Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

Inspired by some of the talk on new novels and why they suck and whatever, here's a rolling thread for discussion of new literary fiction!

I just got to the top of the library holds list for 'Tinkers' (just won the Pulitzer) - I pick it up today! Sounds good - will report back after I finish bloody Proust.

this list of upcoming titles might interest some

i really want to read that shteyngart novel but it apparently doesn't come out here until september

i keep thinking 'oh, that's coming out soon', and then i check, and remember it's not, here

You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin

hmmmmmm

i really want to read that shteyngart novel but it apparently doesn't come out here until september

boy this one has all kinds of buzz, it feels like

I'm cleansing my palate after Your Face Tomorrow with nonfiction...it always takes me forever to finish nonfiction books tho

oh god, i still have that lying around for after i finish the thirty-eight other things i am reading

its really good dude!!!!! altho i tried reading the "prequel" but it was kinda boring so i read some short stories instead

today i bought the other two kj parker books and stephen king's new pb. i don't even belong on this thread right now.

haha u ended up buying the other parkers? im still keeping an eye out for them

on topic: i really liked the imperfections by tom rachman.

d'you want my copies when i'm done? they're only going to go in a box somewhere, otherwise

i am sure i will have THOUGHTS to share about them on the rolling contemporary nerd fiction thread. i will note in passing that one of the characters is now thinking about 'insurgents'

yah def - i can send you some stuff in return, if youd like. either from the nerd fic thread or this one. i have a whole bunch of nyrb publishing things i can send as well.

also i will be in LDN for a little bit this fall (like l8 sept.)

Current library pile = authors from the New Yorker Top 20 Under 40 list, bits and pieces from that Dalkey ArchiveBest European Fiction 2010, Ann Carson's Autobiography Of Red, and a few recommendations from the other thread (Tom McCarthy's Remainder, Mo Yan's Life & Death...). Had been caught up playing catchup with teen fiction for some freelance pieces - writers like Libba Bray & M.T. Anderson seem to be doing what Shakey wants from fiction, heh. Nothing local's caught my eye lately (I think Eleanor Catton's had some press in the UK?), but I've picked up a few journals.

Anyone read Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad yet?

i think there was talk abt it in some other thread?? cant remember where tho

Bit of chat about a UK one here.

(ayo lamp send me your address. tom dot west at gmail dot com)

hey dudes, it's ksh

I need to get back into the habit of reading fiction regularly again, so I've decided to start off by rereading Coetzee's Disgrace. haven't read any Coetzee since high school, I think, but I'm looking forward to revisiting this one

C by Tom McCarthy, anyone?

Also I see from the ILB FAP discussion that Steven Hall comes up in that list, and that was reviewed by Tom McCarthy.

Absolutely. The one book I'm excited by this year. I'm in the crowd that thinks Remainder was a bit special, & this is the proper follow-up, so I've been waiting for it for a bit. Should maybe try to shake a copy from the publishing tree this week.

Never had an impulse to read Steven Hall - he was recommended to me by a couple of people, but I think they were maybe assuming I'd like something a bit meta because I read curious things.

At the mo, enjoying the bloodsport reviews of Craig Raine's novel. Sounds awful, but I might read it in a bookshop. Intrigued by the bile it's generated.

Almost finished and I can confirm that Tinkers is wonderful.

tempted to go pick up the Gary Shteyngart tomorrow in store, which I pretty much never do

^i have it on hold at my library

recently finished 'atmospheric disturbances' which i liked a lot

Just chatted about C to a decently connected publishing person - acc to him, a few ppl are saying it's a masterpiece, easy best novel of the year, etc. But I don't really trust the insider perspective (especially as McC's properly represented and with a big house this time), so I'm ready to be disappointed.

Think I want to read Atmospheric Disturbances.

If man's autocracy, his genius, his powers of generation, have all passed to the machine, and if the pulpy, material base for the refined and abstract thoughts and emotions that we read in books has been revealed to us, then how can we understand poetry or prose as the sublime self-expression of autonomous and elevated individuals? Melville's answer is as implicit as his question: we can't, not any more.

wut

also am generally suspicious of anyone who writes about marinetti with breathy enthusiasm.

