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 interested in Murmer. I was interested in The Cemetery in Barnes too but I read a preview of it and that put me off slightly.

I want to read Rachel Cusk but every time I pick up Outline I recoil anew at the inexplicable choice of Optima as a body font. Not to like shit on Zapf but it looks all wrong.

actually, more than slightly. it struck me as being quite artificially "refined" in a similar way to the dreaded Ishiguro. xpost

i liked Murmur - a James Morrison recommendation. Just started Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (2016), which 20 pages in is really excellent. Tho i’m aware that the almost algorithmic arbitrary strangeness of the youngest thomas the tank engine board books might seem excellent after forbidden line by paul stanbridge (2016).

in that list great to see dewitt (obv) & maggie nelson. also - cosign woof on satin island, which no matter how much tolerance you may be able to gen up by framing it in intentional cheapness (there’s a little wiggle room for that reading) was crap.

Goon Squad, yes. i know it got mixed reviews from people on here, but i liked it.

and i liked against the day, big messy and fun.

oh and i do want to read cusk after that review in the lrb.

josipovici i really react against in what is possibly an unfair way. i’ve only read everything passes and a bit of goldberg:variations. the first was quite striking in some respects - broken prose incantation (ie kind of looks like a poem on the page but isn’t). but it also seemed pompous - that is to say its manner suggested a high level of importance which was in the end it seemed to me as much if not more tonal than in terms of the subject matter. i wrote a little about it here.

goldberg i couldn’t get on with at all. it seemed supremely and unjustifiably satisfied with its own cleverness. my response if it were a person would be “yes i suppose you are but the problem is i don’t like you very much”. i realise this is not good lit crit and i would like to break down exactly how that response is constituted in the text. but it will do for now.

I like it.

jeez i loved satin island wtf

really hated goon squad though especially the heavily footnoted chapter from the perspective of the bitter journalist who assaults someone. just a bunch of lazily-written short stories arbitrarily bent into each other

i guess i can see how satin island could be a little overweighted with cliché "deep" anthropological ideas but idk the writing was so good, i got pretty caught up in it

wow i hate most of the books on this vulture list lol

the line of beauty yes absolutely but the goldfinch uuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh

lol 1q84 i love lists that are just like "here are a bunch of books that came out in the past twenty years that had some kind of buzz around them but not necessarily any inherent value"

i agree that the goldfinch and 1q84 suck

however I'm reading the last samurai thanks to that list and it's great

I should clearly be recommending that book in more threads, more often.

the last samurai does rule

MURMUR is wonderful, he repeats

The Long Take by Robin Robertson: this is interesting but not deserving of the praise it gets, and I say this as a devotee of the film noir movies it revels in. It's a novel in verse, but if ever there was some poetry that was just obviously prose with regular line breaks put in, it's this.

Murmur is phenomenal, I read it in one sitting on the beach but I keep casting my mind back to it. It's full of narrative tricks but they're only ever enhancing rather than undercutting the big thematic stuff and its (substantial) emotional heft.

I absolutely loved In Our Mad & Furious City as well, but a coming-of-age London novel full of grime music and racial/religious tensions was never not going to appeal to me, but the potential to have done something utterly cringeworthy and try-hard was vast and he manages to avoid all that entirely.

There is lots of good stuff in that Vulture list but plenty of eyeroll moments as well.

The inclusion of Mary Gaitskell's Veronica in there made me genuinely happy but everyone concerned should be embarrassed to appear in a list alongside Capital.

Just ordered Murmer on the back of those mentions.

or off the back?

I think it's "off the back"?

I realized that Edward St Aubyn wasn't on that list either which is, imo, another pretty bad omission for such an anglophile list.

I came across a copy of Dunbar, his entry in the Hogarth Shakespeare Series, "updating" King Lear which I'm looking forward to reading. Will also stan for Helen Dewitt's Lightning Rods. Did anyone read the collection of short stories she published earlier in the year?

Yes! Pick 'em up. It'll make you believe in yourself.

Jesus christ, Murmur destroyed me. I read much of the last sections with my eyes itching with tears.

