB/9781946022707.jpg

ha, oops, sorry. that first one didn't show up for me so i just had to add a blurry second picture.

Nunez is my favorite living writer by a mile

I think The Last of Her Kind (2006) might be her masterpiece, but A Feather on the Breath of God (1995) and The Friend (2018) are also extremely accomplished

I highly recommend her non-fiction account of Virginia Woolf's monkey Mitz (1998) and her Susan Sontag memoir Sempre Susan (2011)

But really everything she's written is great and it's all about style, she is a perfect writer to me. Only real outlier is Salvation City (2010) which is more of a post-apocalyptic YA novel of ideas, but even that has some real strong passages.

So far I've read SEMPRE SUSAN and THE FRIEND properly, buzzed through THE VULNERABLES, which I may reread,, and am on my secornd round of WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH? in preparation for the book group meeting tomorrow, and have got my eye on MITZ and THE LAST OF HER KIND. Feel like she is a perfect writer, for me anyway.

Oh yeah, you said perfect too.

I glanced at some of the reviews on her web page. She wrote a fair review of STATION ELEVEN. Also hadn't realized that she had given Jonathan Franzen a copy of DESPERATE CHARACTERS at Yaddo, thereby setting in motion the Paula Fox revival.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/t-magazine/sigrid-nunez-paula-fox-desperate-characters.html

I’ve only read The Friend, thought it was pretty enjoyable for the most part. I will probably seek out some others at some point.

Recently: Strong Poison, my first Dorothy L. Sayers, in which Lord Peter Wimsey's sterling powers of detection, also nerves, are challenged by the sensational murder trial of young Harriet Vane, a mystery writer who lived in sin with the young dead man, also an author. Zingers fly, especially from the excitable Lord and his pals, but so rare to find them doing so through perfectly timed shades of dark realness (and real enough): a lot of crime shows so try to do this, but Sayers just does it. Prisoner Vane is necessarily the least mobile, least confident character, but credibly convinces Wimsey that she's innocent (well probably). All the women here are credible, in a variety of roles, and one of LP's employees at what seems like a secretarial agency, and is, to a certain extent, but mainly is about detecting white collar crime, one of these ladies gets sent up north to do crucial legwork.
Relationship of W. and V. nuanced, and intro assures us that they did not go running around as Mr. and Mrs. Detective for several more volumes.

i have heard such good things about the harriet vane books, i need to get on the Sayers train!

bowen looks fun

sorry for snap judgment and yucking someone's yum but re nunez, ""The Last of Her Kind introduces two women who meet as freshmen on the Columbia campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. ..." would rather die than ever read a novel set at a college again

iirc 'the friend' and 'what are you going through' are closer to sebald than to your average college novel.

what can I say the prose is gorgeous

it's a great novel, highly recommended if you liked the Neapolitan novels by Ferrante, they have a lot in common

Sebald definitely an influence, but Coetzee even more

WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH was insanely good and pretty much made my brane explode or perhaps implode.

i will read her. i never have.

Got my eye on THE LAST OF HER KIND next but maybe need to properly finish THE VULNERABLES first.

there's a lightness to her writing that's somewhat reminiscent of Kundera but less bullshit

The Last of Her Kind is more dense though, but very rewarding

I also really enjoyed the Bowen when I read it last week. Would also recommend his v creepy Play For Today Robin Redbreast.

i've been meaning to check and see if Robin Redbreast was on Britbox.

The Girls is unusual because they sell it as a thriller on the back of the new reprint but it was all the mundane details of their home/shop/craft fairs/etc that delighted me. i love people who have an eye for those details.

Bowen? Elizabeth Bowen?

My wife is a huge Nunez fan, glad to see the love.

Our next couples read is Jackie Collins’ Chances, the first Lucky Santangelo book.

Thanks so much for all the comments on Nunez books---local library has two, yay. The only SN thing I've read is a mention of her and Sontag's son going on a double date with Sontag and a guy whose name I'm blanking on.
Speaking of The Girls and the library, yall might go by yours and take a look at Emma Cline's novel of the same title, a middle-aged woman's memoir of the early teen time she got involved with a Manson type, who seems a bit generic*, but it really is about The Girls, and Cline, then in her 20s, draws on and distills flashback-is-now earlyteengirlverse, with no show-off Creative Writing Special EFX. Also credible modulation of narrator's voice to present day, seeing herself as geezer seen that way as well by some kids on a bad path: pressure of that emitting these memories in an unwelcome, compulsively vivid clarity, which just keeps rolling along, for not too long, via alternating timelines.
Cline also gets that crispy cuspy Kali sunshine grid of The Crying Of Lot 49, Dog Soldiers, Wolf In White Van (esp, when narrator goes outside, even down the street), and the best parts of Devil House.
*But also brings the Dennis Wilson-Terry Melcher hybrid: I could practically smell the cologne and other aids.

Also the narrator's remembered takes on her struggling parents and others, filtered now by her own age and experience---but teen girlhood refuses to be upstaged.

Thanks, been interested in Emma Cline and even have a copy of THE GIRLS but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.