Booker longlist 2010:

Peter Carey: Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
Emma Donoghue: Room (Pan MacMillan - Picador)
Helen Dunmore: The Betrayal (Penguin - Fig Tree)
Damon Galgut: In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Books)
Howard Jacobson: The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
Andrea Levy: The Long Song(Headline Publishing Group - Headline Review)
Tom McCarthy: C (Random House - Jonathan Cape)
David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet(Hodder & Stoughton - Sceptre)
Lisa Moore: February (Random House - Chatto & Windus)
Paul Murray: Skippy Dies (Penguin - Hamish Hamilton)
Rose Tremain: Trespass (Random House - Chatto & Windus)
Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap (Grove Atlantic - Tuskar Rock)
Alan Warner: The Stars in the Bright Sky (Random House - Jonathan Cape)

Thoughts? I've only read one of these (The Slap, fucking brilliant) so I feel unqualified to really comment.

Shit--have read none, though I've bought but not yet opened the Paul Murray.

I've read the Paul Murray. It's enjoyable but it didn't exactly wow me and i'm not sure it really justifies it's length. Kind of surprised to see it on here tbh. Quite refreshing not to see Ian McEwan on there though.

still need to buy & read Solar. so out of the loop u_u

you really dont

is it bad? i've read a bunch of McEwan and the only thing I really wasn't a fan of was Amsterdam

by a bunch I mean, like, four of five

he kinda sucks, i think

Yup

i don't think he sucks at all, but that's not the point. curious to hear max's opinion

oh i was just being flippant. i didnt read it. i dont like him, or what he 'stands for.' he comes across like an asshole in interviews. but i met him once and he was vaguely nice.

oh cool. I think I've seen like one interview with him or something, but that was a long time ago so I don't really remember it. my opinion of him is more or less based on just reading his stuff. we were assigned Atonement in 11th grade or whatever and I read Amsterdam, Cement Garden, and Saturday after that -- all in high school and right after I graduated -- and then I picked up On Chesil Beach when it was released back in 2007. i liked Saturday the best

actually not sure if I even read all of Atonement

you missed a pretty crucial ending, dumbass

a "twist" ending

yeah

youll never know if 'atonement' 'occurs'

hey Que, can you shut the fuck up and leave me alone?

you follow me into every fucking thread, and at this point it's more or less harassment

hey, just saying. Atonement has a twist ending and if you didn't read the whole thing, you missed something crucial.

i'm not fucking kidding about the harassment, dude. i never did anything to you as far as I remember, but you make it a point to make my posting experience here way less enjoyable everyday. i understand you don't like me, and i don't care about that or if you actually still think i'm a sock, but you need to just leave me alone

**SPOILER ALERT**

Part four

The fourth section, titled "London 1999", is written from Briony's perspective. She is a successful novelist at the age of 77 and dying of vascular dementia.

It is revealed that Briony is the author of the preceding sections of the novel. Although Cecilia and Robbie are reunited in Briony's novel, they were not in reality. Robbie Turner died of septicemia caused by his injury on the beaches of Dunkirk and Cecilia was killed by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains above Balham Underground station. The truth is that Cecilia and Robbie never saw each other again after their half-hour meeting. Although the detail concerning Lola's marriage to Paul Marshall is true, Briony never visited Cecilia to make amends.

Briony explains why she decided to change real events and unite Cecilia and Robbie in her novel, although it was not her intention in her many previous drafts. She did not see what purpose it would serve if she told the readers the pitiless truth. She reasons that they could not draw any sense of hope or satisfaction from it. But above all, she wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia their happiness by being together. Since they could not have the time together they so much longed for in reality, Briony wanted to give it to them at least in her novel.

sorry i called you a dumbass dude. i hardly post anymore, so i don't know what you mean about following you into threads. but i will leave this one, ok?

it's ok. there are a million times where you've showed up and attacked me for what I thought was pretty innocuous stuff -- all I'm asking you to do is to back off it

I'm sure many, many people have totally given up on writing. How many amazing writers have we missed out on? It's a type of murder.

At least in the US, anyone spouting off this sort of reactionary claptrap could be immediately shut up by these stats

https://blog.leeandlow.com/2020/01/28/2019diversitybaselinesurvey/

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Sunday, 23 April 2023 7:47 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

the first figure (pie charts) shows 74% of people who worked in publishing in 2019 are cis women

The survey reveals that publishing is about 74 percent cis women and 23 percent cis men. “The 2015 survey reported that overall, 78 percent of people who work in publishing self-report as cis women. The current survey has 74 percent of the respondents self-reporting as cis women. Given the sample size difference, this 4 percent change in cis women does meet the bar for statistically significant change.“

how many of these women are agents, who are low paid?

more here, US-centric but a good view nonetheless

and this is about writers, rather than those working in publishing.