There's swathes of it I didn't understand but I'll get some thoughts together once I've pulled myself together!

I realized that Edward St Aubyn wasn't on that list either which is, imo, another pretty bad omission for such an anglophile list.

his best books came out in the '90s

Mallarme's The Book has had its first complete translation!

http://exactchange.com/shop/mallarme-the-book/

a friend of mine wrote a very well received (apparently radical) translation of (some of) Mallermé's poem's xyz. could be of interest to you:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/stephane-mallarme-poems-in-verse-review

Thanks!

I realized that Edward St Aubyn wasn't on that list either which is, imo, another pretty bad omission for such an anglophile list.

his best books came out in the '90s

― Number None, Monday, October 8, 2018 10:45 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Controversial! I think Mother's Milk and At Last were the best of the Patrick Melrose books.

it's controversial to think those are the best ones.

xyzzz and jed, thanks for both Mallarmé recs!

Lol, no it's not but it does seem like his reputation and recent popularity (fwiw) over the last 5-6 years hinge more on his recent work.

seems like a good list https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/pa5b7m/best-books-2018-poetry-short-stories

maybe i just want to read The Incendiaries

That intro paragraph is pretty self-congratulatory given the list features only American writers. (Although, tbf, one of them lives part of the time in Canada)

Not sure where to put this so

This is my favourite thing on Twitter today. It’s beautiful! pic.twitter.com/BbUCgI8H5e

— Bethany Black (@BeffernieBlack) February 10, 2019

Lol

:D

some very good looking things here. v interested in the two Joyce-related books, Lucia and Dedalus.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/republic-of-consciousness-prize-2019-longlist/

They announced the shortlist in the last day or two, in case you missed it - both the Joyce-related things made it through. https://www.thebookseller.com/news/shortlist-unveiled-republic-consciousness-prize-small-presses-965176

It does look a good list, I'm looking forward to reading the Lord Kitchener one, and I'm very pleased for the Henningham Family Press people, who I've run into once or twice and who seem like righteous folk.

I did miss it, thanks Tim.

That's a badly written article!

Haha I didn’t even read past the list.

The Wendy Erskine stories are v good.

NYRB:
Uwe Johnson - Anniversaries
Varlam Shamalov - Kolyma Tales

Penguin:
Dag Solstad - Armand V/T Singer
Svetlana Alexivech - THe Unwomanly Face of War

Other Publishers:
Wolfgang Hilbig -The Tidings of the Trees/The Females
Helen DeWitt - Some Trick
Gerald Murnane - The Plains
Emily Wilson - The Odyssey

― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 21 January 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Adding these as notable new releases. Penguin have been doing good by euro/foreign fiction:

Pavese - The Beautiful Summer
Violette Leduc - The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

Lots and lots from New Directions:

Dasa Drndic: https://www.ndbooks.com/author/dasa-drndic/
Natalia Ginzburg: https://www.ndbooks.com/author/natalia-ginzburg/
Two new Hrabals: https://www.ndbooks.com/author/bohumil-hrabal/

NYRB have put out

Serge's Notebooks is probably the most interesting they've put out this year (but that's just me lol): https://www.nyrb.com/products/notebooks?variant=7060384055348

As to what is forthcoming this is an interesting collection:

https://www.nyrb.com/collections/forthcoming/products/the-storyteller-essays?variant=9273236586548

Genet: https://www.nyrb.com/collections/forthcoming/products/criminal-child?variant=14170567049268

Musil: https://www.nyrb.com/collections/forthcoming/products/agathe-or-the-forgotten-sister?variant=14728883109940

As for Archipelago I am quite looking forward to these Onetti short stories, the guy is due a revival:

https://archipelagobooks.org/book/a-dream-come-true/

In terms of re-issues I haven't read I'll get this:

https://www.andotherstories.org/tamarisk-row/

Those Storyteller essays have been available from Verso for a couple of years, assuming its the same selection. Very much want the Musil.

Agree re the Penguin European books. Just wish they'd publish more than 4 books a year.