I have some experience in publishing (UK not US) and I'd say in terms of people working in it, it skews young, white, upper middle class, female. One reason for that is that although working in publishing is relatively high status, the pay is pretty crap for a job that requires a university degree and probably also requires you to live in London. So it attracts people who can somehow afford the shitty pay and London prices, i.e people who have family money or who have husbands who work in finance or something.

But I don't think publishing being predominantly female explains the increase in the number of female novelists being published, that's more accounted for by the fact that in the past few decades, the readership for fiction has become a lot more female, and women are more likely to read female authors (just as men are more likely to read male authors). So the publishers are just following the money.

how many of these women are agents, who are low paid?

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Sunday, 23 April 2023 7:37 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i don’t know, i was just reading what was in the link you posted

I think the author of the Irish Times article correctly put her finger on a trend that has slowly unfolded over the previous couple of decades: the decline in celebrated male authors who write about sex and relationships in a literary way (I'm thinking primarily of authors writing about heterosexual relationships, I'm not sure if the same trend has happened with gay male writers or not). Knausgaard, as pointed out, is a good counter-example, but it's hard to think of many others. To compare to, say, the state of literature in the '80s or even well into the '90s, the contrast would be stark.

Who wants to read about some straight guy wanting to have sex tho

I have some experience in publishing (UK not US) and I'd say in terms of people working in it, it skews young, white, upper middle class, female. One reason for that is that although working in publishing is relatively high status, the pay is pretty crap for a job that requires a university degree and probably also requires you to live in London. So it attracts people who can somehow afford the shitty pay and London prices, i.e people who have family money or who have husbands who work in finance or something.

Yeah I was going to mention class as an er identity spectrum where the classically-advantaged are very much not in a different position than before. In any case I’d have to think the economics play much more of a role than the idea that these days you get arrested and thrown in jail just for saying you’re a man

& maybe the fact that men don’t read as much as they used to is because there aren’t as many blockbuster middlebrow authors writing bad sex scenes but that’s a pretty large assumption, could be all sorts of reasons

joe rogan podcast and memories of amis will suffice

the government should subsidize horny male writers to increase male literacy rates

philip roth, henry miller etc were psyops created by the cia to get american boys to read

Yeah I was going to mention class as an er identity spectrum where the classically-advantaged are very much not in a different position than before. In any case I’d have to think the economics play much more of a role than the idea that these days you get arrested and thrown in jail just for saying you’re a man

― michel goindry (wins), Monday, 24 April 2023 06:36 (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this seems fair. the fact i am able to have 5h working days means i have time for writing, although the catch is that i treat it like an amateur pursuit, a side-gig, when i'm able to wrench free from internet obsession. then again, having writing as a side-gig probably means you're not able to accumulate the volume of work or the intensity of purpose to really get stuff published. idk. anyone trying to be a full-time writer, especially living in the uk let alone london rn has my...wonderment

re: flopson's prating, i find it notable that my first attempt at getting published was full of (very weird) sex, but my recent second, having read a bunch of books by women in the meantime, expressly had none. bowdlerised by maturity the spirit of the age eh! i feel it's for the best - if it works for Magnus Mills etc

whatever happened to the ILX writing exchanges btw

the government should subsidize horny male writers to increase male literacy rates

― flopson, Monday, 24 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Please no but also this points to another reason (mentioned in the piece I linked) that funding for the arts has been gutted so writers aren't able to get a space free from distractions, such as rent increases.

---

that in the past few decades, the readership for fiction has become a lot more female, and women are more likely to read female authors (just as men are more likely to read male authors). So the publishers are just following the money.

― Zelda Zonk, Monday, 24 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Is that really true? I'd like to see some research that backs that up.

women were always reading more fiction than men, weren't they? seem to recall novels were seen as dangerous in the 19th century because women spent so much time on them...

this is a Danish survey showing that the last book male readers read was in 80% of the cases written by a male author (19% female, 1% non-binary) whereas last book read by female readers was in 54% of the cases written by a female author, 44% male, 3% non-binary
https://kum.dk/fileadmin/_kum/1_Nyheder_og_presse/2023/Rapport_Laesning-i-forandring_FEB_TG.pdf

I don't think we need rockstar male authors, but I think it's true that public literary reception has become increasingly moralistic and that sometimes that makes for less interesting work, I don't think Knausgaard would have published those books in the current atmosphere

but that goes for authors of any gender/ethnicity/sexuality, this article makes some good points imo:

Many authors write with just enough racial awareness to flatter their readers into thinking they’ve read something bold and insightful, all the while avoiding any exploration of truths that would make both author and reader uncomfortable. It’s literature as lifestyle affirmation art.

this is a Danish survey showing that the last book male readers read was in 80% of the cases written by a male author (19% female, 1% non-binary) whereas last book read by female readers was in 54% of the cases written by a female author, 44% male, 3% non-binary
https://kum.dk/fileadmin/_kum/1_Nyheder_og_presse/2023/Rapport_Laesning-i-forandring_FEB_TG.pdf

― corrs unplugged, Monday, 24 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

This is what I suspect as the case.

Just now through twitter and seeing a couple of tweets I have been reminded of four men who: talked about a short story published recently, a book they published in the past, a book they are to publish in future and one person who is getting a book published but are way overdue because reasons. None are names, all randoms.

Obviously this is all through book twitter but publishing your own writing is a bit of a niche activity anyway(?), so wonder if it's an actual issue.

Most women I know who read a lot do say they tend to prefer female writers but hegemony being what it is they prob still end up reading more men than most men read women.

There certainly are already a lot of books

Perhaps still more books than shows, as unlikely as that sounds.

I don't mean to view the days of literary rock stars through rose-tinted glasses. In lots of ways that world sucked. That world of big-time book critics, literary publishers and authors seemed very clubby. Lots of mediocre work was championed and there was more than a hint of sexism in some of the attitudes. But on the other hand, maybe having that clubby world controlling book review sections in major periodicals and newspapers at least allowed some critical mass to coalesce around certain authors and books, enough to cross them over to a wider mainstream audience and get people interested in literature who otherwise might not have given it the time of day. Those hyper-masculine literary lions were caricatures in some respects, but at least they had an appeal that extended beyond ivory-tower eggheads and hoity-toity rich folks. We can indulge some nostalgia for those dinosaurs even while admitting their kind will probably not walk the earth again.

So…it was like the recording industry?

To me at least it seemed like a smaller world than the recording industry was.

Many authors write with just enough racial awareness to flatter their readers into thinking they’ve read something bold and insightful, all the while avoiding any exploration of truths that would make both author and reader uncomfortable. It’s literature as lifestyle affirmation art.

(Back to Mr Palomar.)

the narrator is specifically talking about Asian-American writing, and gives several extremely specific and detailed examples xp

I don't think you can call something that starts with "many authors" a sweeping generalization, it's saying from the off that it's not everyone.

Many authors are saying…

Out of context, v. off-putting (incl. "Many"): made me cynical about that author's cynicism, re clickbait. Good to know there is more to it.

But would have to read all the authors cited, each in context, to see if the judgement seems fair.

(& think I'm gonna try to finish Mr. Palomar today, because it deserves more than my declining-toward-bedtime mind.)

I don't think we need rockstar male authors, but I think it's true that public literary reception has become increasingly moralistic and that sometimes that makes for less interesting work, I don't think Knausgaard would have published those books in the current atmosphere

but that goes for authors of any gender/ethnicity/sexuality, this article makes some good points imo:
_Many authors write with just enough racial awareness to flatter their readers into thinking they’ve read something bold and insightful, all the while avoiding any exploration of truths that would make both author and reader uncomfortable. It’s literature as lifestyle affirmation art._

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/06/asian-american-psycho🕸

All the big rockstar male authors are still in print, you can still read them if you want.

Yeah, they never seem to go out of print.

True, but on the other hand, I feel it would be difficult for a Philip Roth or John Updike to rise to the top these days. The "selfish misogynistic asshole describes his sexual/romantic life" genre does seem fairly done and dusted.

Growing up in the 80s, the whole phenomenon of quality paperbacks (Vintage Contemporaries, Vintage International, Penguin American, and so on) really gave a sense of quality and excitement to new books, the "rock star" energy mentioned above. And for sure there was Richard Ford and Barry Hannah, but there was Lorrie Moore and Ellen Gilchrist and so on as well.

Who else among us remembers the promotional blitzkrieg that launched The World According to Garp?

Sounds relevant.

MY BOOK IS OUT TODAYY ✨✨I loved writing this book and I hope you can feel that - it’s a project from my heart + hope it’s a valuable contribution to the conversation around housing, how it impacts every part of how we live and how we must make home a right for everyone ✨✨✨ pic.twitter.com/y21hBa8MdH

— kieranyates (@kieran_yates) April 27, 2023

Did you belong to QPB, Eazy? Quality Paperback Bookclub, for those of yall who missed it: trade pbs, quite a good variety, like omnibus editions of olde American authors coming back around (Dawn Powell!), also ones from other countries, fiction and nonfiction. A fair amount of erotica, believe it or not.
So I finished (read straight through, then back through some of)Mr. Palomar. I should read back through some more of the smooth, friendly, inexorable, guided tours, sunny lectures, really, of the perceptions and thought processes of Mr. P., a seemingly afternoon, middle-aged gentleman, trained to think in terms of prototypes and models, the rightness of principles, however much he actually knows or knows that he knows or believes about them---but now he wants to see things as they are, because that's what increasingly seems right.
He's a seeker of the everyday (cue" "At home he's a tourist"), getting down to basics in a spaced out way that can disappear into tiny details---my own mind blinks and misses some, I admit, but in short chapters that bump into invisible walls of the much valued world: "the surface of things," into and from which he means to peer, balancing on the window sill, but being seen, as also embraced, can be tricky: he walks past a topless sunbather several times, determined to thereby express just the right, rightest, most enlightened state of mind, until finally (you can guess the rest).
At the zoo, he gets too wrapped up in the implications of the apes---until his little daughter (he seems to be a late-life Dad), tired of the damn apes, pulls him toward the penguins, aieee-it's okay though, he needed some kind of change.
Which can be agreeable, like when he and his wife choose, or at least he does, to watch a gecko on the terrace window over TV: they or he can see the translucent gecko belly welcoming another bug, and even a butterfly.
The ugly nasty usual pigeon clouds over Rome get bumrushed by sparrows in late autumn---Mr. P. can find no adequate account for their behavior---forming, at one point, a wheeling word balloon of sparrows, the vessel of a vast fast message, comment of sparrows, so complex, but perhaps it can be read by someone or something (sparrows?)
But there's also an accruing sense, eventually spelled out in passing, of the limits, limited value and rightness of conjecture, of what he once took to be "supreme intellectual exercise," of words themselves yadda yadda I notice that the original Italian edition of this is copyright 1983, two years before the author died, and seems like he had some sense of that, falling further into place, in the comedy of thought, under the sun and moon and stars.

Sorry! Starlings, not sparrows!

Better late than never, I guess: 20 years after winning the Nobel and 29 years after its publication, the translation of Elfriede Jelinek's magnum opus Die Kinder der Toten is forthcoming at @YaleBooks ! pic.twitter.com/wQRogDXR5x

— Karl (@underreadgerman) September 12, 2023

I have been emailing YUP about this book since 2005-ish and developed rapport with people as they came & went from the job. I read an extract of this in a US publication, a scene with a bus crash; it was kind of classic Jelinek, hopeless and violent....I'm a fan, I"m excited for this

Is that extract online?

no, it was in a paper journal, a very small affair. I have it around here someplace but I am pretty disorganized, books in stacks all over the house & also at the office which is half an hour away (I suspect it's out there) -- the journal is/was called Dimension 2 and the editor was a good correspondent and I see from our correspondence that I promised to send him some stuff and I probably didn't, I'll remedy that today (six years late). It's in vol. 5 no. 3 -- I believe it's the prologue, I had originally heard it was the prologue & the epilogue but I don't recall the latter.

oh wait I did find a part of it online: here. still if you have space on your shelves it's so cool to get some obscure journal that just happens to have an excerpt from a book that won the Nobel but that most English readers can't be bothered about, fun book adventures imo

Excellent, hope it's not too tough to source in the UK.

Thank you, J Crawford, for the link. Shall read that soon.